Ordinary Gweilo

I blame the Geeky Kaiser.  He mentioned BlogJet, and so I thought I would try it out.  It’s a useful little program for composing posts, and lets you do more clever formatting than Typepad allows.  Like colors and bullet points.  Unfortunately it seems to be incompatible with the Typepad editor, so if you start with one you really have to carry on with it rather than switching over half-way through writing a post (as I did with the post below about salmon, which explains why it was such a mess earlier on). 

The main advantage I can see (apart from colors and bullet points) is that you can compose off-line and save your work as you go along.  I was using WordPad, which is fine except that you can’t create hyperlinks.  Yes, I know Word could do that, but I avoid it because it uses characters that don’t always display properly through a browser.  For example, Hemlock was obviously using MS Word (or something similar) during his stint on The Gweilo Diaries having complained about the unfriendly MT interface. 

Talking of Hemlock, I notice that he has updated The World’s Most Authoritative Guide to Hong Kong Blogs and included this blog, along with Fumier and other fellow upstarts.  He gives me "full marks for admitting [I am] not especially exciting" and says that I write about my "apparently staid and not overly eventful day-to-day life".  Actually, I thought the one thing I was not writing about was my day-to-day life.  What I have tried to do is provide some observations on everyday life in Hong Kong, and these inevitably tend to be fairly mundane.  However, clearly I am not competing with Conrad or Shaky, and if anyone wants to read about that type of lifestyle then this is not the place to come.  The title of the blog is meant to emphasis that I’m just an ordinary guy living in the New Territories, not a typical "expat" on a generous package living in Mid-Levels and enjoying the Wan Chai nightlife. 

Actually, one problem about doing a blog is that it’s difficult to know what other people think about it.  Other bloggers tend to be very polite, and in truth we rely a bit too much upon links and commenting on each other’s blogs for it to be any other way.  Sometimes there are differences of opinion, such as Glutter’s recent attack on bloggers who "like to put photos of girls half their age semi-nude up on the net", and her consequent removal of links to certain un-named blogs, but these seem very rare.  I kept out of that controversy, though it seems that in Glutter’s opinion my silence constitutes support for Conrad et al. 

So I do find it interesting to read opinions on this and other blogs (as long as they are vaguely intelligent, which rules out the idiotic Blogwatch), even if I don’t agree.  Any other comments would be very welcome.