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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  • Extending your apartment

    There was an intriguing piece in last week’s Sunday Morning Post about an architect who is renting two adjoining apartments in a Kowloon Tong apartment block. It seems that he managed to persuade the owner and the management company to allow him to remove the front doors of both apartments and construct a new front door in the common area between them. This seems to have involved installing a plywood box in the common area, which doesn’t sound very secure. In Singapore, it seems they have a different approach Shuxie reports that her apartment is being extended by 10 square metres!

    A few months ago, my neighbourhood had to vote to decide if they wanted to get an ‘upgrading’ for their public housing buildings (“HDB”). The buildings around here are 20-30 years old, and while they are perfectly allright for anyone to live in (they have been built by a public company, unlike the renegade private developers in Hong Kong who tend to save on the quality of the concrete – and I got this information first hand from someone involved in construction of buildings in HK, buildings that are designed for a useful life of 20 years against the usual practice of 50 years)), I won’t complain if they put a new lift that stop at each floor or renovate the minimalist bathroom.

    But one thing included in the package was more surprising: they proposed to increase the size of the flat by about 10 square metres… even at the 21st floor! Unlike you built some kind of balcony, it is difficult to get new area over here, and you just don’t add a balcony, it needs to be integrated to the overall structure of the building…

    They have just brought the extension by truck and are currently placing them: Just like LEGO bricks, they are lifting these concrete bricks to their new position in front of the windows of the flats, and will surely find a way to fix it, I hope solidly… I knew they were using prefabricated parts to build the flats more quickly (there is even a dedicated factory in the North of the island), but it is the first time that I see it used for an addition to an existing building. Luckily Singapore does not have to undergo typhoons or significant earthquakes, and the HDB buildings are built bar-shaped, not tower-shaped, so you get somehing quite stable.

    Apparently, as well as voting in favour of the scheme, you also have to vote for the PAP (the governing party). At the last two elections, the PAP promised that areas that voted for the party would get priority for public housing upgrades. Alexandre’s site looks very good – clean and uncluttered, but with plenty of photographs. Worth a look!

  • Keep it simple, guys

    My son called me this afternoon whilst I was at work, complaining that his DVD of ‘Spy Kids’ was in Chinese and our helper couldn’t switch the language to English. This is true – for some reason, the normal method of pressing the ‘language’ button the remote control does nothing on this DVD. Instead you have to go back to the initial menu, select ‘audio options’ and then choose from a selection of different versions of Dolby, some in English, some in Chinese.

    I love DVDs, especially now that they are so cheap. This one only cost US$3, and there are plenty of titles available for less than that. But why is that the people who design DVDs can’t keep it simple. I do not want animated menus, I do not want to have to select subtitles or language options from a menu, I don’t really want a summary of the episode I am about to watch, I certainly don’t want a series of advertisements for other products to appear automatically before the film starts. If there really is a demand for this stuff, surely it must be possible to make it optional!

    The Simpsons Season 2 DVD really annoys me because when you switch it on you get an irritating and very noisy screen where the four main characters heads spin around very rapidly. Then you have to press ‘play’ and it happens again. Then one more time. It wasn’t even funny the first time, guys!

    ‘Ice Age’ manages to excel itself by forcing you to plough through the animated menus to switch on the subtitles, and several Disney titles have a succession of trailers for other films that you can only bypass if you press the ‘menu’ button before they start. And is it really necessary to force us to watch a Dolby advertisement? It almost makes you want to buy pirate DVDs!

  • Nisi mecum concubueris, phobistae vicerint

    What is “widely used by lawyers to cheat you, by doctors to scare you witless and by houseplant sellers to shift their wares?” From The Economist, comes a review of a new book that attempts to put Latin back into everyday life.

    I was going to say that I studied Latin at school, but that really wouldn’t be fair. I spent a few years sitting in a classroom whilst Latin was being taught, but failed to pick up very much at all. I’ve never had much of an aptitude for languages, but what I have learned has come not from school but from holidays in France and living in Hong Kong, and frankly that’s not very much.

    There are insults here for every occasion, from air rage (Heia, amice, utrum illae sunt sarcinae tuae, an modo Carthaginem despoliasti?, “Hey, pal, is that carry-on luggage or did you just sack Carthage?”) to computer trouble (Assume plicam damnatam, o tu moles muscaria muscerdarum, “Download the goddam file, you bug-ridden piece of shit”).

    Plus the phrase I have used as the title of this post, which may come in useful for Conrad one day…

  • No complaints from me

    HSBC ran into some flak in the UK over its record profits, and apparently their online banking service was down earlier this week, but I have to give them some credit for improving the banking experience.

