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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  • Rubbish

    Is this the worst-designed website of any major organization in Hong Kong? The entry page is bad, but if you select ‘English’ the next screen is even worse. It looks as if an assortment of pictures and links were scattered randomly across the page. Spectacularly awful.

  • Screensavers – what’s the point?

    I remember a long time ago when it was a good idea to have a screen saver on your PC. I have seen screens that really did have an image etched into them because that was what they were displaying almost continuously. Now, computer applications are designed differently and screen technology has improved significantly, so it is no longer a problem.

    Yet people still load stupid screensavers on to their PC. My all-time favourite was an office where I worked in the UK that had a corporate screensaver with a slide show of pictures of their products, their unlovely sixties office building and their even less attractive board directors. This monster ate up most of the processing power of the PC when it swung into action, and yet it was installed throughout the company.

    Where I am currently working, the lady who sits in front of me has a screensaver that displays pictures from (I think) Switerland. When I am sitting there trying to think about something, I can see this wretched thing cycling through its small range of photographs of mountains and snow and cows (and motorways), and it has an hypnotic effect. My train of thought comes to a shuddering halt and I start thinking about the mountains and the snow and the nice visual effects as each new slide appears. Drives me mad…

  • Poo – this one’s for Fumier

    Have you ever wondered why it’s so smelly? The New Scientist has some answers.

  • End of season dinner

    FOLLOWING RECENT RESULTS YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED TO THE

    MANCHESTER UNITED END OF SEASON DINNER DANCE

    (being held early due to unforeseen circumstances)

    Menu

    Main course
    Humble pie
    Lancashire hotch-potch
    Tim Howard’s Porto catch of the day

    Dessert
    Hard Cheese
    Sour Grapes

    Wine
    L’urine de Rio, Carrington 2003
    (a hard-to-swallow sample vintage)

    Guest speakers
    Kevin Keegan
    Arsene Wenger

    Please note that the club’s European Tour scheduled for April and May has been cancelled.

    [Thanks to Jim for sending it to me – not sure where it came from originally, but there about 50 million suspects in the UK.]

  • It writes itself

    "As long as I keep focusing on French perfidy, Beijing’s ham-handedness and Thai girls, this site practically writes itself. Watch."

    Indeed, Conrad, indeed [link deleted – site no longer available].

    Conrad is foaming at the mouth because Spain’s new prime minister was quoted in The Guardian expressing an opinion on who should be president of the United States:

    Spain’s prime minister, José María Aznar, and Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, are unequivocal in their support of Mr Bush, as are many eastern European countries and former Soviet republics. But opinion in Spain, as in Britain, is divided. The Spanish opposition leader in the general election this Sunday, the socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, said yesterday: "I think Kerry will win. I want Kerry to win."

    Hardly headline news – right-wing leaders want Bush to win, left-wing leaders want Kerry to win. Of course, were Mr Zapatero to have said that after he had become prime minister then it would have caused controversy. Heads of government do not express opinions on who they want to win in other country’s elections. However, I think we all knew that Margaret Thatcher was a fan of Ronnie Reagan, and Tony Blair got on well with Bill Clinton even if they were careful exactly what they said about each other.

    I think Conrad should take back control of his site before it writes more nonsense like this:

    While Spaniards may have shown themselves amenable to outside interference in their elections, Americans are not. This little monkey needs to keep his mouth shut.

    Right. The Spanish people only voted for the socialists because their country was bombed – or could it have anything to do with the prime minister taking his country to war when 90% of the population were against it? Democracy is like that sometimes, however much George Bush loves you.

    As for interference in the US election, perhaps Conrad has forgotten that neither the Democrats or the Republicans have yet nominated their candidates for president, the election itself is more than six months away, and this ‘endorsement’ will probably do Kerry more harm than good.

