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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  • No foreigners, thank you

    Poor old Phil at Expat@Large has been suffering from that heady mix of arrogance and incompetence that seems to afflict large companies from time to time.  He registered his domain name with Lycos, who then decided that they didn’t want to accept pesky foreign credit cards and so refused to take his money to renew the domain. 

    Which would be OK, I suppose, if they had told him this in advance and let him transfer his domain to another provider.  Oh no, they didn’t – instead they renewed it and are keeping for themselves until he can find a US credit card in order to pay them.  Brilliant.

    So now he has a new domain, and the old one is gone.

  • It’s about Tomme

    My wife was watching the news last night on Cable TV and exclaimed that some people had died in Switzerland from eating some cheese called T-O-M-M-E.

    Indeed they have, though I am not sure how this really rather obscure story made it on to the news in Hong Kong.  I can’t find any mention of the story on the BBC News website, and Google News only throws up one reference. 

    Regular readers will now that I do like a bit of cheese from time to time, and I think I have purchased some Tomme from the mini-Great in Kowloon Tong in the past.  However, I’ve eaten up my stocks, and the shop has now closed down.

    So that’s another narrow escape, then.

  • You lose, they win

    It seems that online poker is the latest way to make a fortune.  Not by playing it, of course, but by owning the websites where people play.  The Guardian reports that the owners of the most popular website (PartyPoker) are going to become billionaires when the company floats.

    Don’t surprise me – several of my friends in the UK seem quite keen on playing online.  And writing about it on their blogs, naturally enough.  Sadly, I only understand about 20% of what they write, not having played poker of any kind for several years, and never having played online.  And, truth to tell, when I did play all those years ago, I wasn’t all that good – though, as I recall, that didn’t stop me winning some of the time, much to the irritation of the so-called experts.

    The Guardian piece says that online gaming sites have their eye on China, figuring (not unreasonably) that when a nation of gamblers gets easy access to the Internet anything might happen.  Given the popularity of fleapits in Macau and those bizarre cruises to nowhere, playing on the Internet has got to be an attractive option. 

  • Virtually useless

    How can it be so difficult to setup a website that people can use?  In fact, why would you bother to setup a website that was people can’t use?   

    Now, to be fair, I think PPS is a great idea.  Pay your bills by phone any time, day or night, whichever bank you use.  Why bother to set up a direct debit when you can use this service free of charge? All local calls in Hong Kong are free, so it really does cost nothing – the only downside was listening to the recorded messages as you used the service ("Welcome to PPS…Good Evening…To register your bill").

    These days, of course, they have a website as well, so no more irritating messages.  Except that rather more irritatingly, it seems to require a "Java Virtual Machine".  Maybe I haven’t got one of those on my PC at work, so nothing happens.  I looked at their requirements, and even followed the link to where I could get my own Java Virtual Machine – except that when I got there I had no idea what I was supposed to be looking for.

    So I gave up.   

    Meanwhile, I finally gave in and upgraded my home PC’s Windows XP to SP2.  Having read a few articles about this I came to the conclusion that it might not be straightforward, so I decided it was best to put it off and to be prepared for some problems.  I waited, I got the CD from Microsoft, I backed stuff up before I upgraded, and I hoped for the best.

    As it turned out it was very straightforward – didn’t take long, nothing went wrong, and I haven’t had any problems since I upgraded.  I can even use the PPS website. 

    Computers, eh.  Can’t live with ’em, can’t throw them out of your 37th floor apartment window.       

  • Cold as Ice

    Rather to my surprise I found several interesting stories in today’s SCMP.  If this keeps happening I may have to start buying it again.

    The first one, already been noted by Simon, is that Hong Kong has the coldest offices in the world:

    A study by Polytechnic University showed that although 25 degrees was a "sensible temperature" from a comfort point of view, the temperature of 90 per cent of Hong Kong’s offices averaged between 21 and 23 degrees Celsius. The average setting is lower than that in Australia, the US and developing countries, the researchers claimed.  The study showed that Hong Kong’s offices could be as cool as 17 degrees Celsius.

    Describing Hong Kong’s "bizarre culture" of low air-con settings, Ms Ng criticised the common practice among offices in Hong Kong to "turn the air conditioning to a freezing temperature [so that workers must] dress in heavy clothes for the artificial cold weather 

    Indeed, indeed. 

    Then (as a follow-up to the story about the doctor who gave the wrong drugs to several – 150 to be exact – of his patients) we are told that there are "an insufficient number of pharmacies to cope with the added workload in the event doctors were forced to stop dispensing drugs".  Well, of course there are.  The health director seems to specialise in stating the totally obvious, because he went on to reassure us that doctors don’t deliberately try to kill their patients:

    "This is just a single incident that rarely happens … It’s very likely a human mistake," Mr Lam said.

    Right.

    The third story that caught my attention because of the opening paragraph:

    A bar in Kowloon may face a fine of tens of thousand of dollars under an aggressive new crackdown on pubs and clubs screening soccer matches using an illegal satellite feed.

    I’m not sure where the word "fine" comes from, but it fooled me into thinking that the police were involved.  Instead, quite correctly, this is a civil matter and nobody is going to get fined – but if the bar loses the case then they could have to pay damages.

