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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  • Not free and not good

    I see that the New York Times is the latest newspaper to abandon the ‘pay wall’ and make all their content freely available (links).  How long can the SCMP hold out against this worldwide trend?

    Actually, whilst we’re on this subject (and I know I’m sounding like a broken record here), how can the SCMP website still be quite so appalling?

    Surely it must be the only newspaper website anywhere in the world that doesn’t have a page showing all today’s stories (or all recent stories) in each section (e.g. Hong Kong news, China news, International, Business, etc.). 

    Instead, if you select ‘Hong Kong’ there is a lead item with a picture, and 5 stories with short summaries, plus about 20 more with headlines only.  You have to click on ‘next’ to get a few more stories in the sub-categories of  ‘City’ or ‘Politics & Policy’.  Oh, and the text is tiny.

    Then there’s lots of white space at the bottom of the page.    

    I don’t know about you, but my PC has a mouse, complete with a little wheel thingy (and my keyboard has arrow keys).  I’ve found that these can be quite useful, because (unlike newspapers, where pages have a fixed size), web pages can be as long as you like.  If you scroll down you can see more.  It works really well (see The Guardian, The Times, etc., etc.).

  • Pork Pies

    It’s that time of year again.

    Every Chinese restaurant has piles of Moon Cakes everywhere you look.  Worse still, fridges across Hong Kong seem to be full of the wretched things, with hardly any space available for actual food or drink.

    I’ve never quite seen the attraction of these lard and sugar-filled delights.  And who’d have guessed that they might be unhealthy?

  • Going, going, gone.

    Vince from HKMacs has reminded me that my list of Hong Kong blogs needed updating, and his prize is to get reinstated (probably for the 17th time).

    I notice that a few of my contemporaries are flagging.  Some have sprung back into life recently, and so they live to fight another day, but others have not (Phil being the most notable). 

  • Quick, slow…

    I notice that the KCR is advertising their "direct" service from Tsim Sha Tsui East to Lok Ma Chau.  The irony here is that when the "Southern Link" is completed in a couple of years, it will be necessary to change at Hung Hom so it won’t be direct at all.

    Mind you, maybe by then people will actually want to go to Lok Ma Chau.

    It reminds me that a few years ago, the MTR extended the Kwun Tong line to North Point and constructed new platforms that provided a same-level interchange for passengers arriving on the Kwun Tong line and travelling west on the Island Line (and vice versa).  Which is a splendid thing, of course.

    They then ran an advertising campaign extolling the virtues of this new interchange, and the few minutes it would save on each journey.

    Which is all very well, except that less than a year later the Kwun Tong line was diverted to Tseung Kwan O and passengers for Quarry Bay or North Point had to change trains at Yau Tong.  Not so fast any more!!

  • Puzzling

    I used to think that Hong Kong supermarkets were easy enough to categorise.

    • CitySuper and Great have lots of stuff I want, but can’t afford
    • Park’n’Shop certainly isn’t Tesco or Sainsburys, but it is (just about) OK
    • Wellcome generally isn’t.
    • CRC?  Who goes there?

    And, of course, the basics are available everywhere.

    Or so I thought

    I found a product called ‘Rice Crunchies’ (they’re rice crackers from Thailand) in Park’n’Shop, but now they have disappeared from their shelves and are only to be found in CRC, of all places. 

    Even basic items are not immune.  Currently, Gala Apples don’t seem to be available anywhere apart from Wellcome (and possibly CitySuper).  What’s that all about, then?

    CitySuper itself even managed to be out of stock of one of their ‘own brand’ basic products (oats) for several weeks, which is quite impressively incompetent – especially since they have a label on the shelf saying that they are a ‘best seller’.  Not if they’re out of stock, they’re not.

  • Help!

    Google seem to have ‘improved’ iGoogle, and suddenly the Google News thingy has been ‘localised’, and I have no idea how to switch it from Chinese back to English:

    If I go to http://www.google.com.hk/ig?hl=en Google News is Chinese, but everything else is in English.

    Confusing…

  • More competition – higher prices

    The most popular subject in Talkback (the SCMP’s curious letter column that isn’t) seems to be problems with Pay TV, and specifically the sports channels.

    This is an interesting example of greater competition not having the normal effect of reducing prices.  Quite the contrary in fact – the cost of subscribing to all the sports channels in Hong Kong is much higher now than it was a few years.

    There was a time when all you needed was a subscription to Cable TV (and for your building to have Star Sports).  Now you would need Cable TV, PCCW’s Now Broadband TV and TVB Pay Vision (Star Sports has, of course, become a pay channel on Now TV).  On top of that, there are now several extra channels dedicated to specific sports (Golf, Cricket, Basketball), and of course they cost more.  If you add all that up it is certainly not cheap – though it’s hard to imagine that anyone would have all the extra channels.

    Greater competition drives up the price that the channels pay for rights to various sports, and that gets passed on to viewers.  It’s happened in the UK, where Sky Sports used to have exclusive rights to the Premier League, but now Setanta have some games, so you need to pay an extra £10.00 for their package on top of £34.00 for all the Sky sports channels.

