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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  • Who the hell is Pierce Lam?

    Letter of the week from today’s SCMP, echoing my own thoughts:

    I fail to understand why you continue to publish letters from Pierce Lam on the English Schools Foundation. In the past six weeks, since I first noticed his letters about the ESF, you have published at least five from him. The content of each is the same. Basically, he seems to have made it his personal mission to "bash the ESF". Some of his letters contain inaccuracies and falsehoods. His latest one, "ESF values at school" (March 4), is ludicrous. In it, he comments derisively on the ESF community, even if the topic was charity work which some students and teachers were doing in Sri Lanka. (Mr Lam had previously told us that ESF schools "hardly participate" in "community services".) In my community, Mr Lam’s letters are becoming an object of ridicule. If only he would adopt a worthier cause to vent his anger on, such as improving the quality of the air.

    If you don’t read the letters page of the SCMP (which would be a wise decision) you may not have read Pierce Lam’s many and very boring letters on the subject of the ESF. What he doesn’t seem to have appreciated is that the ESF has taken on board much of the criticism and it now has a new chairman, new chief executive and a slimmed-down governing body.  The new people have to be given a chance to sort things out.

    Pierce Lam’s letter two weeks ago was particularly stupid, as it made fun of ESF students for doing charity work in Sri Lanka.  It prompted a dignified response from some of the students, but (Mr?) Lam continues to bang way with his argument, apparently holding ESF students responsible for the governance of the schools where they study. 

    He’s entitled to his point of view, but he really has nothing interesting or useful to say on the subject, and I don’t understand why the SCMP bother to print his letters.

  • Three small ones

    Run for your lives…it’s a baby blog.

    Not just one baby, but three one year-olds (triplets) and a 3 year-old.  From Pok Fu Lam over on the fairly posh side, just to prove that all human life is here.

    seems to type without using the shift key as far as I can see, and mainly about her babies (plus a trip to phuket post-tsunami)

  • Connections

    A few weeks ago, Shaky mentioned liveplasma, which is a rather clever website that tries to graphically illustrate connections between bands (and now films as well).  The idea being that if you like Massive Attack, you will like Portishead, Tricky and Thievery Corporation.  I do already like the first two, but the third one is new to me, so it seems to be working in the way that it should.

    The site is simple enough to use, but if you’re lazy and you want to see how it works just click on the link above to see the Massive Attack example.  Shaky says that they co-operate with Amazon in some way, but apart from links that encourage you to buy stuff I am not sure how this works.

    A similar concept seems to be employed by MusicMatch‘s "Artist Match Radio", except that rather than offering you a list of artists they generate a playlist of their music.  So, if you choose Massive Attack you also get songs by Portishead, Tricky, Morcheeba, Thievery Corporation, The Chemical Brothers, Air, Lamb, Groove Armada and Moby. 

    And, er, Bjork, screeching away, even though they (wisely) don’t include her name in their top 30 ‘related artists’.

    Obviously the advantage here is that you can listen to these artists and make your mind up about them (shockingly, I have never downloaded any MP3s, legal or otherwise, so this is an advantage for me).  The only drawback is that there doesn’t appear to be any way of expressing your opinions on the tracks they have chosen, so you can’t customise the selection.  You can skip to the next track when Bjork comes on, though. 

    I do like this concept, and I’m even willing to pay for it (only US$3 per month).  I previously tried out RealOne’s Radio Pass, but I couldn’t figure it out and so I abandoned it.  Now, about those Bjork tracks…

  • When cultures clash

    An amusing story from Shaky about trying to buy a phone in Fortress and being offered to a dummy phone to evaluate:

    The Geeky Kaiser: “I’d like to try out a real one, I want to try out the operating system.”

    Salesman: “What? It just has a normal system. Same as all phones.”

    Shaky was not impressed, but I imagine the salesman was equally bemused.  Who cares about the operating system on a phone?  The brand, the shape and size, the number of megapixels, the price, the free gift, of course, but the operating system?  Well, yes, people do care, but they probably don’t shop in Fortress.

