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: Sep 2008
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Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I already have a device that can record digital TV. It’s the Now TV/DVB combined set-top box that can receive Now HD and terrestrial digital channels. All you need to do is add an external disk through the USB connector, and off you go. Admittedly the functionality is…
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I’m still recovering from the shock of discovering that government has done something sensible for once. They have increased taxi fares for short journeys and reduced them for long journeys, as The Standard reported on Wednesday: Passengers who take short- or medium-distance trips – about 80 percent of the total number – will pay on…
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Today’s SCMP has a lengthy Bloomberg story about the credit-rating weasels – Bringing Down Wall Street as Ratings Let Loose Subprime Scourge by Elliot Blair Smith: “I view the ratings agencies as one of the key culprits,” says Joseph Stiglitz, 65, the Nobel laureate economist at Columbia University in New York. “They were the party…
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More great thinkers in the SCMP’s marvellous Talkback column: As a domestic helper gets a holiday on Sunday, if the Monday is a statutory public holiday the helper gets two days off. However when that happens, who does the cleaning for those two days? It means the house remains in a mess for that period…
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Recently I bought a bottle of Snapple Iced Lemon Tea, thinking that it really was natural (as stated on the label). Then I read the ingredients. The second item (after water) is High Fructose Corn Syrup, the ingredient which is widely blamed for making the population of the United States so obese. From Wikipedia: The…
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It now appears that AIG is going to avoid Chapter 11 bankruptcy, but it’s striking how much power the credit rating agencies have in determining whether it fails or not. By threatening to lower AIG’s credit rating, the agencies precipitated a crisis. This in turn sent AIG’s share price down, which was enough to persuade…
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When I searched Google News for news about AIG, guess what was the first story that came up? Yes, it was about the sponsorship deal they have with Manchester United…
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I’m rather liking Google Chrome. It seems far more intuitive and easier to use than Internet Explorer (OK, that’s not much of a challenge). Of course Chrome lacks some features found in IE and other browsers, but Google clearly decided to start with something simple, and that’s got to be a good thing. So far…
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If you wanted to find out what was on TVB Pearl, you’d look on their website, right? That should have up-to-date information about what’s on the channel, shouldn’t it? Well, not always, it seems. Yesterday, they showed Naked Science, but the website shows the information for last week’s episode. Tonight they have the Celebrity Apprentice,…
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The big story was the collapse of the Liberal Party in the geographical constituencies, but there were two other things that caught my attention. The first was that the pan-democrats were incredibly fortunate with the results. For example, in NT East they got 57% of the vote and won 71% of the seats, and something…
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