Ordinary Gweilo

It's not big and it's not clever, it's just a Brit in Hong Kong writiing (mainly) about Hong Kong

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  • Giving it all away

    Rather bizarrely, The Mail on Sunday (a UK newspaper) is giving away Prince’s new CD today.  I can see that it makes sense financially – Prince will get more from the newspaper than he would as an advance from a record company – but I find it hard to believe that MoS readers would be big fans of Prince (or vice versa).

    It therefore seems likely that a lot of the CDs will be thrown away unplayed, and that a lot of copies of the newpaper will be discarded unread.

    Apart from the environmental issue, music retailers in the UK are not happy:

    Paul Quirk, co-chairman of the Entertainment Retailers Association, said the decision "beggars belief".

    "The Artist formerly known as Prince should know that with behaviour like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores," said Mr Quirk, referring to a period in the 1990s when Prince famously stopped using his name in favour of a symbol.

    "It is an insult to all those record stores who have supported Prince throughout his career.  It is yet another example of the damaging covermount culture which is destroying any perception of value around recorded music."

    Hmmm..  I wonder how many copies of this album would have been sold in UK record stores.  Not very many, I venture to suggest. 

    Anyway, after initially criticizing the move, HMV have decided that they will stock the newspaper:

    HMV’s move was attacked today by rival Virgin Megastores, which "expressed disbelief" at the company’s decision.

    "We’re stunned that HMV has decided to take what appears to be a complete U-turn on their stance towards covermounts and particularly in this case, as only a week ago they were so vocal about the damage it will cause," said Simon Douglas, Virgin Retail managing director.

    "Simon Fox [HMV chief executive] labelled the Mail on Sunday deal as ‘devaluing music’ and ‘absolute madness’, now they appear to have joined forces to sell more copies of the very same paper," Mr Douglas added.

    "It’s not only retailers that suffer; the public will suffer in the long term by restricting choice on the high street. Of course people will take a free CD by a platinum-selling artist like Prince but you only need to look at what’s happened to Fopp going into administration to get an idea of the potential long-term impact

    There are two issues here, I think.  The first is rather specific to the UK, where newspapers give away DVDs, CDs, posters, etc. in an effort to boost circulation – though usually the DVDs and CDs are either very old or rather obscure.  I doubt that it really does the newspapers any good, and it probably reduces the perceived value of CDs and DVDs.  So I do think that HMV are taking a risk here (though maybe they are right that some people will buy some CDs along with their 3 day old Mail on Sunday).

    The second and universal issue is that CDs and DVDs are on their way out, and shops such as HMV and Virgin Megastores are just going to having to come to terms with that.  If you can download music and video, why bother going to a shop to buy physical product?  It also means that artists need to find other ways to earn money (see Free doesn’t mean worthless), and so I happen to think that Prince is being pretty smart here.    

  • Different rules

    When Carlos Tevez & Javier Mascherano were unexpectedly signed by West Ham just before last summer’s transfer deadline the whole thing looked decidedly odd, and sure enough it has turned into a hugely entertaining saga for anyone not directly affected. 

    First West Ham pretended they owned the players.  Then they claimed to have torn up the agreement whereby Tevez was owned by somebody else.  Now they appear to be expecting a transfer fee from Manchester United for a player they don’t own.  Somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen.

    Earlier, the club were found guilty of acting improperly and withholding vital documentation over the ownership of the two players and fined £5.5m by the Premier League even though the standard punishment for similar (and less serious) offences has always been a points deduction – which would have caused West Ham to be relegated.  Then an arbitration panel ruled that the club should have been deducted points, but refused to over-turn the decision.  No, I don’t understand that logic either.

    Yesterday, Sheffield United failed in their bid to get the High Court to force the Premier League to do what they should have done in the first place and deduct points, but say that they are still going to pursue other options. 

