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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Month: Jan 2005

  • Train spotters

    This week’s Post Magazine (free with the Sunday Morning Post, Hong Kong’s leading English language Sunday newspaper) has a piece, hidden away at the back, about the Shenzen Metro.  It’s by David Evans, who I think was one of the SCMP journalists who had a turn running the Lai See column after Nury Vittachi was…

  • No pajamas

    How come stuff like this never happens to me? Retired doctor Mr Leigh-Brown, 67, said he picked up the DVD of The Pajama Game, which was sealed in plastic wrapping, for £2.99 from the bargain bin of a Safeway supermarket in Taunton. “Some topless young women appeared and started talking in Italian… it’s not what…

  • Publish and be damned

    On Wednesday I was glancing through the online edition of the SCMP and came across a rather idiotic opinion piece about Cyberport and PCCW by one John Tsang, Secretary for Commerce, Industry and Technology.  Well, no surprise there, as the SCMP prints all sorts of nonsense on its opinion pages.  What I didn’t realize until…

  • Grrrr….

    I’m sure I have previously mentioned the frustrations of using badly designed computer systems that assume that you must have a postcode or zip code.  Hong Kong is one of several countries that doesn’t have either, but often they insist that you enter something anyway. I have just had a very aggravating experience with one…

  • Cash? From a cash machine? Very old-fashioned notion.

    They recently gave an OBE to the man who was credited with inventing the ATM machine  (though someone else has claimed that he had the idea first). In case you care, the first ATM machine was installed outside a branch of Barclays Bank in London in 1967.  Waiting to use one today, I was thinking…

  • Racing certainty

    Fumier mentions the curious story of a so-called “betting scam” operared by a syndicate in darkest Yuen Long.  I saw this story on the TV news last night, but I wasn’t quite sure what was going on and I can’t find it in the newspapers today – so I am grateful to Fumier for filling in the gaps. …

  • A small one please

    I have to say that I am quite impressed with the new Mac mini, though I suspect that the headline price of US$499 is not what most people will be paying after they have added on everything they want (bigger hard drive, DVD writer, etc.).  Nevertheless, it does seem much more affordable than previous Macs. …

  • Sleeping with the fishes

    About ten days ago, my son was given three small goldfish (is goldfish a generic term or do they all have different names?).  A few days later the first one died.  OK, these things happen. So we bought two more goldfish (these ones really looked like goldfish and were bigger).  Then the second one started…

  • Never boring

    I think it is time for my annual "cricket isn’t really boring" post.  Yesterday England beat South Africa in the fifth test match of a series that has been very competitive. In this match, England started well in their first innings, faltered but then recovered and seemed to be in a strong position.    In…

  • The best investment

    There was a small story in yesterday’s paper that caught my attention. It refers to a PBS show Wall $treet Week with Fortune (the transcript of which is here), on which Matthew Kiernan of Innovest Strategic Value Advisers argued that socially responsible firms offer better returns to investors: [W]e know from all our Wall Street…