    Fortress is like Dixons in the UK.  They have stuff for sale, and you are welcome to go and buy it, but just don’t expect the salesman to know more than the basic details about the product.  At least in Fortress they don’t spend most of their time trying to sell you an extended warranty that costs an arm and a leg – the last time I bought something there, they did offer me an extended warranty, but only in a very half-hearted way.  Actually, it wasn’t bad value for money, to be fair.

  • Kicked upstairs

    I wrote this yesterday, but never got round to posting it.  Now it seems that Tung Chee Hwa is indeed about to resign as Chief Executive of the HKSAR, for "health reasons" (namely that everyone in Hong Kong is sick of him), as predicted in yesterday’s FT.

    It’s amusing to see the different interpretations that are being placed on Tung Chee Hwa’s appointment as a delegate to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Council, and his likely elevation to vice-president of this august body.

    Some view it as a promotion, and Simon was unkind enough to suggest that it was an example of the ‘Peter Principle’ at work.  DAB leader Ma Lik was quoted as saying that it "underscores the central government’s trust in Hong Kong", whatever that means.

    Others say that it’s a sign that Tung is on his way out, and that being vice-chairman of the CPPCC is not an important job:

    The CPPCC’s powers are largely symbolic and the body is regarded as a transition point for senior Chinese officials on their way to retirement.

    This certainly makes more sense that the PRC government giving Tung an important job.  They’re not stupid, and they’ve worked closely with Tung since 1997, so it seems unlikely they’d trust him with a job that really matters.  Much more likely that this is preparing the way for his departure.

  • Welcome to Hong Kong

    Simon has noticed a story in The Standard about another clever scheme to fleece tourists.  Apparently some enterprising businessmen have set up a mall in lovely downtown Kowloon Bay specifically for mainland tourists, and called it the “Hong Kong Tourist (Duty Free) Shopping Mall”.  Nothing is left to chance, and mainland tourists are brought to this mall by their kindly travel agents to do their shopping.  So convenient, lah.

    Remarkably, it appears that prices are somewhat higher than in shops that the rest of us frequent, and, of course, there’s those weasel words “duty free”.  There is no sales tax in Hong Kong (though the government has plans to introduce one at some unspecified point in the future).  Visitors may not realize that, and in many countries around the world avoiding paying sales tax or VAT is an attractive prospect.   

    A few years back the same thing was done to Japanese tourists, but rather more elegantly.  Visitors were taken to one of the DFS outlets, usually on their way to the airport, I believe, and given half an hour to buy presents for their friends and relatives back home.  Poor old DFS (I think it’s meant to stand for "Duty Free Stores") has rather fallen on hard times, what with the dramatic drop in visitors from Japan and the general downturn in the retail sector, but I think they’re still hanging on in there.

    The other part of the trick was to charge Japanese tourist more than everyone else for their hotel rooms.  For reasons which I don’t fully understand, hotels here seem to offer their best rates to travel agents, who then sell the rooms to the general public (after adding their mark-up).  The travel agents each seem to specialise in particular nationalities, thus making it very simple to charge different prices in different markets.  The SCMP used to periodically take an interest in this strange business, but of course it isn’t illegal and if challenged the hotels will say that there was no rule that Japanese tourists had to buy their rooms from a Japanese travel agent.

    These days we don’t get so many visitors from Japan.  One reason is that ten years or so ago the Hong Kong Tourist Board played up the Japanese concerns about the handover, and did their best to persuade them to come here before it became part of Communist China.  The first part of the plan was very successful, but it made the drop in visitor numbers after the handover even more dramatic.  Somehow Hong Kong seems to have dropped off the map as far as the Japanese are concerned. 

    These days Hong Kong is heavily reliant on visitors from the mainland.  They come here and buy expensive brand-name goods, whilst at the same time Hong Kong people are flooding into Shenzen to buy cheap fakes.  Each to his own.