    The irony here is that West Ham were presumably chosen in the expectation that the two players they would play regularly in a team that was reasonably successful. The team would benefit and the players would be sold on for higher fees.  Instead West Ham spent almost the whole season struggling to avoid relegation, and Mascherano hardly played at all during his brief time at the club – and was loaned to Liverpool during the January transfer window (but only after the rules were bent to allow him to play for 3 clubs in one season).

    Tevez didn’t start his time at West Ham very well either, but he almost single-handedly saved West Ham with his performances at the end of the season, which is one reason why Sheffield United felt so aggrieved.

    It’s interesting to speculate on what might have happened to West Ham if these two players had not arrived.  It certainly appears that Alan Pardew didn’t know much about the players before they were signed, and didn’t have much idea what to do with them.   After doing surprisingly well in the previous (2005/6) season, they were 6th in the table at the time of the deal, but they didn’t win a game in September, and by December they were in the bottom three and Pardew was duly sacked (though he was snapped up by Charlton and got them relegated).

    (more…)

  • Everyone changes their mind

    A few weeks ago, Donald Trump announced that he was quitting The Apprentice, apparently in response to NBC’s reluctance to go-ahead with a new series.

    Now it seems (Reuters) that both Trump and NBC have changed their minds.  NBC (which never formally cancelled the show) wants to go-ahead with season 7 (and possibly season 8 as well), and Trump is happy to go along with this – and why not when he gets paid handsomely for promoting himself and his companies. 

    The story seems to be that the old boss of NBC wanted to cancel the show, but new chairman Ben Silverman has a different view.  Although the ratings have fallen, the people who do watch it appear to be an attractive audience for advertisers.  Or maybe NBC just don’t have anything better to put into their schedule!

    I just hope that someone will take a long hard look at what made the show popular in the first place and stop messing about with it.  Bring back George Ross.  No more gimmicks such as the losing team sleeping in the garden or the winning project manager going to the boardroom to decide who gets fired from the losing team.  No more Donald Trump jr.           

  • Hold the Presses: scmp.com is still rubbish

    A progress report on the redesigned scmp.com:

    • The headlines are now shown in full.  Well done!
    • The home page is still slow to load, and sometimes is simply not available (see below).  Sometimes I can access the home page but then when I login I get the stupid message again. 
    • The search is marginally better than before, but either it is not working properly or they haven’t got round to making all the archive content available. 
    • There is no PDA service, and I have not been able to extract anything from the replacement WAP site because of the way it handles passwords. 
    • There is still no page showing all the stories for a day or for a section (e.g. Hong Kong news).
    • There are no links to previous quoted stories/letters (how hard would that be?).
    • Most stories still spill over on to a 2nd page.  You can display the full story on one page with one click, but wouldn’t it be sensible to make that either the default or a user option?
    • The RSS feeds seem to be rather less than comprehensive.

    There is one thing I quite like:

    • The ‘related story’ link is a good idea, but it’s a pity that it often turns up very old and often out-of-date stories that don’t actually seem to be relevant (e.g. Deflation turnaround hopes snuffed out from 5 years ago is allegedly related to a recent column by James Tien about civil service salaries). 

    Also, as others have pointed out, the website still does not have all the content from the newspaper.

    All round it’s very disappointing.  Especially this message:

    Service Temporarily Unavailable

    The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

    Apache/2.0.59 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.59 OpenSSL/0.9.7g mod_jk/1.2.19 PHP/5.2.0 Server at http://www.scmp.com Port 80

  • You have junk

    John Naughton in The Observer on an old favourite:

    ‘You can’, my mother used to say, ‘have too much of a good thing’. Since she was generally not in favour of good things (which she equated with self-indulgence), I habitually disregarded this advice. But I am now beginning to wonder if she may have been right after all.

    This thought is sparked by an inspection of my email system. I have 852 messages in my ‘office’ inbox. Correction, make that 854: two more came in while I was typing that last sentence. My personal inbox has 1,304 messages.

