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

  • NTSCMP

    The NTSCMP website is getting larger and more confusing every day. Apart from attacks on the SCMP, we have a selection of other columnists (not all of whom can be George Adams) laying into almost anyone and everyone in Hong Kong. It’s good knockabout stuff, though one can’t help wondering whether an ignorance of the…

  • ESF pay cuts

    This is one issue that doesn’t look as if it is going away. According to today’s SCMP: English Schools Foundation teachers have voted to withdraw goodwill, including extra-curricular activities, in their fight against a proposed pay cut of up to 10 per cent. Teachers’ representatives held six hours of talks with management this week but…

  • I hate PCs

    There are times when I really wonder about PCs. I am not an expert by any means, but I understand the basics and I’ve even added a few bits and pieces (DVD drive, extra memory and disk, an Ethernet card), yet I still sometimes find myself totally baffled by things that don’t work how they…

  • Sat feevee exTV to hit Hong Kong

    The headline is from Variety. exTV is the name of the new Pay-TV venture from Galaxy Satellite Broadcasting, owned by TVB and Intelsat (the government insisted that TVB couldn’t control the venture and had to have a partner, and I think the original partner pulled out). This is from the Hong Kong Standard: The service…

  • SARS – panic now whilst stocks last

    The news that a Taiwanese military researcher managed to infect himself with SARS has caused alarm in Hong Kong, and I am sure that sales of masks will have been given a boost. The SCMP was calm and rational, devoting most of page one and all of page three to the story. They had a…

  • Hong Kong IPOs

    The China Life IPO has been quite entertaining. First we had the spectacle of grannies and taxi drivers queuing up to invest their life savings (or HK$1m borrowed from their broker), obviously unaware of the fact that they were very unlikely to get more than HK$10,000 worth of shares allocated to them. Then we had…

  • A fool and his money

    Hong Kong has a few supermarkets that are aimed squarely at the expat community – Citysuper (in Times Square, Harbour City and IFC 2), Great (in Pacific Place), and Olivers (in the Princes building). The majority of the customers are gweilos (Brits, Australians, Americans, Canadians, Europeans) and Japanese, and the shops tend to have different…

  • Asia Weblog Awards

    Phil is now starting to remove dodgy votes. The effect on some of the runners has been dramatic, and I can’t say I’m totally surprised. I have been very suspicious about some of the vote counts (I’m not going to name anyone here) and the figures now look a bit more reasonable. Phil has created…

  • TVB public service blurring

    I was watching the first part of the documentary series about Soong Mei-Ling (Madame Chiang Kai-Shek) on TVB Pearl. One of the talking heads was Hao Po-tsun, and the caption informed us that he was Premier of ##### 1990-93. Someone from TVB had diligently blocked out this politically incorrect description. Marvellous. The program also described…

  • Christmas past and present

    It’s funny how Christmas means different things at different stages in your life. My son is now old enough to understand Christmas, and at the weekend we bought him a Christmas tree (in response to frequent requests over the last few days) and he had great fun decorating it. I realized that this is the…