  • 2 + 2 = 9

    Interesting to see how stories bounce around various blogs picking up steam along the way regardless of whether there is much truth in them. Adam at Brainysmurf admits that he made comments about France’s military exercises with China based on a rather misleading story from Reuters without checking all the facts. What Reuters did was connect the exercises with the elections in Taiwan, and mention that the French government disapproved of the Taiwan referendum and is keen to build business links with China. Add in a comment about the cheese-eating surrender monkeys and there’s your comment piece.

    Never mind that there was widespread condemnation of the Taiwan referendum from world leaders including George Bush. Never mind that it is inconceivable that France would do anything to help China invade Taiwan. Never mind that these exercises took place nearly 800 miles from Taiwan. Never mind that if this was meant to influence the result of the Taiwan election this rather obscure story would be big news in Taiwan (which it apparently isn’t). No, why let any of that get in the way of a good conspiracy theory.

    I don’t think that anyone else who picked up the same report and took its line about Taiwan at face value has (so far) offered any apologies for their comments. So full credit for Adam for admitting that he got it wrong!

    Update: the BBC has a more balanced story on this, quoting a Taiwan government spokesman:

    “If this week’s planned exercises are as large as those China held in 1996 they will clearly amount to an attempt to intimidate Taiwan’s voters,” Joseph Wu, deputy secretary general to Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian, told BBC News Online.

    However, obviously there is quite a difference between what happened in 1996 and what is happening today.

  • Full Metal Spike

    As promised, I did subscribe to Spike magazine. What has happened since has hardly inspired confidence.

    I used their website to subscribe. This re-directs you to Quamnet which has a secure site that will accept credit cards, and it appeared to work but I didn’t receive any confirmation, and neither did I get the ‘instant’ access to their website that was promised.

    The following Friday I found a copy of Spike at a newstand and purchased it to read over lunch. The same afternoon, I received an email from Spike telling me that they had received my payment and that my subscription would start with the issue published that day!! A copy duly arrived through the post on Saturday morning.

    This is obviously nonsense. What do they expect? That I would hold off buying Spike on the off-chance that my subscription had already started, presumably waiting till Tuesday morning (after I had checked the post on Monday)? All the other magazines to which I have subscribed give you a few days notice that the first copy is going to arrive, which is usually a few weeks after you have paid. Spike, on the other hand, sends you an email after the first copy has been posted.

    Then they send you an idiotic free gift. Not a tool set, a pen. a cheap personal organizer, luggage or anything marginally useful, but a “real metal spike”. Good grief.

    Well, ‘send’ might be putting it a bit strongly. The label containing my name and address obviously wasn’t aligned properly, and printed only the estate name. Someone had thoughtfully added my name, but nothing else. Neither did it have a return address.

    Now it so happens that Hong Kong Post know me quite well, as a result of my complaint about my Amazon parcel being left in a public place with a sign saying “please steal me”. Which was how my real metal spike came to be delivered to my front door by a man from Hong Kong Post, who apologized for it being ‘broken’. Which it wasn’t.

    My next problem is going to come when my wife notices an 8″ metal spike sitting next to my computer, and suggests that possibly it isn’t a good idea to leave it around for small children to play with. So, grateful as I am for the excellent service from Hong Kong Post, I actually don’t want a real metal spike.

  • Boring, boring cricket

    Foreigners often complain that cricket is boring, and I have to admit that sometimes they are right. However, in the last few days we have had a couple of examples of what can happen.

    On Sunday we had England bowling out the West Indies for 47 runs and winning the First Test by 10 wickets.

    Then today we had Australia being bowled out for 120, and Sri Lanka struggling in reply on 92-7.

    Not that I can watch cricket on TV – even if I wanted to pay whatever ridiculous price Cable TV charge for their cricket channel I couldn’t because it isn’t available where we live. If we were in India, the courts would force the local TV channel to show cricket even if someone else owned the rights.

    On the subject of Cable TV, there is a bizarre court case going on right now in Hong Kong concerning the way that they have disconnected Star TV channels when installing their service. Cable TV claim that:

    The Telecommunications Authority had asked Cable TV to do the impossible when it ordered the company to restore satellite services to “all buildings in the territory”, a judicial review heard yesterday.

