Ordinary Gweilo

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

recent posts

Archives

Categories

  • A lot of hot air

    Yesterday when I was standing waiting for a minibus I was very conscious of the hot air being pumped out by a succession of KMB buses as they waited to pick up passengers, and today The Standard has a story today about the over-use of aircon that makes passengers too cold and pedestrians too hot.   

    One Citybus along route 8X, dubbed the "fridge route," registered temperatures of 15.1 degrees Celsius when the outside temperature was 31.2 degrees.

    I hope my fridge is colder than 15 degrees.

    Roy Tam Hoi-pong, president of Green Sense which conducted the survey, warned of "air-con sickness," wherein a person is hit with cold symptoms and a headache because of the sudden change in temperature.

    "When the bus is too cold, and people are constantly going from a hot to cold environment, it weakens their immune system and makes it easy to catch colds," said Dr Alvin Chan Yee-shing, a Medical Council and Hong Kong Medical Association council member.

    "Patients often complain that they feel more congested, or get stuffy noses, when sitting on a bus."

    So, what’s the explanation?

    A spokeswoman for Citybus and New World First Bus said customer feedback and advice from the air- conditioning suppliers led to a "suitable" temperature setting in the buses.

    An automatic thermostat control system also adjusted the temperatures. But because the environment inside a bus is subject to many conditions, the vehicle cannot maintain a stable temperature like inside an office, the spokeswoman said, adding the opening and closing of doors, time of day, length of journey and number of passengers all affected the inside temperature.

    A KMB spokeswoman offered the same explanation, adding that if the temperature had been taken near the doors, there would have been much higher readings.

    Well, yes, it would be warmer by the doors when they are open, but once they close there is usually an icy blast of cold air to lower the temperature again.  The upper deck of a bus has no doors and the windows don’t open, so surely it must be possible to keep the temperature fairly constant at around 25 degrees.

    However, she said KMB air- conditioned buses are set at 23 degrees.

    That’s 2.5 degrees cooler than the government’s recommendation, but obviously it’s a whole lot better than 15 or 16 degrees.

  • Zinio = rubbish

    Back in January I was amused that Business Week wanted to pretend that stopping publishing the magazine outside the US was somehow a good thing.  They refunded the balance of all subscriptions, and offered two ways to continue reading the magazine – one was to have it sent from the US by steamship, and the other was to read it electronically using Zinio.

    I made the mistake of signing up for the cheaper, quicker (and, as it turned out, worst) option, thinking that I could print out the sections I wanted to read.

    Sounds like a good plan?  Er, not really. 

    Yes, the Zino applicaton looks quite attractive, but it is big and resource-hungry – someone should have told the designers to drop the "clever" animation that shows a page turning when you move through the magazine, and just make it small and fast.

    In fact, the magazine metaphor is pretty dumb.  Do I really want to read something that looks exactly like a printed magazine (adverts and all)?  Why can’t I have one window open with the contents and then another for articles I want to read?  Why can’t I zoom in or out as much as I want?  Or search?

    Printing is equally hopeless.  I should be able to click on article and have it print in the background (instead you have to select the pages and then select print and then wait while it prints – and it’s very slow).  I should be able to select to print on A4 rather than having to answer messages on the printer about loading ‘Letter’ paper (Acrobat can do this, of course).  Hopeless (and a Google search turns up the news that someone from The Guardian seems to agree that Zinio is rubbish).    

    Given that printing is so painful, how about letting me read it on my PDA?  I can read Acrobat’s PDF documents this way, but Zinio doesn’t offer this function.  It’s a PC or nothing. 

    It also gives me an irritating message when I start up the PC telling me that it has found a new issue of Business Week but I have already downloaded it.  Why bother telling me this?

    Oh, and one more thing.  The email address I gave to Zinio (and no-one else) is now being used by spammers.  Who did that, Mr Zinio?

  • Mild peril and frequent jousting

    I suppose they’re trying to be helpful (from The Guardian)

    In 1993, Jurassic Park became the first film to be released with a warning line. It scraped past the British Board of Film Classification with a PG rating because the distributors agreed to admit that it might be "unsuitable for young children". Four years later, the BBFC began supplying "consumer advice lines" on its website, starting with Jurassic Park 2, which it described, less than snappily, as: "Passed PG for scary scenes of violence that may be unsuitable for sensitive children or those under eight."

