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: Jan 2004

  • Up, Down, Good, Bad. Understanding the peg.

    Earlier this week I noticed this story about how the currency peg is making it more attractive to invest in equities or property. Then another piece yesterday, worrying that the Hong Kong Dollar is falling in value and that this may cause interest rates to rise and slow down the economy. We need to get…

  • Space for a C5

    A rather strange story from The Guardian about garages that are too small to park a car. I don’t normally have much time for consumer stories, since they typically serve to highlight that people have been naive or stupid, but this one is a bit mysterious: It would appear that architects do not consider how…

  • Stupid viruses

    I’m getting rather bored with the latest virus (MyDoom). I have received a few of these email messages containing attachments, and also the follow-ups claiming I have sent out messages containing viruses. I am intrigued by the logic behind this one, which seems to be aimed at people who will open an unexplained attachment from…

  • Blockbusted

    Blockbuster is giving up on Hong Kong because (they say) shop rentals are too high. As the leases on their existing shops run out over the next 18 months, they will close down. Blockbuster came to Hong Kong after the KPS chain went bust, and took over many of the locations and most of the…

  • A pound of your best cheddar please

    It’s cruel and unusual punishment, I tell you. This evening TVB Pearl screened a program called “Cheese Slices”, all about cheddar cheese. Not the horrible mass-produced stuff you can buy in a supermarket, but the real thing made in a traditional way. They showed Jamie Montgomery making the cheese, and Randolph Hodgson from Neal’s Yard…

  • Fake Watches

    Simon beat me to this one because I still haven’t had time to read this week’s Economist – that’s the problem when it arrives on a Monday and you have to work for a living. He has noticed this story about fake watches in China. Well, actually it’s a story about the ‘surprising’ success of…

  • Off the hook

    [I know this has got absolutely nothing to do with the purported subject matter of this blog, but I think I can permit myself this indulgence.] Last night I watched Lord Hutton presenting the conclusions of his inquiry, shown on BBC World (and CNN). I was expecting a fairly brief summary, but he actually read…

  • Chinese New Year – still going strong

    This should be positively the last mention of Chinese New Year here (until next year). Promise. This week I have managed to attend two company post-CNY lunches and witnessed the giving and receiving of Lai See packets on a fairly large scale. The amount of enjoyment that people get out of this ritual is quite…

  • Sweatshops

    Simon notes an interesting blog that I have seen before but don’t read regularly, Asian Labour News.  It’s put together by Stephen Frost, who is a Research Fellow at the Southeast Asia Research Centre, part of the City University of Hong Kong, and it is described as “an online database of news about workers in Southeast Asia and…

  • Plasma, LCD or smoke and mirrors

    I am always happy when my view of the world is confirmed. So I heartily recommend Stephen Wildstrom’s column in the current issue of Business Week magazine, wherein he considers the relative merits of plasma, LCD, CRT, and projection systems when choosing a TV. He says: The picture quality of LCD is rapidly approaching that…