    How can it be impossible? These are blocks where the Star channels were previously available, so what is so difficult about restoring the service? Not quite sure what the government is doing interfering in this, so I’d support Cable TV if that was their argument, but surely it must be possible.

  • The cash economy

    Hong Kong has a number of tunnels (and one bridge) that you have to pay to use. If you want to drive from Kowloon to Hong Kong (or vice versa) or from the New Territories to the Airport (or Tung Chung) you have no choice but to pay for the privilege. The other tunnels offer more direct (and hence quicker) routes into or around the New Territories.

    You can pay the toll in cash, or automatically by using Autotoll. There is no discount for using Autotoll, and you have to pay in advance, but it saves you time. I don’t have a car, and hence the dearth of posts about the poor standard of driving in Hong Kong that you will find from Monsieur Merde and Giles the Rugby Fan. [I did have my eye on the extremely elegant Renault Vel Satis, but Fumier has persuaded me to consider a convertible – a 1992 yellow Saab or an old model 3-series – which are probably even more desirable.]

    As a taxi user, I always hope that the cab has an Autotoll thingy, but I am usually disappointed. After all, what’s the incentive for a driver to pay in advance for something that will get him to his destination marginally quicker? If he has to queue up to pay the toll, it’s the customer who is paying for the time, and it seems to provide a good opportunity to get some change (for when Fumier jumps into your cab with nothing smaller than a $50 note).

    Sitting in a small box for several hours at a time breathing in exhaust fumes and collecting small sums of money must be one of the more pointless human activities, especially when we have the technology to render it virtually obsolete. If I were in charge of Hong Kong transport policy I’d be trying to find a way to get more private cars and all taxis and commercial vehicles to use Autotoll. The complication is that apart from the (original) Cross Harbour Tunnel, all of these ventures (including Autotoll) are privately-run commercial enterprises. However, there must be a way of doing it if the government was really determined. So, no chance then…

  • Spain’s General Election

    Simon mentions the general election in Spain and the reaction to the results. It was certainly a surprise, and the right-wing bloggers are horrified that the terrorist bombings in Madrid may have influenced the result and could do so again.

    As Simon says, one of the features of democracy is that it sometimes throws up unexpected results, and in recent times these have normally taken the form of right-wing parties doing surprisingly well (notably in Switzerland, Austria, and of course in the French Presidential Election). Also, the result of the British general election in 1992 was a big surprise to most people – the opposition Labour Party looked to be heading for victory but the Tories held on to power.

    I prefer to believe that people do think carefully about how to vote, and that sometimes it is a very close call. In 1992, people who wanted to vote Labour were worried that they would increase taxes and damage the economy (and the Labour Party took that message onboard and came back to win a resounding victory in 1997). Many people who voted for extreme right-wing parties in Europe did so out of frustration and to send a message to the mainstream politicians.

    By the same token, is it any surprise that the people of Spain have voted against a government that took them into a hugely unpopular war (90% of the population was against the Iraq war) and then tried to convince them that the bombings were the work of Basque separatists?

    No-one will ever know for certain what effect the bombing had. Perhaps it just brought more people out to vote, perhaps some people were reminded of what had happened a year earlier as the Spanish government ignored public opinion to support the war in Iraq, perhaps some people were prompted to support the government in the war against terrorism.

    I also think we need to get this into perspective. Terrorists are ruthless and always looking for ways to achieve their ends, and sadly there will be more bombs and more people killed. Trying to influence the result of an election in such an overt way is only one of the many tactics open to them, but it seems simplistic in the extreme to assume that it will always be effective – it is quite plausible that a different reaction by the government of Spain could have led to a totally different result in the election, and in Britain the main opposition party also supported the war so could hardly be a beneficiary of anti-war votes.

    As ever, life is much more complicated than it seems at first sight.