    My spam-blocking service tells me that, in the past 30 days, I received no fewer than 3,920 invitations to: enhance my, er, physique; invest in dodgy shares; send money to the deserving widows of Nigerian dictators; and purchase Viagra. I am – literally – drowning in email.

    Well, not literally, of course.

    If I took it seriously, I could spend all day dealing with my email and never do any actual work. Which is why, increasingly, I tend to ignore my inboxes. This may seem discourteous, but in fact it isn’t – because much of ‘my’ email isn’t actually aimed primarily at me at all. I am just one of the people who is cc’d on the correspondence. In other words, people who are communicating with one another have added me as a kind of bystander. Their motives for doing this are varied. In some cases they are doing me a courtesy, or trying to persuade me that they’re not doing things behind my back. (Little do they know that I couldn’t care less.) In other cases, they are simply being lazy or covering their arses in case anything goes wrong, at which point they will say that I was ‘kept in the loop’ and accordingly must share some of the blame.

    Yes, but I think it’s more complex than that.  Most people tend to copy their emails too widely, but that’s because it’s often easier to do that than to figure out whether each person might need (or want) to know what is going on.   

    The problem is not with email as such, but with the way organisations have subverted – or perverted – it for bureaucratic purposes. And they have done it for the same reason that spammers have perverted personal email: because it’s cheap and easy to do. In the old days, big organisations had massive internal mail systems, with post-rooms and messengers lugging bags or trolleys of paper. Email offered a way of dispensing with all this bother and expense. So organisations began to deluge employees with electronic documents. And the flood of email rapidly became the torrent that paralyses us today. Email has morphed from a communication channel into a means of bureaucratic control.

    Well, up to a point – I agree that most organizations haven’t bothered to think through the way they use email, but there is also an obvious deficiency in most email software – the subject line is rarely enough to tell the recipient what they need to do with an email (and many people don’t even to make the subject meaningful or change it when the conversation develops). 

    It seems to me that what we need is a more structured approach so that you have to specify both a category (e.g, customer, project, etc.) and the action required by each recipient – and if it is just for information then it could be filed in the correct folder and never go into the recipient’s inbox.  

    Of course this would also require users of email to be more disciplined and to think before sending a message.  Which has to be a good thing – currently it’s just too easy to fire off an email to dozens of people, and the result is that many people either ignore most of they emails they receive, or waste far too much time processing them.      

  • Misguided

    The Sunday Times has highlighted some of the abuses of websites that carry ‘consumer’ reviews of hotels and restaurants:

    The online review appeared to be a glowing endorsement of a fine hotel by the shores of Loch Ness. “My parents stayed many years ago and said what a lovely spot this place has. They were so right!” said the review of the Drumnadrochit hotel posted on TripAdvisor, one of the most popular websites for travel information.

    “Well done to the staff, who were really charming . . . Have no hesitation in booking . . . the food is outstanding . . . Believe me you’ll love it.”

    The gushing praise, however, was not the independent judgment of an ordinary guest: in fact, it had been written and posted by David Bremner, the hotel’s owner.

    Which is not exactly surprising – Amazon has the same problem with publishers and authors praising their own books.  There’s probably no way to prevent this, but I think most people can tell when a review seems out of line with the consensus (and allowing people to rate the reviewers also helps).  The problem with hotels and restaurants is that there are generally far fewer reviews, so one good (or bad) comment can carry more weight.  There’s also concern that this is driving traditional guide books out of business:

    The best travel guides have traditionally been compiled by professional inspectors who visit hotels and restaurants incognito and fiercely guard their impartiality. But it is a costly business and one that can no longer compete.

    The current issue of the RAC hotel guide, which employed 12 full-time inspectors, will be the last. It has emerged that the company which publishes Les Routiers’ UK guide, which had eight inspectors, will go into liquidation this week; it said that competition from websites had helped to drive it out of business.

