There’s one other New Yorker in my company and he just sent me a link to this bit over at The Onion:

NEW YORK—At 4:32 p.m. Tuesday, every single resident of New York City decided to evacuate the famed metropolis, having realized it was nothing more than a massive, trash-ridden hellhole that slowly sucks the life out of every one of its inhabitants.

With audible murmurs of “This is no way to live,” “What the hell am I doing here—I hate it here,” and “Fuck this place. Fuck this horrible place,” all 8.4 million citizens in each of the five boroughs packed up their belongings and told reporters they would rather blow their brains out with a shotgun than spend another waking moment in this festering cesspool of filth and scum and sadness.

But the question is:  how many words would you have to change to make it about Hong Kong rather than New York?

“I always had this perverted sense of pride because I was managing to scrape by here,” said Brooklyn resident Andrew McQuade, who, after watching two subway rats gnawing on a third bloody rat carcass, finally determined that New York City was a giant sprawling cancer. “Well, fuck that. I don’t need to pay $2,000 a month to share a doghouse-sized apartment with some random Craigslist dipshit to prove my worth. I want to live like a goddamn human being.”

Probably not that many.

Okay – I would never say that Hong Kong is “a horrible place” but sometimes certain aspects of it just get to me and I guess today is one of those days.

But still, you could change this:

When fleeing New Yorkers were asked if they would miss the city’s iconic landmarks, most responded that Central Park is just a pathetic excuse for experiencing actual nature, that the Brooklyn Bridge is great but it’s just a fucking bridge, that nobody goes to the Met anyway, and that living in a dingy, grime-caked apartment while exhaust fumes from an idling truck seep through your bedroom window isn’t worth slightly bigger bagels.

To this:

When fleeing Hong Kongers were asked if they would miss the city’s iconic landmarks, most responded that Hong Kong Park is just a pathetic excuse for experiencing actual nature, that the Tsing Ma Bridge is great but it’s just a fucking bridge, that nobody goes to the Cultural Centre anyway, and that living in a dingy, grime-caked apartment while exhaust fumes from an idling truck seep through your bedroom window isn’t worth slightly bigger char siu bau.

Couldn’t you?

For any experts out there ….

I bought a Fotodiox adapter that allows me to put Nikon lenses on my Sony NEX 5 camera.  However, I jumped the gun on this and didn’t really read up on it in advance and discovered now that it’s too late.  More expensive adapters include an aperture control ring; this one doesn’t have one.  And it’s important because:

*  Nikon G lenses don’t have an aperture ring on the lens

*  When you take a Nikon G lens off the camera, the aperture goes to the smallest opening

So when I put the lens on this adapter and put the lens and adapter on the Sony, I’m stopped all the way down to f/16 or f/22 depending on the lens.  Which of course is of only limited use at best.

So my question is:  is there some way to get the Nikon lens to remain in the wide open position when off the camera – aside from constant pressure from my finger on the aperture level on the back of the lens?

Or do I just stick this up on eBay and then go out and buy one of the more expensive adapter rings?  (sigh)

Even though I’m quite content at my current job, my resume remains online at the usual places because, well, you never know, right?  Tomorrow Bill Gates could call me up saying he wants to get rid of Steve Ballmer and he found me on Monster and decided I’m the best possible replacement.  Okay, that might be a bit of a stretch and honestly I don’t have any excuse especially since I haven’t used drugs in decades and rarely drink alcohol any more, but a boy can dream, right?

At any rate, the stuff that comes to me via email as a result of these web sites is worthless in every way except for entertainment value.

Case in point: an email inquiry that arrived today.  My CV makes it pretty clear that I’ve got 24 years experience in my field.  This was for a very, very junior position requiring just one year’s experience.  Okay, I get a lot of those.  This one came from an agency in Singapore, where you’d think they might have at least some competency in English.

We are currently seeking experienced professionals in Hong kong for an project with an bnaking client.

Oddly enough, I don’t have much experience in the bnaking field.

The job description included this:

Familar with Base SAS programming and use of SAS Enterprise Guide (EG)

Trust me, SAS does not appear anywhere in my CV.  I don’t think the sequence “sas” appears anywhere in my CV – I have been to Kansas City once but didn’t think that was worth mentioning there.