  • Fresh’n’cheap

    The food part in this week’s Post Magazine was mainly about chicken livers, and the writer (Susan Jung) mentioned that they are only available frozen (from Olivers and some supermarkets).

    That does seem to be true, but about two years ago several branches of Park’n’Shop did sell fresh chicken livers (and other similar bits and pieces).  They were very cheap, presumably because they were a largely unwanted by-product of fresh chickens.  Having previously been only able to buy frozen chicken livers at some fantastic price from CitySuper or Olivers, I couldn’t believe my luck!

    You see, I do like chicken livers.  It only takes a few minutes to make a rough and ready chicken liver paté and slap it on some bread (and for less than HK$5 as well), or you can do it properly and save it for the next day.  Or you can fry the livers and serve them with bacon, or even do something more fancy with them.  Did I mention that they were very cheap?

    Unfortunately the 2002 outbreak of bird flu brought a temporary end to the trade in fresh chickens and (as far as I can tell) a permanent end to the availability of fresh chicken livers in Park’n’Shop.

    Unless anyone knows better! 

  • Not my fault, guv

    Yesterday’s Sunday Morning Post has a largely sympathetic profile of Nick Leeson, the man who bankrupted Barings Bank 10 years ago.  Apparently he has re-married and is now living on the west coast of Ireland, and is trying to make a living writing books and doing public speaking.  Presumably he also has a PR person doing his best to rescue his reputation by getting positive stories about him published in newspapers.

    Unfortunately for him, you simply have to read The Collapse of Barings by Stephen Fay to discover that it’s going to take a lot more than a few sympathetic journalists to restore his reputation.  Though I suppose every little helps, and in this case, Eugene Henderson obviously hasn’t read Fay’s book and uncritically repeats Leeson’s justification for what he did.

    Mr Leeson, then 25, had played the market secretly, and disastrously, in a three-year attempt to cover up an initial ₤20,000 trading error by one of his recruits.  He made no personal profit and he never intended it to be otherwise.

    Did he really embark on his trading adventures in order to protect an employee who had made a mistake (selling Nikkei futures when she was supposed to be buying them)? 

    No. Leeson had already started trading (and losing money) using his 88888 account several weeks before this mistake took place.  He had already lost far money than the ₤20,000 that was lost by his employee.  Then, a few months later he had recovered the losses and could easily have stopped, but he chose to carry on. 

    Did he benefit from what he did? 

    Well, he earned substantial bonuses that were directly attributable to the fictional profits he reported. His bonus for 1993 was ₤130,000, and had he continued to get away with his deception for a little longer he would have received an even more substantial bonus in early 1995.  Yet, after the collapse of Barings it became clear that the bonuses were grossly inflated by Leeson’s imaginary trading profits (when the bonuses for 1994 were recalculated, the bonus pool fell from ₤100m to less than ₤10m).  So Leeson’s deceptions benefited him (and a large number of other Barings employees).

    The other part of his defence is equally disingenuous:

    “If there had been barriers to my actions, and more control over what I was doing, I would have stopped doing what I was doing before things got to the stage they did.”

    This might make the casual reader believe Leeson was simply trading without his bosses knowing what he was doing.  In fact, he went to extraordinary lengths to cover his tracks, deliberately subverting the system and creating hugely complex (and totally false) transactions to disguise what he was really doing.  Worse, he wasn’t satisfied with making his trades disappear – he wanted to make them appear to be hugely profitable, and remarkably he was able to do exactly that. 

    Of course Barings should never have allowed Leeson to be both a trader and in charge of settlements, and of course they should never have believed the huge profits he was reporting, and of course they should have looked more closely at the so-called errors account 88888, but none of that excuses Leeson’s behaviour.

    Stephen Fay’s book tells the story of Leeson’s actions in great detail, and attempts to explain why Barings failed to realize what was going on.  It’s a thorough but very readable account of a story that really is stranger than fiction.  None of the main players come out of it well, and the only plausible explanations seem to be greed (everyone wanted to believe what Leeson was telling them because it benefited them) and inter-office politics.