    This information, it has to be said, has become increasingly colourful. There is the ever popular "contains mild peril", which was applied to March of the Penguins, as if it were a film about running with scissors. Then there was "contains mild language and horror, and fantasy spiders", which accompanied Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and even "contains moderate emotional intensity" (Swimming Upstream), a damning review if ever I read one. Anyone thinking of taking their children to the new Jack Black movie, Nacho Libre, should consider that it "contains moderate and comic wrestling violence" – words that might as easily describe an average child’s day.

    Sadly, following the results of a BBFC focus group, the board is trying to cut down on some of its strangest phrases. "Mild peril", for instance, is being replaced with "scary moments". "Moderate torture" too now finds itself out of favour, as some people see it as a contradiction. "Can you have ‘moderate’ torture?" asks Clark. How about a Chinese burn? "Possibly …"

    Before I let her go, I ask Sue Clark, the BBFC’s head of communications, to settle the controversy over A Knight’s Tale. This film’s consumer advice line, "contains frequent jousting", is considered a masterpiece among fans of the genre, although there are those who insist the words were never used. According to Clark, that description was indeed considered, but ultimately rejected. "We have to be careful not just to produce a piece of information for the sake of it," she explains, before admitting, "I have to say, I do laugh at some of them."

    Not as much as you might laugh when reading the description of a film on a dodgy DVD, but that’s another story.

  • Hong Kong Blogs

    I’ve (finally) updated the list of Hong Kong blogs. There are three additions

    Chopped Onions

    Human Dynasty

    Sun Gai Gweilo

    In other news, Waah is on a final warning

  • Lights Out

    Just a reminder that Lights Out Hong Kong "want to plunge our city into darkness for three minutes" on Saturday today.  From their website:

    Turn your lights out on the 8th of August at 8pm for 3 minutes

    於8月8日下午8時關掉電燈3分鐘

    Watch out, though, it’s a "slippery slope" and who knows what it might lead to.  Cleaner air and less pollution, I suppose.  Dangerous stuff.

  • The man from Mensa

    The Apprentice is back, and it’s as daft as ever.  We are told that one million people applied to be on the show, and they have selected only the best and brightest.  Well, you could have fooled me.

    This time the teams were created by the random device of Trump choosing two Project Managers and asking them to pick the people they wanted – with the minor drawback that they didn’t even know the names of most of the people, let alone anything about their character or personality.  In spite of this, both seemed to figure out that the rotund bloke with the glasses was one to avoid. 

    Trump’s way of choosing the PMs wasn’t much better – one was selected because he had announced that he was a member of Mensa.  I’m sure Mensa is a marvellous organization, but if the best achievement that someone can come up with is that they have paid a membership fee to join a club for people with high IQ’s then they can’t have done very much with their life.

    Anyway, things moved along as they usually do, with ample proof that they aren’t picking those people because they are the most capable.  That would be far too dull, I imagine.

    Someone with the unlikely name of Summer volunteered to do cold calling, and promptly gave up after one call.  Brilliant.  There’s a Russian guy called Lenny who’ll also be gone soon, and the man from Mensa was every bit the leader that I had expected.  Oh, and the guy who got picked last seems to have read something about ‘brainstorming’ but not realized that it’s not just about saying random things that happen to have come into your head.  He’s a lawyer, I think, so that’s two strikes already.

    Boardroom.  Carolyn does her best to get Summer fired, but Trump is going for Mensa man when Summer interrupts him to say something of no consequence.  Haven’t those people watched the show before?  Don’t they know how it works?  Keep quiet.  Mensa man survived, but not for long.   

    They seem to have dropped the ‘immunity’ option altogether.  Now, that was a daft idea.

  • Cars

    Disney’s recent track record with animated films is not at all good.  Pixar, on the other hand, have turned out a long string of highly impressive offerings in the best tradition of Walt Disney – the two Toy Story films undoubtedly belong up there with the classic Disney cartoons of the past, and every one of Pixar’s film has been better than any of Disney’s own efforts in the last dozen or so years.  Hence Disney’s decision to acquire Pixar and put John Lasseter in charge of all their animation.

    Unfortunately Cars does not live up to the very high standards set by Pixar.  Not that’s it bad, just that it isn’t as good as Toy Story, The Incredibles and the rest.