    However, two things make Hong Kong different from the UK

    1. In HK, almost all the sports channels are exclusive to just one platform.  In the UK you can choose satellite or cable and still get all the channels – although cable TV are in competition with Sky, they still carry all the Sky sport and film channels, and a Sky dish will pick up Setanta Sports.
    2. In HK, you have little choice but to sign an 18 month (or longer) contract.  In the UK, most people are on monthly contracts.  If you have an 18 month contract for Now’s golf channel you are stuck with it even if they lose the rights to the events you want to watch.

    When you consider that there is no guarantee than any given channel (or combination of channels) will continue to hold the rights to any event indefinitely, it’s easy to see how you can end up paying for one channel and then have to pay extra because another channel has acquired the rights. 

    (more…)

  • Random Story Generator

    The SCMP continues to amuse and entertain (in a good way, of course…).  I was reading about new Blu-Ray Recorders (subscription required) and was directed to this story in the "related archives":

    BBC World Service plans to develop digital radio by 2003

    Mar 04, 1998

    The BBC says it will sign a deal today to develop standards for new digital radio technology in the mainland. BBC World Service said it would sign the pact as part of an international consortium, Digital Radio Mondiale, including Sony Corp, Sangean, and Telefunken. The new digital radio standards will offer interference-free shortwave listening. The standards could be ready for ratification by the International Telecommunications Union in about two years with radio sets in shops by 2003.

    What could possibly more relevant to a story about new Blu-ray high-definition optical disc recorders than a nearly ten year old story about the BBC World Service?

  • Room with a view

    Back in 2004, the boss of Ultimo (a lingerie company in the UK), claimed that conditions in the dormitories at factories in Guangdong producing her company’s products were similar to that of a ‘Travel Inn’.

    Well, maybe not.  Or at least not the dormitories for the workers.    

    Now comes a story (I read it in The Sun, but it’s everywhere), one elderly couple in the UK have been living in the same room in another budget hotel chain for 10 years – and before that they lived in another branch of the same chain for 12 years:

    A COUPLE who stayed in a Travelodge in 1985 loved it so much they moved in – and have LIVED in them ever since.

    David Davidson, 79, and wife Jean, 70, have spent around £100,000 over 22 years, averaging out at around £90 a week.

    But they reckon its worth it for the trouble-free time being cared for by staff — and their view of the car park.

    Retired banker David said: “This is our home. We have everything we need here and the staff are like family now.”

    The couple even stay in Travelodges when they go on holiday.

    They first sampled the budget hotel chain when they booked into a newly-opened branch in Barton-under-Needwood, Staffs, while visiting an elderly aunt.

    They tried another on the A1 at Newark, Notts. Although they had bought a small flat in Sheffield for £20,000 in 1980, they were so impressed with the hotel location for trips to Derby and Lincoln that they gradually found themselves moving in.

    David said: “We were there for 12 years. Then in late 1996 we heard about a new hotel opening later that year in Grantham and we decided to permanently base ourselves there, having watched it being built.”

    In July 1997 the couple moved into Room 1 of the hotel on the day it opened at the Gonerby Moor service area on the A1 — and remain there to this day.

    They never have to cook, clean, wash up, do the laundry or make a bed. Nor do they pay the usual household bills.

    Well, if they are really only paying around £90 a week, then it’s quite good value for money.

    But I have to say that looking at the photos of the couple in The Sun, they don’t look very happy to be living in an anonymous hotel room right next to a busy trunk road…

  • Head for the hills

    Did I miss this story in the SCMP?  I found it in New Scientist:

    Tsunami risk for Hong Kong and Macao

    Hong Kong and Macao are enormous, sprawling economic centres perched on the coast. And both stand a 10 per cent chance of being hit by a serious tsunami in the next century, warn geophysicists. The warning follows a new assessment of how earthquakes along the nearby Manila trench could radiate tsunami waves across the South China Sea.

    Although Chinese records of tsunamis date back to AD 171, the hazard was largely ignored until the cataclysmic Sumatra tsunami in 2004. However, the structure of the complex plate boundary on the eastern side of the South China Sea, running from Taiwan to the Manila trench, makes shallow subduction-related quakes particularly likely. This problem was highlighted by the quake in December 2006 that hobbled internet traffic in the region when it ripped through subsea data cables. Such earthquakes could also trigger tsunamis.

    To assess the threat, Yingchun Liu of the Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing developed a computer model with David Yuen’s group at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. They identified the sites where major quakes were most likely, then modelled how the tsunamis they produced would spread and their heights as they reached major cities. Finally, they factored in the tsunami risks of all possible large quakes for each location.

    They found that all coastal regions, stretching north from Macao and Hong Kong to beyond Shantou – a city of 1.2 million people where the tropic of Cancer crosses the Chinese coast – have about a 1-in-10 chance of being struck by a tsumani within 100 years (Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, vol 163, p 233).