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: Feb 2004

  • Now I’m confused!

    This development in Oracle’s battle with PeopleSoft took me rather by surprise. Last year, Peoplesoft agreed to merge with (take over) J D Edwards, and Oracle then launched a hostile bid that seemed to be designed to frustrate this merger. Peoplesoft and JDE managed to re-structure their merger so that it could be completed more…

  • We are what we eat

    Interesting post over at Madame Shutterfly. It’s fairly obvious that the problems with BSE, SARS and Avian Flu, and the concerns about farmed salmon, highlight a more general issue. The conditions in which animals and birds are reared and sold have changed for the worse over time, and the risk to consumers has increased. The…

  • Tricky

    Here’s a cautionary tale about what can happen when rich businessmen start shuffling the pack. Li Ka Shing’s Hutchison Whampoa sold one company it owned (Hutchison Global Crossing) to another company it controls (Vanda) in return for new shares, and then sold the shares at a discount to the market price. This caused the share…

  • No comment

    Fumier points out that Hemlock has now been posting his diary on-line for two years. For some reason, I had imagined that it was longer than that, but I’m not sure why. Like Fumier, I came across Hemlock on IceRed in the days when it was possible to have an intelligent debate there (didn’t happen…

  • “It was one of those days you don’t want to happen”

    This is a rather odd story from the UK. An elderly man was apparently unaware that the brother with whom he shared his mobile home had died – until he went into his room and found a skeleton. Here is the report from the local paper.

  • Gantt Chart hell

    Too busy to post anything much as I am planning a project, which is a horrible, tedious, job, especially with Microsoft Project (or at least the version I am using). However, I did enjoy these two recent Dilbert cartoons that you can find here and here. Is it worth upgrading to the latest version of…

  • The BBC – Guilty as charged?

    I’m getting rather annoyed with a lot of the nonsense that is being written in various blogs in reponse to the report of the Hutton Inquiry. People who know next to nothing about the background to the story sound off about Tony Blair or the BBC, based mainly on their own prejudices and second-hand information…

  • Sai King – Hong Kong’s Cheltenham

    Hemlock recently noted that Spike was ideal for anyone who wanted to re-read articles they had already read in The Spectator or on Quamnet.com. This week’s edition of the magazine is true to form, but with a subtle alteration to at least one of the articles. Petronella Wyatt’s piece about Cape Town (as originally published)…

  • There’s something wrong

    I found this Dilbert cartoon quite amusing. Anyone who has ever supported a computer system will be aware that users really do keep doing the same thing over and over again in the hope that eventually it work. Amazingly, sometimes it does! If it doesn’t (which is the expected outcome) they will probably give up…