Ordinary Gweilo

Cable TV have finally got round to converting our estate to their digital service.  No advance warning, though – a guy phoned up and said he would be coming in half an hour to change the convertor box, which he did, and it took him about five minutes to complete the job.   

Disappointingly, the picture quality is no better, but you do get an electronic channel guide – though it currently only includes about half the channels.  It also allows you to select the audio track, for the 1% of the population who don’t have NICAM on their TV. 

The main difference is that we now have a few additional channels (5 from Discovery, Channel News Asia, Zee TV, the cricket and ice hockey channels, porn, and a few other odds and ends).  The cricket channel is a mind-boggling HK$340 per month, though the coverage does seem to be quite good (and very comprehensive), but I can’t see how I could possibly watch enough of it to justify that price.  The Discovery channels are a more reasonable HK$45 per month for the set, but a random sampling suggests that programs are repeated quite frequently!  Next challenge is to persuade my son that nature programmes are better than the Cartoon Network. 

I’m still waiting for hard disk video recorders to come down to a reasonable price.  Pioneer have a new combined HDD and DVD recorder, but it’s still a rather lump HK$7999.  I thought I saw a Philips machine that was cheaper than that, but I must have imagined it because I can’t find it on the Internet or in the shop where I thought I saw it.  Must be going mad, then.