Ordinary Gweilo

So what’s been happening whilst I’ve been away?

Babies seem to the theme – Simon and his colleague Giles seem to have become fathers for the 3rd and 2nd times respectively. Simon is having a celebration on Wednesday, and I will try to pop along for an hour or so. Congratulations to both gentlemen and their wives!!

Simon celebrated the birth by getting his site redesigned. It looks good, but I hate the narrow column of text running down the middle of the screen on the front page – this seems to be a common problem (most of the Typepad templates have the same flaw) and I find it hard to read the text. Shaky had a design like that for a while, but has changed it a few times since and it now fills the screen. Let’s not carp though – I continue to be amazed by the amount of effort that Simon manages to put into his site, which is now a year old, incidentally, and it was his fault that I started doing this (I figured if he could do it, then so could I). Plus, last time I was rude about him, I got into big trouble!

Shaky is also celebrating his first anniversary, though I had imagined that he’d been around longer. He also spends a lot of time messing around with his site, but he doesn’t have a wife or kids so there is plenty of time in the day.

Phil is back in business (yes, I know this happened before I went away) and has not just redesigned his site but totally re-built it. I suppose I can just about understand that it is more satisfying to do it all yourself rather than using MT or WordPress or Blogger or Typepad, but I would never attempt such a thing. Anyway, the site looks good, and it’s great to have Phil back (even if he is threatening to run his Asia Blog awards again).

Goodness me, even NTSCMP had a decent story (about John Egan not really being a ‘top’ lawyer), but they really shouldn’t use ideas (Hong Kong Olympic sports in full) that have appeared in Spike when they are continually whingeing about their jokes being stolen by the same publication! Funniest piece was the marvellous combination of arrogance and paranoia that has George implying that the Chinese government is deliberately meddling with their web design to sabotage the site. Yeah, right.

Some things never change.