    [Cable and Satellite Broadcasting Association of Asia] chief executive Simon Twiston Davies said: "Bars are continuing to do it because they want the screen sports on the cheap, and this is not acceptable.   "If I went into a bar in Hong Kong, ordered a beer and then gave them $5 for it, I’d be had up (arrested). That’s the same thing as trying to get pay-TV on the cheap."

    Mr Twiston Davies said although many bars had responded positively to warning letters, many others were flagrantly ignoring the warning. "I think there is a certain complacency out there," he said.

    He said the association wanted to see Hong Kong retain its position as a broadcasting hub where intellectual property rights were respected, but that its status was compromised by widespread satellite signal piracy.

    Blah, blah, blah.  A free subscription to ESPN for anyone who can explain how this ‘piracy’ could possibly have any impact on Hong Kong’s status as a broadcasting hub (whatever one of those might be).  As for the "bottle of beer for $5" argument, I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.  Unless I have missed something, no-one is paying Cable TV less than they asked.

    Well, having said that these stories caught my attention, I sadly have to conclude that the way that the SCMP reported them has probably convinced me that I shouldn’t spend $7 every day buying their stupid newspaper.

    Sorry, by the way – I’m still very busy. 

  • An expensive day trip

    Spike over at Hongkie Town is complaining that he can no longer get a multiple-entry visa to go to China, and instead has to make do with a six-month dual-entry visa (costing near HK$1,000).  That’s not very good!

    Six months ago when I last renewed my visa I complained about the cost, but now I am wondering whether I’ll have the same problem as Spike next time.  Or perhaps this is just aimed at Americans.

    I won’t repeat what I wrote last time, but you have to wonder whether it’s really in China’s best interests to stop people coming to spend money.  Politics again, I suppose. 

  • 14 toilets and a plastic viking hat

    [I was quite sure I posted this on Monday, but it disappeared for some reason]

    The first series of the UK version of The Apprentice appears to have been highly successful, and here in Hong Kong we are already on to the third series of the Donald Trump original.

    In the first three weeks the losing project manager has been fired each time, and it’s really hard to fault the logic behind this. So far we have seen three textbook examples of weak management, all from people who must have watched the first two series and yet failed to learn a single thing. I can only assume that they have been picked because they will make the show more interesting rather than for their ability.

    (more…)

  • More useful advice

    Simon got there first with some useful advice from today’s SCMP:

    Couples have been warned not to rush into sex because the hormones released during orgasm can blind people to the true value of their relationship. Patricia Love, a counsellor on love and marriage, said the effects of the hormones could make an "alcoholic with seven kids seem like a good catch".

    I sometimes wonder if these people just think up daft things to say so that they can get their names in the newspaper.

    Meanwhile, on a similar theme, yesterday’s Guardian mentions another interesting theory:

    Alan Riley, professor of sexual medicine at the University of Central Lancashire has discovered that, while men appear to be on a five-day cycle when it comes to wanting sex, women are on a 10-day cycle. In other words, for a bloke the alarm goes off five days after they last had sex, and they want it again, whereas for women the clock is still ticking away and would do so happily for another five days.

    Oh, sorry, it’s a discovery not a theory.

  • Why

    Spam is annoying enough, but why is so much of it in German recently?

    By the way, sorry for the lack of posting over the last week or so.  Very busy.

  • Don’t believe the hype

    Phil was on TV again yesterday night – this time it was Channel News Asia (from Singapore) and I suppose it was late enough not to scare too many children.

    Personally, I’m getting rather bored with all the hype about blogging.  When magazines like Business Week start telling us that Blogs will change your business, something has gone wrong.  Yes, I know that some large companies are employing Chief Blogging Officers, and others are allowing employees to blog about their work.  I also know there are sites that pay people to blog.  And yet, what does it all mean?  Five years or so ago (or whenever it was) we heard similar stories about the Internet in general, and 99% of it was hype.  Likewise, blogging is just a hobby that amuses a few people, and it isn’t going to change their lives or make them seriously rich (there’s a good New York Times article on the subject if you’re fast enough).

    Phil’s final comment on the TV programme was that viral marketing is the future for blogs.  Well, if you say so…  Viral marketing is probably something we will see more of, but how many blogs have enough readers for it to be worthwhile?

    Meanwhile, some of the more high-minded bloggers in Hong Kong got upset when a TV show and newspaper report characterised blogging as little more than young people publishing their online diaries.  Of course that’s wrong – it’s old people as well. 

    OK, so a small minority of blogs have intelligent commentary and serious political content, and a few of them are widely-read (and, of course, American bloggers are hugely influential, as Dan Rather will tell you) but the vast majority are shallow and trivial.  So it’s not unreasonable for blogging to be portrayed in that way, and no amount of pompous letters from bloggers "to media/organizations/scholars" are going to change that. 

    Blogging tools are useful, and some people with something to say have been able to get online more easily (and cheaply) than would otherwise have been the case, but as with every other piece of technology from video cameras to digital cameras to mobile phones to the Internet itself, the trivial always greatly outweighs the worthy. 

    Luckily, people who are looking for interesting and worthwhile blogs are probably capable of finding them, whatever Cable TV or Sing Pao Daily or anyone else says about the subject.  Not here, though.