    I’m not surprised, but I’d expect that the best guides (e.g. Michelin in France, the Good Food Guide in the UK) will survive because people respect their opinions and know that they are independent.  However, Michelin are being very aggressive in establishing presence on the Internet and presumably hope to make money out of it eventually, so maybe they can foresee a time when the printed guide no longer exists. 

    Of course, there is an interesting difference between reviewing books, CDs, software (and other similar products) and the likes of hotels and restaurants.  If 100 people buy the same book from Amazon they all receive the same product, whereas if 100 people eat in the same restaurant or stay in the same hotel they will have different experiences.  I might get a great room in a hotel and encounter very helpful staff, whereas someone else gets a bad room and  bad service.  People also have quite different expectations, so if someone who normally stays in roadside motels has a few days in a 5 star hotel in Bangkok they will be very positive, but that won’t help someone who wants to decide between The Mandarin Oriental, the Sukhothai and the Shangri-La.

    The other big difference is that I give a great review to a restaurant, I might find that next time I want to visit it the place is fully booked and they’ve put up the prices – so it might be in my best interest to give a less glowing review.  An even more extreme example comes from websites that let people share their opinions on property that is up for sale – why would anyone want to encourage someone else to make an offer on a place they want to buy?

    I am sure that there will an increasing volume of customer reviews and comments on the Internet, but the problem is how to identify the worthwhile from the worthless.

  • Still very annoying

    My wife is a techno-phobe.  She doesn’t like computers, and only uses them because she has no choice.  If something doesn’t work, she gives up – and, of course, this provides makes her even more convinced that computers are best avoided.

    Me, I will try to find out what is wrong and how to solve the problem.  Then I wonder how it can be that large companies can build websites that don’t work unless you have a very specific configuration and/or use a specific browser.

    I know not everyone will agree, but I expect all websites to work in the current version of Internet Explorer without any significant problems – and I think they should also work in Firefox and Safari (subject to the limitations of those browsers).  I say this as a user, so please don’t tell me that IE is the one with the problem – like it not, IE is the browser that most people use, and it should be possible to test your website in IE.  If a feature doesn’t work well in IE then you are welcome to moan about it, but I don’t care – if it doesn’t work, don’t use it.

    IE 7 was available as a public beta for months, and anyone with an important website who didn’t start testing it with IE 7 at that time is just stupid.  It’s not good enough to warn people against installing IE 7 when Microsoft were including it in automatic updates that many users will not have known how to stop.

    If you have a security certificate on your site, ensure that it is valid and correct.  Ordinary users don’t understand warning messages about certificates, and may well assume your site is broken if they get a message like that.  It is.  Fix it.

    I don’t understand why I get warnings about secure sites.  I don’t like them, and I am sure they confuse ‘ordinary users’.   

    Pop-up windows are often blocked (even IE does this now), so don’t design your website so that essential information appears in a pop-up window.  The government’s Smart ID website seemed to suffer from this particular piece of stupidity.

    A screen that asks you to enter your user id and password should be extremely simple.  It certainly should not have any things that flash in an annoying way.  Yes, this means you, HSBC.  In fact, HSBC Internet Banking is a nightmare from beginning to end, so I am not at all surprised to see people still using ATMs for things they could do on their home computer.      

    I could go on and on.

  • More miles

    Asia Miles (Cathay Pacific’s frequently flier program)  are making changes to the number of miles needed to redeem flights.

    Rather to my surprise, the change actually seems quite logical and, well – fair. They have increased the number of miles needed for some long-haul tickets, and cut the number of miles for short-haul. 

    This makes sense, because under their current system Business Class & First Class Rewards on long-haul flights (including companion tickets and upgrades) offer the best value.  Over the last few years, the product has been improved, and prices have gone up, but the mileage has stayed the same. Presumably most people are aware of this, and the result is that these rewards are hard to book.

