Ordinary Gweilo
It's not big and it's not clever, it's just a Brit in Hong Kong writing (mainly) about Hong Kong
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Month: Dec 2003
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From today’s SCMP, about 50 years of public housing in Hong Kong: Subsidised housing has become so popular that last year half the population lived in permanent public housing. There are 90,000 people waiting an average of three years for a public housing flat, down from 150,000 in 1997. When Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister…
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Today’s Sun has this front-page story: it’s about one of the Queen’s dogs. What could be more important than one dog killing another?
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One of the biggest sources of revenue for mobile phone operators is international roaming. Amazingly, the Hong Kong government now seems to be doing its best to help the phone companies at the expense of consumers. Phone companies try to make it as easy as possible for the customer to use their phone overseas (which…
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Interesting story from The Guardian about Kazaa. Apparently they have done a deal with an Indian film company to make films legally available for US$2.99. The idea is that the file cannot be copied and will self-destruct after being watched. Following on from the news last week of DVDs being available a few days after…
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Phil is complaining that eBay’s new Hong Kong site is all in Chinese, following the example set by Yahoo Hong Kong, which dropped its English version a couple of years ago. It is a significant overhead to maintain systems in multiple languages, and one major difference between Hong Kong and Singapore is that here there…
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Leading libel lawyer Peter Carter-Ruck died on Friday. Readers of Private Eye will know the name because he was frequently writing to the magazine demanding damages for something they had written, and when they felt confident or brave they would publish the letters. One of his former partners has written a piece in today’s Guardian…
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Sunday’s SCMP had a very muddled piece by Katherine Forestier, their education correspondent, about the problems at Kennedy School (run by the English Schools Foundation) and the demand by the staff that the chairman of the school council should resign. I read the story a few times, and I’m still not sure that I fully…
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I have to admit that it has been cold these last few days, and I have been wearing a jacket or a coat when I go out. No scarves or hats or any other nonsense, just a jacket. I know that Hong Kong people aren’t really used to cold weather, but I couldn’t quite believe…
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I found this article about the ‘gadgets of the year” in The Guardian. I’m not really a gadget freak, but I am interested in what is coming along and I normally wait until prices drop before I actually buy. Today I bought a webcam (mainly so that my son can use it to talk to…
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England seem to be heading for defeat in the Third Test in Colombo, and athough there is still the possibility of another rearguard action to save the game, the Daily Telegraph’s cricket correspondent came up with a novel excuse for their poor performance: Another excuse occurred on Friday night. A party on the front lawn…
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