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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  • Food Gulu – update required. Plus spam.

    Food Gulu

    I understand that apps need to be updated periodically.  But why do you force me to update it before I can use it?  Almost every other app allows you to use the current version and update later (when you have time).  But not FoodGulu, oh no.

    Food Gulu is a simple enough app – it allows you to book  tables for restaurants in Hong Kong (including the Maxims group).  Anyone who has had to wait for a table for Dim Sum should appreciate the convenience.  You can make a booking on your way to the restaurant  – and if there’s a long wait you can do something else whilst monitoring the queue.

    But recently it seems to need updating every week, and the first you hear of it is when you open it to book a table.

    Plus they have started sending me annoying offers for a 20% discount if I pre-order food in a Korean restaurant at the airport.  This can’t be a targeted offer (I’ve never been to this restaurant or used the FoodGulu app at the airport), so it must be spam

  • Hong Kong people neither surprised nor shocked that CY Leung was told not to stand again

    Seriously, South China Morning Post?  Hong Kong is not “in shock” and we are not “stunned”:

    Hong Kong in shock as Chief Executive CY Leung decides not to seek re-election

    South China Morning Post | Saturday 10 December, 2016

    Hong Kong’s embattled leader on Friday left the city stunned and threw next year’s chief executive election wide open by ­announcing that he would not seek a second term to spare his family “unbearable pressure”.

    Eyes were glued to television screens and mouths hung open in shock as a grim-faced Leung Chun-ying told Hong Kong that he was calling it quits in a hastily arranged press conference at 3.30pm, an hour after the government gave the media a heads-up.

    The only person who might have been shocked and surprised would be CY Leung when Beijing told him what to do.

    and…

    • “Eyes were glued to television screens” – no they weren’t
    • “mouths hung open” – no they didn’t
    • “grim-faced Leung Chun-ying” – well, OK, he didn’t look happy
    • “heads-up” is a horrible phrase.  What’s wrong with calling it a briefing?

  • SCMP promoting random old news

    Outbrain links (on The Guardian, unfortunately) on 10 November

    image

    …promoting an Education Post story from seven months earlier:

    SCMP

    Outbrain links (again on The Guardian) on 23 November

    image

    …promoting an Education Post story from three months earlier:

    EP2

    Even more absurdly, they have in the past promoted an old news story about schools and kindergartens being closed due to a typhoon:

    image

    Of course, Outbrain is nonsense, as the New York Times rightly points out:

    Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads

    You see them everywhere, and maybe, sometimes, you click: those rows of links under web articles, often augmented with eye-catching photos and curiosity-stoking headlines about the latest health tips, celebrity news or ways to escape financial stress.

    Usually grouped together under a label like “Promoted Stories” or “Around the Web,” these links are often advertisements dressed up to look like stories people might want to read. They have long provided much-needed revenue for publishers and given a wide range of advertisers a relatively affordable way to reach large and often premium audiences.

    But now, some publishers are wondering about the effect these so-called content ads may be having on their brands and readers. This month, these ads stopped appearing on Slate. And The New Yorker, which restricted placement of such ads to its humor articles, recently removed them from its website altogether.

    Among the reasons: The links can lead to questionable websites, run by unknown entities. Sometimes the information they present is false.

    Or not exactly false but very old.  Here’s another take on this:

    Have Publishers Lost Their Minds With Outbrain?

    Outbrain is just another short-term fix that creates a long-term problem. You don’t have to take my word for it. Take it from one of the biggest-spending clients in the business, who clearly explained why this idea of buying traffic is sending premium publishers in the wrong direction.

  • Only in Chinese

    I received an email from Spotify (entirely in Chinese).  Ignored it.

    Turns out that it was telling me that I have to change my password.

    But no English translation!!

    This is what it says (courtesy of Google translate):

    Please update your Spotify account password

    Hello Spotify the User:

    To protect your Spotify account, we have reset your password. This is because you use the same password for other services data leakage accident occurred, so we think your Spotify have hacked possible.
    do not worry! It is only a preventive measure Yet no one else entered your Spotify account, your data is still safe.

    To create a new password to be able to continue to sign in the future Spotify, please just press the green button on the big side.

  • Red minibuses

    Interesting article from the BBC about red minibuses in Hong Kong. 

    Things I already knew: red minibuses don’t follow fixed routes, and are very dangerous.

    Things I learned from this: red minibuses first appeared in 1967; green minibuses started in 1980; the government wants to phase out red minibuses and replace them with the more regulated green version.

    Hop aboard Hong Kong Kong’s wildest ride

    In a city with one of the world’s best public transport networks, the cheap, fast, accident-prone red minibus survives.

    The former British colony has the world’s largest fleet of double-decker buses, 18,000 taxis, and a spotless, efficient subway system known as the MTR. And yet, every day, thousands of people opt to ride one of the 1,138 red-topped, 16-seat Toyota Coaster minibuses that are notorious not only for their speed, but for their eccentric drivers, unregulated fares, and tendency to smash into other vehicles.

    It’s a system that dates back to 1967, when the Cultural Revolution spilled over the border from China. Left-wing agitators were intent on overthrowing the colonial British government, and Hong Kong was crippled by protests, strikes and riots. When drivers from the city’s major bus companies went on strike, shared taxis that had long served the rural New Territories began to illegally pick up passengers in the urban areas of Kowloon and Hong Kong Island. The colonial government decided to legalize this additional service.