    At lunchtime today I went to a new branch of HSBC, and found that they have managed to eliminate the queues. You still have to wait to be served, but after you have collected your ticket you can sit down until your number is called. I waited less than 5 minutes to be served, which is pretty good at lunchtime, so perhaps most people don’t yet know the branch is there! Or maybe I was just very lucky.

    Actually, if I’d had to wait any longer I wouldn’t have bothered – I could have used the ATM machine to pay in the cheque (which is what I normally do). Frankly, I’m a bit amazed that they are opening new branches, but I guess this one must have replaced another that closed down. Or was converted into a “Night and Day Banking Centre” (which actually means they have ATM machines and staff trying to sell you insurance, but no other banking facilities).

  • Hutton surprised that BBC bosses resigned

    An interesting follow-up to the furore about the Hutton Inquiry. It seems that, according to The Guardian Lord Hutton is surprised that Gavyn Davies and Greg Dyke felt the need to resign in reponse to his criticism. He apparently did not mean the following passage to be taken as a general criticism of the BBC:

    Therefore in the very unusual and specific circumstances relating to Mr Gilligan’s broadcasts, I consider that the governors are to be criticised for themselves failing to make more detailed investigations into whether this allegation reported by Mr Gilligan was properly supported by his notes, and for failing to give proper and adequate consideration to whether the BBC should publicly acknowledge that this very grave allegation should not be broadcast.

    The key phrase being “very unusual and specific circumstances”.

    The irony being that what Lord Hutton may have needed was a ‘spin doctor’ to tell the press what he had intended. Or perhaps instead of reading out his conclusions in full (in an unexciting monotone) he should have stated his main findings much more briefly.

  • Definition of an optimist

    I subscribe to a few email lists, and you always find a few people on them seeking help. Mostly the requests are reasonable and others try to help, but this guy seemed to be asking rather a lot:

    Hi All,

    Would you be kind enough to help me to understand the functionality and technical flow regarding SAP Financial module. You may supply me any sorts of documents related to SAP Finance module or may refer to any site name where I can get ifno regarding that, I approached to www.sap.com but did not satisfy myself with the material what I found over there.

    Thnx.

    Apart from the fact this mailing list has nothing to do with SAP software, anyone who knows anything about SAP would realize that the functional and technical flow is very complex, and consultants who have that expertise can charge a lot of money for their time. So why would anyone give that material away to someone they don’t know? Still, I suppose it does no harm to ask!

  • Idiots and Email (pt 2)

    This is a belated follow-up to my earlier post about emails.

    Another thing that idiots do with email is forward messages with all the earlier messages still attached at the bottom. Lotus Notes does have separate buttons for ‘Reply’ and ‘Reply with History’, whereas all that Outlook offers is a global option to do one or other, and I guess most people choose the history option.

    The resulting multi-page emails are usually just plain irritating, but if you weren’t copied on the earlier messages it can sometimes be worth glancing through them – you can discover things that you probably weren’t supposed to know.

    The worst example I’ve heard about was a message to all the staff in another office of the company where I was working, telling them to attend an important meeting. Anyone who read through the earlier messages (that were still appended) found a list of staff members, and it wasn’t too difficult to figure out that they were going to be made redundant. They were, and someone ended up somewhat embarassed.

    I once received an email from the same office that inadvertently revealed some internal discussions about whether to provide some assistance that I had requested. It didn’t exactly show them in a good light, and demonstrated once again that you really do need to be careful what you write down. Never assume that anything you write in an email will remain confidential.

    I remember one employee sending an email to a colleague in another country complaining about me (I was his boss). He decided to leave the first three lines of the message blank, reasoning that if the stupid auto-preview feature was switched-on this part of his message might be visible to anyone who walked past the screen and he didn’t want to incriminate himself. However, when he left the company he forgot to delete the messages and so I saw them anyway!!

    It is true that you can sometimes discover interesting things by looking at emails on people’s screens, which is one reason why it is best to make the subject heading very general.

    Another idiot decided that when he was made redundant he would email all his work to his home email and delete it off the computer, as well as deleting all the mail in his inbox. However, he didn’t delete the mail from his ‘sent’ folder, which rather defeated the purpose. His work was of no value anyway, so it didn’t cause any loss to the company!

