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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  • The shortest day

    The Winter Solstice is celebrated on the shortest day of the year (i.e. today) and it is traditional to visit your family for a special dinner (no, sorry, that doesn’t mean a Big Mac and large fries).  I think we are celebrating the fact that from here on out the days get longer – though compared to the cold and dark December afternoons in the UK I hardly notice the difference.  Anyway, here’s the official line:

    This celebration can be traced to the Chinese belief in yin and yang, which represent balance and harmony in life. It is believed that the yin qualities of darkness and cold are at their most powerful at this time, but it is also the turning point, giving way to the light and warmth of yang. For this reason, the Dong Zhi Festival is a time for optimism.

    The strange thing is that although it is one of the most important festivals of the year, it isn’t a public holiday. However, most offices do close early, which is better than nothing.  So, after a short day today we have a full day tomorrow, and then it’s Christmas (yes, OK, some people have to work on Saturday morning).  Whoopee.

  • Digital TV duopoly

    I was rather surprised to read about the plans that ATV and TVB have for digital TV (from The Standard):

    Television Broadcasts and Asia Television, Hong Kong’s terrestrial TV operators, have pledged to invest at least a further HK$400 million each to roll out high-definition television (HDTV) services in the city by the end of 2007.

    Both are required under their broadcasting licenses to begin HDTV services by 2007, a Broadcasting Authority spokeswoman said Monday. The government body has approved the companies’ plans for HDTV, in which each has committed to spend a further HK$400 million by 2009, she said.

    Isn’t there an opportunity here for the government to auction the available frequencies to the highest bidders rather than just giving it to the dullards who are already boring the population with their dreary programs?  It doesn’t sound promising, as the SCMP reports:

    ATV proposes to launch four new, standard resolution channels providing programmes on show business, culture, trade news, finance and shopping information. The broadcaster also aims to provide 14 hours of prime time HDTV programming per week.

    Yawn, yawn.  Rubbish doesn’t get any appealing because it’s broadcast in high definition.

  • Things I don’t understand (1)

    Couples who have a shared email address.  What’s that all about, then?

    I suppose it made sense a few years ago, but these days there are plenty of perfectly good free email services, most notably GMail (more storage space than you could possibly need, and the option to save copies of emails in Outlook), and adding a 2nd email address to an existing account only costs a few dollars a month. 

    Oh, and people who use work email for personal stuff.  Don’t understand that at all. 

  • It’s back

    I think the word is hubris. 

    In week 2 of the latest Apprentice, the men’s team were delighted when they were told that the task was to develop an advertising campaign for Lamborghini.  What could possibly go wrong?  Chris works in advertising and the rest of the team are all, er, men. Throughout the task they exuded confidence, and yet they came up with a dull and confusing campaign that they roceeded to explain in minute detail.  "Here’s the car, and here’s water, which could kill us and yet we need it to stay alive" (I paraphrase slightly).

    (more…)

  • Noisy

    I don’t want to sound like one of those crazy people who write letters to the SCMP, but…

    When they introduced Idiot TV on buses, I thought most of the complaints were overdone – yes it’s annoying, but I found it quite easy to ignore.

    Now they have apparently decided to turn up the volume so that we can’t ignore it.  Even when I am listening to music on my MP3 player I can still hear their brainless presenters talking rubbish in the background. 

    I predict that they will tell us that their research shows that most passengers enjoy watching this nonsense, and most of them are deaf (on account of shouting at each other all the time).  Or perhaps it’s to drown out the people who talk loudly into their mobile phones on buses.  It definitely wouldn’t be because they want to be able to charge more for advertising.  Oh no.

  • Not the full picture

    I notice that E@L has acquired a bargain price Philips Plasma TV, whilst Shaky has already replaced his with something new and shiny from Pioneer.  I still remember the first time I saw a plasma TV on sale in Hong Kong, and I think the price was HK$100k (US$12,800).  Now they start at around one-tenth of that price and Fortress and friends fill their stores with them. 

    Which is where things start to get a bit tricky.

    Time was when all you had to decide was the screen size and whether you wanted to pay extra for a big name brand.  All TVs were pretty much the same, with minor variations such as Nicam and flatter squarer tubes to make it mildly interesting.

    Now you have to choose between old-style CRT, LCD and Plasma, and between HD and a variety of other standards, with a huge range of prices.  Yet when you go into the average shop it is almost impossible to see the difference in quality between the cheapest and most expensive.  I’ve looked at cheap sets that appear to have very good sharp pictures, and sets that cost a small fortune and yet have murky pictures.

    I suppose there are a couple of explanations for this.  The first is that the average electrical store offers far-from-ideal viewing conditions, and the second is that the best sets are designed for high-definition TV and the next generation of DVD technology (Blu-Ray etc.), neither of which are yet available.  Plus, the idiots use large-screen TVs to advertise other products and special offers, usually with VCD-quality pictures.         

    Or perhaps it’s the fact the people who run Fortress, Broadway and the rest are happy to treat us like idiots who know nothing about the products but love special offers.  Fortunately there are some specialist stores that do nothing but sell plasma and LCD TVs.  They turn down the lighting to create an environment that is more relaxing and closer to the conditions where you would watch TV at home, and they even appear to have used some care in deciding what to show on the screens.  Yes, that is The Incredibles you are watching.  We have Toy Story and Finding Nemo if you’d prefer.  Pixar plays very well on a plasma screen, in case you hadn’t noticed.