And then this:

Good knowlegde in use of MS Excel and MS Access

Honestly, next time I’m out of work (which will be hopefully never again, at least until voluntary retirement) I think I’ll look for a job as a head hunter.  Apparently you don’t need any “knowlegde” to get that kind of position.

Rolling Stone has the lowdown on Carlos Santana’s next album, due out September 21st.   It’s called Guitar Heaven: The Greatest Guitar Classics of All Time.  Perhaps inspired by my earlier post on Gibson’s listing of the best guitar albums?   Here’s the track list, showing the guest vocalist and original version of each track on the album.

• “Whole Lotta Love” featuring Chris Cornell (Led Zeppelin)
• “Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’” featuring Scott Weiland (The Rolling Stones)
• “Sunshine Of Your Love” featuring Rob Thomas (Cream)
• “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” featuring india.arie and Yo-Yo Ma (The Beatles)
• “Dance the Night Away” featuring Pat Monahan (Van Halen)
• “Back In Black” featuring Nas and Janelle Monáe (AC/DC)
• “Riders On the Storm” featuring Chester Bennington and Ray Manzarek (The Doors)
• “Smoke On the Water” featuring Jacoby Shaddix (Deep Purple)
• “Photograph” featuring Chris Daughtry (Def Leppard)
• “Bang A Gong” featuring Gavin Rossdale (T. Rex)
• “Little Wing” featuring Joe Cocker (Jimi Hendrix)
• “I Ain’t Superstitious” featuring Jonny Lang (Howlin’ Wolf, Jeff Beck Group)

Looks like there will be an interesting re-think on some of these songs, especially Back in Black and While My Guitar Gently Weeps.  Riders on the Storm is a “great guitar classic”????

November 16th sees Bruce Springsteen expand Darkness on the Edge of Town to 3 CDs and 3 Blu-Ray or SD discs.  The NY Times says there will be 21 previously unreleased songs (some with titles I don’t recognize even from bootlegs), a complete concert from Houston ’78, rare late 70s video clips, a concert from Asbury Park in 2009 and a documentary on the making of the album (playing at a film festival in Toronto in September and on HBO in October).

Speaking of The Boss, Idolator’s got a clip from last night’s Emmys.  Jimmy Fallon and the cast of Glee give Born to Run the Glee make-over.  Lots of surprise cameos that I won’t spoil.

And now for something completely different – A Chrome Experiment.  The latest video from Arcade Fire, The Wilderness Downtown, for their single We Used to Wait, was made using HTML5.  The extra kick is that you input your address (“the address of the home where you grew up” is requested) and then images from Google Maps and Google Street View of your very own home are smooshed into the video.  It’s a Chrome Experiment because you need to use Google’s Chrome browser to see this.  It might work in Firefox or Safari but don’t even bother if you’re running IE.  It’s a great track from their excellent new album and a cool concept.

Thanks to all for the suggestions posted here and on Twitter.  Right now Backblaze is looking like the one I’m going to try first.  US$5 per month for unlimited storage definitely fits into my budget.

Which leads me to wonder … if I’m backing up everything to the cloud, will I still need to have 5 RAID drives?  Do I need to have a local back-up if I’ve got a cloud one?  There is the thought that if I convert all my RAID1 drives to RAID0, I’m going to be left with enough spare disk space to last me forever … or at least till next year.

Yesterday’s movie was Solitary Man, and I’m writing about it because it stayed with me all day.  There are some obvious parallels in my life I suppose, but only superficial ones (or are they?).  Michael Douglas plays Ben Kalmen, a former big shot fallen on very hard times.  He’s 60 years old and still has an eye for the younger ladies.  The fact that he used to sell cars tells you that he has the gift of gab and the fact that he looks like Michael Douglas means he still can talk the occasional 18 or 20 year old into bed, even if it may have disastrous results to his life – and it does.

But this is not some Fatal Attraction melodrama, this is in fact a very low key character study that I found consistently entertaining.  It’s written by Brian Koppelman, who has worked a lot with Soderburgh, writing Ocean’s 13 and The Girlfriend Experience.  It’s co-directed by Koppelman and David Levien – the two previously directed Knockaround Guys.  The cast includes Susan Sarandon, Danny DeVito, Jenna Fischer, Mary-Louise Parker, Jesse Eisenberg and some other familiar faces.  And it has some terrific songs on the soundtrack – kicking off with Johnny Cash’s cover of Neil Diamond’s Solitary Man; pay attention to both the lyrics and Cash’s performance – it’s amazing how well that song works with this film.  But Douglas is unquestionably the star.