    In many ways, it is Pixar’s most ambitious film so far.  Whereas Toy Story, Bugs Life and even The Incredibles were about small groups (of toys, bugs, fish, superheroes) operating within the human world, here we have no humans at all.  Cars (and other vehicles) are the only characters, though within a familiar landscape.  It’s also much longer than usual, at around 2 hours.

    Visually it is impressive, and the attention to detail is amazing.  There are countless small jokes hidden away, but more good gags would have helped, and they really should have spent more time on the plot.  Pixar movies usually offer adventure, excitement, and surprises along the way, but this one is disappointingly flat. 

    I suppose the racing sequences are intended to provide the excitement, but sadly they are dull and add little to the storyline.

    Tellingly, the funniest part of the movie comes right at the end, with a replay of some classic Pixar scenes – with cars playing characters such as Buzz and Woody.  One might have hoped that John Lasseter would have taken the hint and realized what was wrong with Cars.  He could have cut out most of the racing scenes, added some signs of human life and a villain or two, and given us a few more decent gags.  Too long, and too clever by half, I fear.

    Having said of all that, it’s not a bad film, and I’m sure kids will love it.  The animation is superb, there are some interesting characters, and the film does manage to evoke small-town America from years gone by.  It also has a timeless quality that is lacking in animation from Dreamworks and others, but at least they would have given us more gags. 

  • Bring an old bag with you today

    Today is No Plastic Bag Day.  The first one was such a success that it has now become a monthly event, but on the first Tuesday of each month so as not to inconvenience too many people.

    I went to the supermarket during the last NPB day, and was fully prepared to pay $1 for my plastic carrier bag, but the helpful assistant gave me a dozen or so small bags instead.  Well, er, thanks, but doesn’t that rather defeat the object of the exercise? 

    I think they must have special training courses for supermarket checkout staff to teach them to stuff everything inside small bags first before they put them into bigger bags.  Changing this mad policy would do a whole lot more than charging for carrier bags one day a month, but I suppose that every little helps.    

  • Spiked

    One thing I don’t quite understand is why any sane adult would write in great detail (on a blog) about their personal life (unless they make it available to only a very limited audience of family and friends).  Ah yes, you say, but you can be anonymous.  Except that by publishing a blog you are drawing attention to yourself, and there are usually clues that will help your friends and acquaintances to identify you. 

    For example, Conrad (from the Gweilo Diaries) couldn’t resist dropping hints about his his life history and his work for a large legal firm (jetting around Asia, sorting out other people’s mistakes -or at least that was the way he saw it).  He obviously hoped to remain anonymous, but in fact his real identity was common knowledge amongst Hong Kong bloggers (and it surely couldn’t have been that difficult for his colleagues and friends to work out who he was).

    I suppose the same must be true of Spike, who has been recounting his life in far more detail than can really be considered wise, though the big difference is that whereas Conrad came across as extremely arrogant, Spike appears to be a nice guy.  Nevertheless, he must have a few enemies (or at least a boss or girlfriend somewhere who might not be impressed). 

    Now, finally, he has decided that enough is enough.  He explains his thinking here, but he has decided to carry with the blog in a different form.  Whether he will stick to his resolution and remain discrete about his personal life is another matter.  Here’s hoping…

  • Confused? Me too…

    As you may have noticed, the letters page of the SCMP is a source of almost endless amusement to me.  Today we have a typically puzzling letter:

    Confused by Patten

    I never met Chris Patten, so he has no reason to try to confuse me, as he attempts to do in David Evans’ interview in Post Magazine (24 Hours, July 23).

    Patten confides that he normally wakes up around 7am.

    But then he comes up with a statement that makes me wonder what happened to that logical world I thought I was in a moment before: "So quite often," he says, "like this morning, even though I didn’t get up until seven, I woke up around six." Really? Well, if you have any idea what he means by that, I’m all ears.

    A friend told me, "Well, he woke up at 6, and stayed in bed until 7." I have no idea how my friend knows that.

    Then, he said he "glances" at the Financial Times and the International Herald-Tribune. My friend tells me Patten meant he reads both quickly.

    Patten also says he doesn’t get too much time to relax, but later says he reads a lot and is taking "the whole of August off to stay at our house in France".

    Oh, well. What do I know? The answer may lie in all those egg tarts.

    ART SELIKOFF, Zhuhai

    I have read this letter several times, and I still have no idea what he’s on about.  It’s an attempt at humour, right?