    Leeson has also written his own book (Rogue Trader) that was turned into a really terrible movie of the same name. I haven’t read the book, but I have watched the film, and its plot is utterly implausible.  It attempts to demonstrate that Leeson hired a bunch of rookie traders and was forced to cover up for one expensive mistake, and it portrays Barings management as a bunch of upper-class twits.  If that wasn’t self-serving enough, we are asked to feel sorry for Leeson as the Nikkei index moves in the wrong direction and frustrates his brilliant trading.  Yeah, right.

    As a film it is flat and almost totally lacking in real drama.  The story is effectively reduced to the gross over-simplification that it was all about Leeson’s bet on the Nikkei, and we are led to believe that if it had gone up rather than down then everything would have been OK for Leeson.  Well, not really.  Anyway, this is portrayed in the film is by showing us what is supposed to be the latest Nikkei index as displayed at the Singapore exchange.  Except that what we see is a large and very simplified display on which the index is always up or down a nice round number.  It is totally and utterly unbelievable – just like Leeson’s rationalisations and explanations for his behaviour.

    Read the book, skip the film, and treat anything Nick Leeson says with a healthy dose of scepticism.

  • Upgrade, Downgrade

    Oh, I hate computers!

    I’ve been having problems with email. It seems to have started when my ISP "upgraded" their service (upgrade = weasel speak for replacing old familiar problems with new ones). Outlook appeared to connect successfully to my "mailbox", but wouldn’t retrieve the email (no error messages, but no mail either).

    So I decided to try out the email client in Opera. This did retrieve my email, but that was about the only good thing about it. Their concept is to use "views" rather than folders, which would be OK if it worked properly, but unfortunately it doesn’t. The "unread" view sometimes displayed all emails received recently (regardless of whether I had read them or not) and sometimes nothing at all. I simply couldn’t get it to do what I wanted (which was to file way most of my emails and let me see the ones that remained). It also has a rather startling omission – no key seems to be available to scan through emails as you read them ("page down" does this in Outlook and Lotus Notes and probably ever other piece of software ever invented).

    So I needed another solution. As I have been having other problems with Outlook, I uninstalled it and tried to install the latest version in its place. This was (predictably enough) fraught with difficulties. It seems that although I had apparently uninstalled Office XP, actually it was still there. So, when I installed Office 2003 and tried to start Outlook it gave me error messages and told me that I couldn’t have multiple versions of Outlook on one PC. No, well, I don’t want multiple versions. That’s why I un-installed it. Grrr.

    When I finally got that sorted, Outlook worked (and the old problem was gone), but it was still not retrieving my email. Worse, by now the Opera Mail client was hiding all of my emails after it had retrieved them. I could see it was retrieving my emails, and I could even find some of them by using the search, but they weren’t visible in any of the views. Time to try something else.

    Frustratingly, the solution to the Outlook problem seems to be as simple as deleting the email account and creating it again. I’ve no idea why it works, but it does. So I am back where I started, but with a shiny new user interface.

    Norton is also on its final warning, and I’m really going to have to follow Henry’s advice and install something else. It keeps giving me stupid messages telling me to re-install it. The first time I fell for it, but subsquent times I have ignored it and all seems to be well (or at least as well as Norton’s stoopid software can manage).

    There must be a better way.

  • Last Chance

    Today is your last chance this year to collect red ‘Lai See’ or ‘Lucky Money” packets.  It’s the 15th day of the Lunar New Year, and marks the end of the holiday celebrations.  Traditionally it is also the time for Lantern Parades, and it is sometimes known as ‘Chinese Valentine’s Day’ (a second chance if you forgot on the 14th).

    So if (like someone I know) you have been avoiding travelling somewhere because you knew you would meet lots of people who would demand ‘lucky money’, you can stop hiding away and travel freely starting tomorrow.