    Today, the government mandates the number of seats and the type of vehicle that may be used as minibuses, which it refers to officially as “public light buses.” Other than that, drivers are free to determine their own routes and fares. Drivers are free agents who rent the vehicles for a shift — the going rate is HK$800 per day — which gives them extra incentive to drive quickly and pick up as many passengers as possible.

  • Hong Kong not so good–Airport Express

    Well, not really – the Airport Express is generally very good.

    The trains now terminate at Asiaworld-Expo, which is odd for an airport express, but it brings the MTR some additional revenue and normally it doesn’t create a problem

    Except when, after a concert, the trains arrive at the airport full of passengers.

    That means standing room only, and sometimes barely even that.

    That’s not good enough when you are paying a premium fare.  A one-way Airport Express ticket to Hong Kong station costs $100.  Fares for events at Asiaworld-Expo are significantly cheaper (e.g. $36 each way to Hong Kong station if you use your Octopus card and make a return trip, which is what most people will do).

    OK, the Airport Express do offer many different discounts, but the best deal from the airport is still around $70 – double the AsiaWorld-Expo price (and many people either don’t qualify for discounts, or don’t know about them).

    And, yes they did recently increase the price of group tickets by around 12%.  They seem to have kept that quiet.

    Given that there is plenty of spare capacity, couldn’t they run extra trains, starting at the airport?  Or restrict the Asiaworld-Expo passengers to one half of the train and put airport passengers in the other half?  They have done that in the past when there were big exhibitions (though that is different, because you don’t get a surge of people at one time).

    Not only are the trains full, but there are then very long queues for taxis at AE stations – which is not what you want when you have spent several hours traveling to Hong Kong.  The solution for that should be even simpler – surely taxi drivers would respond if they knew there was demand?

  • Clickbait from SCMP.com

    Monday's SCMP clickbait headline:

    Chinese airlines are consistently late for this one surprising reason.

    – It's not a surprising reason (spoiler alert: it's the military closing the airspace)

    Wednesday's rather boring story in the paper, with a clickbait headline online

    How developer Rykadan turned a Hong Kong basketball court into tiny flats for big profits.

    Except that it wasn't a Basketball court!  From Google Street View, it looks more like a public toilet:

    Kwun Chung Street

  • Modern life is rubbish

    After the woman who tried to push past me and fell into the gap between the train and the platform, another pleasing outcome…

    A woman is walking along, typing something into her mobile phone.  I walk past her and into the lift.  The doors close (I didn’t touch the button, honest).  She is left outside.  She is not happy.   

  • Changing trains (Hong Kong MTR)

    I’m always interested in other views of the MTR, including this one:

    hong kong metro: five transfers??

    I jumped onto Google looking for hotels that would be convenient to the rail line from the airport.  Yikes!

    Is it my imagination, or am I seeing that:

    • Only three stations in the city are on the Airport line.
    • Only five additional stations can be reached in one transfer.
    • Some parts of the system (e.g. the Ma On Shan (MOL) line in the northeast) are five transfers from the Airport.

    Don't airport lines, where people are hauling luggage, need to be designed so that they plug into the network with relatively few, well-designed transfers.

    Not in London, where the Heathrow Express only takes you to Paddington.  OK, so Crossrail the Elizabeth Line will offer better (but slower) connections throughout Central London, when it opens in 2018. 

    Not in Bangkok, either, which doesn’t even have one convenient connection.  Does Shanghai?

    That’s a strange map of the MTR system, though.  The terminus of the Airport Express (Hong Kong station) is connected to Central station through an underground walkway.  This offers plenty of easy ways to get to the rest of Hong Kong island and most of Kowloon.

    If you don’t mind waiting, the so-called Sha Tin to Central link will provide more simple interchanges – and if they ever finish the new train terminus in West Kowloon, it should be easy to walk from Kowloon station to Austin (on West Rail). 

    Also, most major hotels can be reached through free shuttle buses from either Kowloon or Hong Kong station.  Or taxis are a good, reasonably priced option (although there can be long queues at Hong Kong station).

  • Bad carbs

    It’s fascinating how the “low carb” diet is finally being taken seriously by the establishment.  I have written about this many times, being unconvinced by the Atkins diet but interested in alternatives. 

    The TV series “Doctor in the House”, shown here recently on BBC Earth, featured “low carb” diets as an effective way to deal with diabetes.  Then I found this in New Scientist:

    Fat vs carbs: What’s really worse for your health?

    David Unwin, a doctor practising in Southport, UK [..] suggests to his patients with type 2 diabetes or who want to lose weight that they do the opposite of what official health advice recommends. He advises them to stop counting calories, eat high-fat foods – including saturated fats – and avoid carbohydrates, namely sugar and starch. Telling people to avoid sugar is uncontroversial; the rest is medical heresy.

    But crazy as it sounds, Unwin has found that most of his diabetes patients who follow this advice are getting their blood sugar back under control, and that some are coming off medication they have relied on for years. Those who are overweight are slimming down.

    If you want to read more, I recommend “The Great Cholesterol Myth” by by Jonny Bowden and Stephen Sinatra