    I subscribe to a few mailing lists, and one of them in particular is sometimes enlivened by people relying or forwarding messages to colleagues or others but mistakenly sending them to the whole mailing list as well. As Shaky said in his comments that sparked this off, after you’ve made a mistake like that, it’s best to keep quiet and hope no-one notices!

  • Grandstanding

    The local news still seems to be dominated by the rather tedious debate about democracy and patriotism. I am at a disadvantage watching the TV news because my Cantonese is nothing like good enough to understand what they are talking about, but I think I recognize those sinster guys who are wheeled out to tell us what the Basic Law really means.

    Meanwhile, Martin Lee and his chums are in Washington meeting US senators to talk about democracy. I find it hard to believe that someone as intelligent as Martin Lee can really believe that doing this is helpful. There are a very large number of governments across the world that would listen politely to lectures from the American government about democracy and even do something about it, but China isn’t one of them.

    Or perhaps I am being unfair to Martin Lee. Maybe he will tell the senators that nothing has been decided, and that foreign interference is likely to be counter-productive so they should keep out of this for the time being.

  • Country Boy comes to the big city

    [When I first posted this short piece, it was featured on NTSCMP’s dreary Blogwatch and generated both positive and negative feedback.  However, when the comments started turning into a battle between those who wanted to defend Simon against my “unfair” attack, and those who agreed with me, I deleted the post and replaced it with something less abrasive.

    Although others leapt to Simon’s defence and seem affronted that I should dare to criticize a fellow blogger, the man himself took it in his stride and seemed unconcerned.  He was surprised that I had deleted the post, but I did this not because I thought I had done anything wrong but rather because others were reading more into it than it merited.  Making fun of one post does not constitute an attack on Simon, and personally I always welcome (but seldom receive) any thoughtful criticism.  I have deleted one slightly unfair comment that Simon felt could have been interpreted as a personal critcism, but otherwise this is as it was originally posted.]   

    Intrepid explorer Simon has been venturing away from his home territory and into darkest Kowloon. He has written about in the style of a fairly bright 12 year-old who is anxious to cram as much information as possible into each sentence.

    I planned the trip. Hong Kong really has its public transport worked out. I got onto the internet, looked up the MTR (train) network to find the best way to get there. I walked into the station – clean, spacious, well lit. I used my Octopus card to walk through the turnstile. These are stored value cards which work on all modes of transport plus in many shops and vending machines to boot. The display on the turnstile tells me exactly how much value is left stored on the card. Otherwise I could quickly pump some more money onto the card using a recharging machine in the station.

    There’s more if you can stand it, but I think that’s enough to give you a flavour. If Simon ever gives up his blog, I think he could start writing guide books for children!

    The other amusing part of this story is that Simon went over to Ngau Tau Kok because his cheap DVD player had stopped working and he wanted it repaired. By his own account it took him an hour and a half to get there and back, and it will presumably take him a similar amount of time to collect it after it has been repaired. That’s 3 hours of his time for a product that could be replaced for US$50.  Does that really make sense?

    The good news is that I can now write breathless prose about taking public transport to Kwun Tong, Sham Shui Po, Kwai Chung, Tuen Mun, Fo Tan, Fanling, Yuen Long and countless other exciting places. Using my rechargeable Octopus card. On buses. And trains. And gosh how exciting it all is.

  • Hong Kong’s excellent public transport

    It’s always interesting to get a different perspective on life in Hong Kong, and I found one this week in Simon World. Simon is recently arrived in Hong Kong from Australia, and his blog is mainly intended for family and friends back in Australia, to let them know about life in the modern city of Hong Kong and what Simon and his family are doing. 

    Simon works a 12 hour day for a large international bank and home is a luxury apartment complex overlooking the sea.  He travels between work by shuttle bus, and so has no need to use the city’s public transport.  However, he had to visit the Ngau Tau Kok industrial area in Kowloon, a world away from the Central Business District and his home in the nearby countryside.  He was impressed by most aspects of Hong Kong’s MTR (Mass Transit Railway):

    I got onto the internet, looked up the MTR (train) network to find the best way to get there. I walked into the station – clean, spacious, well lit. I used my Octopus card to walk through the turnstile. These are stored value cards which work on all modes of transport plus in many shops and vending machines to boot. The display on the turnstile tells me exactly how much value is left stored on the card. Otherwise I could quickly pump some more money onto the card using a recharging machine in the station

    After living in Hong Kong for several years, I suppose I have become accustomed to the excellent public transport system.  London has only recently introduced the ‘Oyster’ smartcard, but fares are higher and the network is much older and only the newest stations on the Jubilee Line Extension come close to the standard in Hong Kong.