    On the other hand, short-haul flights are generally getting cheaper – and Business Class on these flights is of a lower standard (with a lower price) than on long-haul.  It therefore makes sense that to cut the number of miles required.

    The worst value, of course, is using your frequent flier miles for anything other than flights.  Don’t do it!

  • Boston Legal

    Monday nights on ATV World used to be "David E Kelley" night.  First Ally McBeal at 9 pm, then The Practice at 10, two series about lawyers written by Mr Kelley, and both set in Boston.

    Ally McBeal lasted for five seasons, which was rather too long for what was a very whimsical concept.  Had Robert Downey Jr. managed to stay "clean" it might have lived into middle age, but without him the fifth and final season was always going to be the last.  It will probably be remembered for having more scenes in the toilet (unisex, natch) than any other drama series, and for always ending with a song.

    The Practice was altogether more serious, and staggered on for eight seasons, each one more over-wrought and insane than the last.  Until, that was, ABC took an axe to the budget, which led to the departure of several of the stars and an end to the far-fetched storylines about serial killers and lawyers having people bumped off.  A definite improvement, but the damage was done and the network cancelled the show at the end of season 8. 

    However, Kelley was able to extend the franchise (as I believe they say) with Boston Legal.  It was theoretically a spin-off from The Practice, insofar as it features two characters (Denny Crane & Alan Shore) from the final series of that program, but actually it seems to owe more of a debt to Ally McBeal.  Crane (William Shatner), seems to be in mould of some of the crazier characters from Ally McBeal, and although Alan Shore (James Spader) shows signs of insanity (such as his morbid fear of clowns), he is more in the vein of the kind-hearted but unscrupulous lawyers in The Practice.

    In fact, I wouldn’t put it past Kelley to bring Richard Fish or John Cage into the mix at some stage.  They would surely be at home in the offices of Crane, Poole & Schmidt. 

    The show’s biggest strength is the double act of James Spader and William Shatner, but the supporting cast (including Candice Bergen) are an integral part of its success, as is usually the case with Kelley’s shows.   

    The fourth season will start in the Autumn in the States, with some of the supporting cast (though not Candice Bergen) being replaced by new faces.  I’ve no idea when Hong Kong viewers will be able to watch the show – ATV dropped The Practice around series six and Boston Legal has not been picked up by either of the terrestrial channels.  The first series was shown on Star World, but there is no sign of the second series appearing in their schedule. 

  • Journey to nowhere

    I notice that Star Cruises have a new ship, and Paul over at The Valley has also commented on it:

    It sure does look very sleek. But don’t fool yourself, this ship hasn’t been designed to maximise the comfort of guests but more to maximise the size of the on board casino.

    Once the ship is in international waters the horn sounds and the casino doors fly open. After this you’ll be lucky see anyone else on board – they’re all in the casino. The ship that Aquarius replaced, the SuperStar Leo, had reasonable rooms and a very small casino. Not really suitable for the local market who’d prefer a giant casino and bunk beds.

    I have actually been one of the Star Cruises ships for a ‘journey to nowhere’, and it was a fascinating experience. 

    • You have to leave Hong Kong territorial waters so that the casino can open, which means that you have to go through the immigration formalities – they collect your passport when you embark, and then you have to queue to pick it up before you disembark. 
    • However, they don’t actually go anywhere – just far enough out into the open seas for gambling to be legal.
    • The cruise includes meals, but (unless you pay extra) that means a fixed menu served in a huge dining room.  Not a very enticing prospect.
    • Yes, the cabins are small (and if you want a tiny balcony you have to pay extra).
    • When the boat has left Hong Kong waters, the casino opened, and that was clearly the main attraction for many of the passengers.  It certainly appeared that many people spent all night in there, emerging to have their breakfast only when the casino closed.

    So Paul has it exactly right that this is all about gambling and not much else.  These days, I’d have thought that Macau would be a far more attractive place to go if that’s what you want.