Ordinary Gweilo

recent posts

about

  • Lei Hou

    I was amused by this story in the Economist: Long live Cantopop – about the University of British Columbia (UBC) offering a course in Cantonese.

    I have been listening again to Naked Cantonese (RTHK Podcast), in which Cecilie Gamst Berg tries to teach us to speak like Hong Kong people.  One of the many tricks played on foreigners is to pretend that it’s correct to say “Neih” (you) and “Ngoh” (me) rather than “Leih” and “[ng]oh”.  Cecilie rightly teaches the latter as current usage (however ‘wrong’ it may be).

    Yet the Economist persists with this nonsense in its story:

    Newcomers to Vancouver’s Chinatown are richer and speak Mandarin. A sign advertising luxury apartments welcomes potential buyers (in Roman letters) with ni hao, the putonghua greeting, rather than the Cantonese nei hou. A decade ago, dignitaries at Chinese-new-year festivities gave speeches in Cantonese; today they speak Mandarin.

    Then we learn that the university has been paid to do this:

    The university has rejected four offers from the Confucius Institute, a cultural body financed by China’s government, to expand its teaching of Mandarin. “When a university can reject money, it’s a subtle form of pushback to an overbearing culture,” says Mr King. Instead, in 2013 UBC accepted C$2m ($1.5m) from a pair of philanthropists in Hong Kong to offer Cantonese.

  • Spotify not “scary good”

    Spotify continues to get itself into trouble, this time by requesting “data about the speed of your movements, such as whether you are running, walking, or in transit”.  They say it’s for a new feature called Spotify Running.

    Me, I’d be happy if their Windows application would just work.  At least now it doesn’t crash (thanks, Spotify techies), but it does take several minutes to start.  What is it doing?

    And then I found this: 

    Spotify’s chief executive apologises after user backlash over new privacy policy

    Spotify’s Discover Weekly service was introduced in late July as an attempt to solve the company’s long-standing problems with music discovery. The feature offers up a two-hour playlist based on users’ listening habits, as well as those of similar fans, and is overseen by Matthew Ogle, formerly of music social network This Is My Jam.

    “We wanted to make something that felt like your best friend making you a mixtape, labelled ‘music you should check out’, every single week,” Ogle told the Guardian last month. In the month since the feature was launched, it has become a hit with users, with comments on social media calling it “the most fire DJ of 2015” and “scary good”.

    Really?  Maybe my musical tastes are too eclectic, but so far I haven’t found much that really interests me.  Yet it does seem that the consensus on Twitter is very favourable, so it must be me.

  • Third world country

    Spike is living in Manila and all is not well: A Scam A Day Keeps The Philippines A Third World Country.

    I’ve been coming here since 1997. On my first trip, I remember seeing people in the street selling single cigarettes and single sticks of gum. I said to myself, “This is a poor country.” 20 years later, I still pass people selling those single cigarettes.

    […] at the core this is still a desperately poor country and the biggest export here still seems to be people.

    Almost everywhere you go in the world you will find Filipinos who have left the country to earn a living. Two of the smartest people I have worked with in Hong Kong are Filipinos, but many of their compatriots are way over-qualified for the jobs they are doing, often in the service industries (it is a rule that musicians in hotels throughout Asia have to be Filipinos).

    As Spike says, when the brightest and best leave the country, where does that leave the ones who are left behind?

  • You want English? Learn Chinese!

    If you live in Greater China you will know that stuff (phones, tablets, etc.) often comes with Chinese as the default setting.  And the (pitifully) few Chinese characters I might recognize are nowhere near enough to navigate through the menus to find the option to change to English.  

    Yes it’s my own fault for buying a tablet with Chinese Windows.  I was in a hurry and I assumed that it would be easy to switch to English.  Indeed (with some help), I changed the primary language to English. 

    Then I downloaded Evernote Touch, and it’s all in Chinese.  What?  I couldn’t find the menu in the application, and it turns out you have to do something in Windows and then all is (reasonably) well.  Anyway, waste of time because it’s rubbish.  Back to the normal (desktop version) of the program, which is fine except that there’s no way to do a right-click.  

    This is strange because in Google Chrome you can do a right-click (hold your finger and up pops a menu). 

