I get rather irritated with Internet chain letters.  Fortunately I don't receive many, but when I do I check them against lists of known hoaxes.  Most are stupid or misguided, but some do have an element of truth.  Normally they usually include a warning of some kind, and presumably some people take notice of them and avoid using certain shampoos or putting water in a microwave.

What I find puzzling is that as this rubbish passes around the world, it often get altered along the way, so people are obviously spending their time updating them before sending them to 50 friends.  Here's one I received recently.

Is this the worst-designed website of any major organization in Hong Kong? The entry page is bad, but if you select 'English' the next screen is even worse. It looks as if an assortment of pictures and links were scattered randomly across the page. Spectacularly awful.

I'm getting rather bored with the latest virus (MyDoom). I have received a few of these email messages containing attachments, and also the follow-ups claiming I have sent out messages containing viruses.

I am intrigued by the logic behind this one, which seems to be aimed at people who will open an unexplained attachment from an unfamiliar sender even when it does not promise anything exciting. It may appeal to wannabe geeks because of the technical gibberish ("The message cannot be represented in 7-bit ASCII encoding and has been sent as a binary attachment) in some versions, but other than that why bother opening the message?

I looked carefully at the first one, didn't recognize the sender, and deleted the message. Then I noticed something on Shaky's site about the virus, and discovered that I was right to delete it. Now my virus checker has caught up, and tells me that there are nasty things in some of the incoming emails and deletes them for me.

The messages claiming I have sent viruses are bizarre, because they refer to an email address that I never use for sending mail, and come (with one exception) from people who I don't know. So I ignore them.

The problem with email, as I have mentioned before, is that it holds a horrible fascination for many people, and they waste a lot of their time reading messages that they should really ignore, and (presumably) opening attachments and clicking on links. Which, of course, is why companies send spam emails - even if only 0.01% of recepients respond it's still worthwhile.

I blame the Geeky Kaiser.  He mentioned BlogJet, and so I thought I would try it out.  It's a useful little program for composing posts, and lets you do more clever formatting than Typepad allows.  Like colors and bullet points.  Unfortunately it seems to be incompatible with the Typepad editor, so if you start with one you really have to carry on with it rather than switching over half-way through writing a post (as I did with the post below about salmon, which explains why it was such a mess earlier on). 

The main advantage I can see (apart from colors and bullet points) is that you can compose off-line and save your work as you go along.  I was using WordPad, which is fine except that you can't create hyperlinks.  Yes, I know Word could do that, but I avoid it because it uses characters that don't always display properly through a browser.  For example, Hemlock was obviously using MS Word (or something similar) during his stint on The Gweilo Diaries having complained about the unfriendly MT interface. 

Talking of Hemlock, I notice that he has updated The World's Most Authoritative Guide to Hong Kong Blogs and included this blog, along with Fumier and other fellow upstarts.  He gives me "full marks for admitting [I am] not especially exciting" and says that I write about my "apparently staid and not overly eventful day-to-day life".  Actually, I thought the one thing I was not writing about was my day-to-day life.  What I have tried to do is provide some observations on everyday life in Hong Kong, and these inevitably tend to be fairly mundane.  However, clearly I am not competing with Conrad or Shaky, and if anyone wants to read about that type of lifestyle then this is not the place to come.  The title of the blog is meant to emphasis that I'm just an ordinary guy living in the New Territories, not a typical "expat" on a generous package living in Mid-Levels and enjoying the Wan Chai nightlife. 

Actually, one problem about doing a blog is that it's difficult to know what other people think about it.  Other bloggers tend to be very polite, and in truth we rely a bit too much upon links and commenting on each other's blogs for it to be any other way.  Sometimes there are differences of opinion, such as Glutter's recent attack on bloggers who "like to put photos of girls half their age semi-nude up on the net", and her consequent removal of links to certain un-named blogs, but these seem very rare.  I kept out of that controversy, though it seems that in Glutter's opinion my silence constitutes support for Conrad et al. 

So I do find it interesting to read opinions on this and other blogs (as long as they are vaguely intelligent, which rules out the idiotic Blogwatch), even if I don't agree.  Any other comments would be very welcome.

Strange story from The Guardian about a guy called Mike Rowe who thought the obvious name for his website was Mike Rowe Soft. A very large software company thought that perhaps it wasn't such a good idea and asked him to hand over the domain name for $10.

The BBC has asked various well-known people to predict what will happen in 2004. Mostly banal stuff like Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles getting married. A year ago they asked the same thing, and now we can see whether they have come true. Two of the predictions were spot-on:

POLITICS - Tony Howard, veteran political commentator, said Tory leader Iain Duncan-Smith would resign, and Michael Howard would be his successor.

TRANSPORT - Christian Wolmar, an expert on the UK's travel woes, predicted that against people's expectations, London's congestion charging scheme will not be a flop.

The congestion charge was a big success, and is going to be extended. My favourite prediction is this one:

TECHNOLOGY - Trevor Baylis, inventor of the wind-up radio, predicted this would be the year for wind-up laptops.

Er, maybe not. Guess what he is predicting for this year?

Mobile phones will become mini televisions in 2004. Pocket TVs have been around for many years and colour screens on mobiles are now common. The one drawback would be the drain on battery life. But, true to form, Mr Baylis has a practical solution - wind-up "dynamo" chargers, which are already available for standard mobiles.

Mad inventors - don't you just love 'em?