    Maybe they can even explain the differences between a set costing little more than US$1,000 and one for US$8,000.  There’s always my theory that it’s all a scam and the expensive ones are just there to make the US$2,000 sets look cheap.  Answers on a postcard please…

  • Flagrant Harbour

    Maybe it was a mistake to put Mackered on my sidebar – he seems to have stopped posting.  Typical.

    Anyway, there’ll be another one along in a minute, and sure enough here is flagrant harbour from someone who appears to be a Brit and claims to have been around before. Don’t know who he was before, though he certainly isn’t Conrad, as Mia seems to think.

  • Trouble with goldfish

    Simon Jordan’s excellent fortnightly column in The Observer offers a fan/owner’s view of some of the things that are wrong with modern football. This week it’s spoilt players:

    The wider issue, though, is addressing the source of the problem: the over-protection of players through weak management and nannying. Last April a Fulham player liaison officer told the papers about some of his tasks. He said he’d been called out to Alain Goma’s house because ‘Goma’s goldfish was swimming in the wrong direction’. He’d been called to rescue a player lost on the London Underground (‘he was helpless’). He’d been called out by Fabrice Fernandes who kept waking up in the morning with a wet head, and discovered the player had been ‘sleeping by an open window’.

    You may not be surprised to hear that he has been charged by the Football Association in regard to something he said about referees.  Top man.

  • When in Rome…

    Does it make any sense to buy a DVD of a programme that is broadcast on TV in Hong Kong?  That I could watch or record for free (well, maybe the cost of a DVD-R disk or two)?

    Obviously the answer is yes.  For a few reasons:

    (1) Laziness (remembering to record the program)

    (2) Time (being able to watch it when you’ve recorded it). Actually this is (1) again because I could put it on a DVD and save it for when I do have time.

    (3) Stupid damn commercials, especially TVB Pearl’s policy of ignoring the breaks put there by the producers and having them whenever they feel like it.

    (4) Additional stuff/subtitles/quality (a bit marginal)

    but the main one is

    (5) To watch the programme as it was originally intended, without nannyish alterations (idiotic stuff such as hearing Anthony Jnr say "Damn You" to his mother and then being reprimanded by his father for saying "the ‘F’ word").  Yes, I have complained about this before. 

    The insane thing about this is that (as far as I know) TVB could choose to transmit The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and similar without this silliness (there is a little-used ‘M’ certificate available for this purpose from whichever nannyish government body decides these things).  They already transmit these shows after midnight so it shouldn’t really be a problem.

    So, three cheers for Now Broadband TV.  They have decided that Hong Kong viewers can be treated as adults and watch ‘Rome’ in the version that HBO viewers in the States and BBC viewers were able to enjoy.  Mind you, the warning caption at the start of the show is something else (you name it, they’ve got it).  Somewhat weirdly, they have done this by setting up a channel (104) which currently exists solely to transmit one programme, but perhaps they will extend this to other HBO offerings.

    Actually, I have to say that I’m kinda intrigued to know what is left of ‘Rome’ after they have excised the nudity, sex and gore.  Well, I suppose there’s the Senate…   

  • Cheese Wars

    I was (you will be unsurprised to learn) more than a little intrigued to see that ATV World were showing a programme called "Cheese Wars" on Monday night.  What would it be about?

    Well, yes, cheese.  Though it was decidedly light on actual cheese, and was more the story of a group of West Country farmers who had been rather badly let down by Dairy Crest, the company that distributes their cheese to supermarkets – oh, and which also happens to be a formidable competitor, marketing their own brands such as Cathedral City (which is actually not bad for a factory-made cheese). The farmers don’t have any legal agreement with mighty Dairy Crest, who just buy their cheese when they feel like it, and (remarkably enough) they were selling quite a lot of Cathedral City, and rather less of the farmer’s cheese.  

    Understandably, the farmers wanted to reduce their reliance on Dairy Crest.  So they hired an expert on cheese marketing, to help them to create their own brand and sell it direct to supermarkets.   Sadly they seemed to have found the Tung Chee Hwa of cheese marketing.  He said that he wanted to get their cheese into 100 supermarkets in the West Country for test marketing, but he managed to get it into precisely zero supermarkets.  His brand ideas were "Bite Me" and "Farmer’s Pride", but these went down like a lead balloon.  Then someone in one of the focus groups suggested "West Country", which is what they eventually adopted.  Perhaps the farmers could have thought of that one themselves…   

    Then, having failed to do what he had promised, our marketing man did what he had been told not to do, and talked to Dairy Crest about the new brand – and even agreed to work more closely with them.  Maybe this was the only viable option, but the farmers could have done that themselves, rather than hiring a marketing director on a fancy salary to create a new brand precisely so they were less dependent on Dairy Crest.

    Anyway, it seems that they haven’t given up on this idea, and now have a Farmhouse Cheese Makers website.  What I learned from reading the website is that two of the members of the farmers’ co-op are the producers of Keen’s cheddar & Montgomery cheddar – and if you want traditional English cheddar made from unpasteurised milk, these are two of the top names.  Yet it seems that in order to stay in business, they also have to sell cheese to Dairy Crest at bargain prices.  Big business triumphs again.