    But back to the point – is it too much to ask that there should always be a button or high-level menu in English, Spanish, or French that takes you to language selection?  

  • No thanks, Amazon

    Why does Amazon keep encouraging me to switch to their China store?

    image

    There’s one tiny, tiny problem:

    image

    It’s all in Chinese.

    That button that says “in English”?  Sounds promising, but does nothing.

  • 1992 and all that

    Well, a strong sense of déjà vu for those of us old enough to remember the 1992 General Election.

    Then, as now, a significant number of people seem to have told the opinion pollsters that they intended to vote Labour (or Liberal Democrat), only to choose the Conservatives when they went to the Polling Station.

    Did they really change their mind at the last moment?  Or did the pollsters just get it wrong?

    It’s interesting to consider that David Cameron’s ludicrous gamble on winning a referendum on Scottish independence – without making any concessions – seems to have rebounded in his favour, doing great damage to the Labour Party.  And what would have happened if Ed Miliband had stayed in London and not joined the absurd spectacle of the major party leaders rushing to Scotland – on the basis of an opinion poll that may well have been wrong.

  • Hong Kong not so good- HKIA North Satellite Concourse

    There’s not too much wrong with Hong Kong International Airport.  Apart from the North Satellite Concourse, that is.

    It was opened more than 5 years ago (for smaller planes such as the Airbus A320 / A321), and yet the only way to get there (or back) is by taking a shuttle bus across the apron….

    …which is also used by large planes.

    As the planes take priority, the buses often get delayed on the tarmac.  And it doesn’t take much for the whole system to grind to a halt.  Recently I had a lengthy wait for a bus to arrive, and then, once it departed, it moved just a few hundred metres – and we had to wait for another 7-8 minutes before it could continue the short journey to the North Satellite Concourse.  Total delay – around 20 minutes, and too much time spent standing on a crowded bus.  

    The best solution from the smart people at HKIA is advice to passengers to allow extra time to get there.  Thanks a lot. 

    Needless to say, it doesn’t have a lounge (there is a Starbucks if you want to pay for food and drink, which I don’t – thanks all the same).

    Is this really an improvement on buses that go directly to planes parked a little further away (which they also still do)?

  • Spotify Connect–just because we can

    In the fine tradition of technology that is “designed” to do random things for no good reason at all. 

    Ladies and Gentlemen, Spotify Connect – playing music on another device.  Why would I want my mobile phone to start playing music from my computer?  It’s not big, it’s not clever and please stop it.

  • All true, obviously

    Over the New Year holiday, CCTV-4 has been showing the full 48 hours of Deng Xiaoping at History’s Crossroads.  My favourite bits (i.e. the only stuff I can understand) are the cameo appearances by Robert Maxwell, Ted Heath, Margaret Thatcher and a Governor or two.  And only one of them looked anything like the real person. 

    The there’s the stilted dialogue…and some of the scenes were totally fictitious.  We see Thatcher having a cordial meeting with Ted Heath (in 1982?), where she asks him “as her old friend”  to talk to Deng about Hong Kong. 

    Rather unlikely, given that they barely spoke after 1976 (she defeated him in the leadership election in 1975).  Yes, Heath went to China and would have talked to Deng about Hong Kong, but the meeting with Thatcher never happened.

    But I expect everything else is totally true. 

  • Closed shop

    The SCMP reports that Page One in Causeway Bay has closed (Bookshop at end of last chapter in Times Square), though it seems possible that it may re-open if space can be found.  So not really the end of the last chapter, then.

    The one in TST moved recently and became a “concept store”.  At first sight it appears to have become a magazine store with a few books, but hidden away upstairs is a reasonable size bookstore.

    The concept, of course, is high-priced books, but the SCMP seems not to have picked up on that:

    [T]he closure of its Causeway Bay branch signaled wider difficulty for English-language bookshops, publisher Jimmy Pang Chi-ming said.

    "Hong Kong people read few books. They read fewer English books, and even fewer hard-cover collectables," he said.

    Well, maybe they do read books but don’t want to pay excessive prices.  English books are typically marked up by 25% in Hong Kong.  Strangely the same books are available in Bangkok without that mark-up, or in India for significantly less.

    Or you can buy from Amazon or Book Depository.