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: Jun 2006
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Last week’s Economist had an article about Ray Ozzie, who is taking over from Bill Gates as Chief Software Architect for Microsoft. Who he, you may be asking: Mr Ozzie personally wrote a million of the first 3.5m lines of code for the first successful collaboration software, Lotus Notes. At a time when nobody had…
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Maybe one of the problems with the English commentary on the FIFA World Cup is that the commentators feel under an obligation to offer us "insight" and opinions rather than sticking to describing what they can see. After a few minutes of the Brazil vs. Ghana game, our man offered the insight that referees had…
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The commentator on one of the recent World Cup games was enthusing about the efficiency of the German rail network. I think the commentator was John Helm, but Cable TV never tell us who is commentating so I may be doing him an injustice. What I’m trying to figure out is how he managed to…
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Receiving "unauthorised" overseas satellite TV signals is not illegal under the Broadcasting Ordinance. Yet a bar in Sai Kung wrote an open letter "admitting" that they had been naughty: "We did not pay the fair price for this programming. We now recognise that our actions were illegal and wrong. We will not repeat them." They…
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One of the more puzzling sights of the World Cup so far (apart from watching England, which is another matter) was the Japanese fan shown on TV celebrating after their team’s draw with Croatia. Why celebrate? It wasn’t exactly a good result – to qualify, Japan now need to beat Brazil, which is tough enough,…
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Banks obviously make a bit of an effort to "disguise" the letters they send out with credit cards inside (by not putting the company name on the back, and a using special address). Doesn’t really work, though, because when an anonymous looking envelope arrives in the mail, my first thought is that it must be…
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England have never won their opening two games in the World Cup. Or at least that’s what the commentator kept telling us during last night’s game. Well, they have now. Of course there is the small matter of two poor performances, but it’s the points that count, right? Well, maybe. I am wondering why I…
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During the 1998 World Cup there was blanket coverage on the terrestrial channels in Hong Kong, with several games shown live on all four channels. ATV World had the BBC commentary, and TVB had the international commentary, whilst there was Cantonese on Home & Jade. I never understood quite why they needed to do that…
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On days like this, you can check where the storms are heading using this from the Observatory’s website.
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Pierce Lam is at his pompous best in the SCMP letter column (Linguistic prejudice), complaining that the English Schools Foundation is selecting children based upon their ability to communicate in, er, English: Hong Kong is about the only city in the world that tolerates a partly publicly funded institution with an admission policy that discriminates…
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