Unlike many other actors his age, Douglas has not entered his 60s in denial, he’s not still playing the kinds of roles that made him a huge box office star, bigger even than his father.  (Well, okay, Wall Street 2 is coming out next month, there are exceptions to the rule.)  He’s taken a few chances in some smaller character-based films, starting perhaps with Wonder Boys in 2000.  And these chances pay off artistically, even if not at the box office, because Douglas continues to get better as an actor.  He’s no longer attempting to get by on looks and charm; I see a real attention to tiny details in his portrayal of this character.

Solitary Man scored high at Rotten Tomatoes and it scored pretty high with me as well.

The only downside is that with my gf away, I’ve been trying to only watch movies that I think she won’t want to see.  But I think she’s gonna like this one, so I’ll definitely end up watching it again.

from here

Just some lyrics running through my head, from Leonard Cohen’s Chelsea Hotel No. 2, written about him and Janis Joplin:

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
you were famous, your heart was a legend.
You told me again you preferred handsome men
but for me you would make an exception.
And clenching your fist for the ones like us
who are oppressed by the figures of beauty,
you fixed yourself, you said, “Well never mind,
we are ugly but we have the music.”

…. and you always learn the lesson the hard way.

Point 1:  The electricity supply in Hong Kong village houses is somewhat antiquated.  Any time there’s a thunder storm and lightning comes down out of the sky somewhere in the immediate vicinity, the main circuit breaker pops and my house loses all electricity.  The circuit breaker is outside the house and of course it only needs to be reset when the rain is coming down in buckets.  For various reasons, it’s not always possible for me to shut my computer down when a storm is coming and I know this could happen.  Or I suppose I could bring in some electrical contractor to redo the wiring or to modernize this stuff.  Except that I only rent the joint and I expect to be gone next year and I know my landlord wouldn’t pay for it.

Point 2:  I keep my important data on RAID 1 drives – two identical drives, one mirroring the other.  One drive fails, the other is okay and you don’t lose anything.  Or so you are told.

So, thunder storm.  Power goes out.  Power gets switched back on and one of my RAID boxes, 750 gig X 2 drives by Buffalo, indicates that drive 1 ain’t doing so well.  I switch off the box, switch it back on and it starts rebuilding drive 1.  A few hours later, it all seems good.  Except it wasn’t.

Some of the files are missing.  And some are now just 0 bytes.  I keep two kinds of data on this drive – my iTunes collection and all of my photos.  I start going through iTunes – I start at “A,” checking every file to see which ones are gone and which ones are still there but are now “nothing.”   Of course I can’t finish this in one sitting because I have almost 45,000 songs sitting in iTunes.  And when I come back the next day, some of the files that were okay the day before are now also screwed.  Some of the files that I re-added the day before are gone again.

The problem would seem to be that the power surge (and yes, I do have this plugged into a surge protector, albeit a cheap one) has damaged the drive controller.  Which then screws up the directories and file systems.  And the files are fucked.

I got a new RAID box, copied over everything copy-able from the old drive.  I’ll smash open the Buffalo box, rescue the two hard disks (which I can reformat and reuse) and toss the box.

The iTunes stuff can all be restored – it’s just really freaking time consuming.

The photos?  Actually, I’m too scared to look right now.  I don’t want to think about what might have been lost – and 95% of them can’t be recovered if they’re gone.

So, now … back-ups on two separate physical devices?  Off-site storage?  Seems like “the cloud” is a possible answer but since I’m talking at least 100 gig here, I don’t know if there’s any solution that falls within my meager budget.  Suggestions?  Recommendations?

Sigh.

Yesterday, my company held a day long event for all staff.  Being the cynical fucker that I am, I have to admit that when I heard the detailed plans for the day, I wasn’t expecting too much.  I was wrong, as is often the case.

Also, I was told that it was a tradition in the company that all of the managers contribute cash for prizes.  This is the first time I’ve ever encountered anything like this.  ”What happened to going around to local businesses and hotels and getting them to contribute prizes and coupons?”  Apparently they’d never heard of this but at my last company (admittedly much larger and more famous), they’d get dinner coupons from hotel restaurants and places like Fortress and Broadway would kick in mobile phones, cameras, video game consoles.  The company did buy two iPads to give away as prizes, everything else was cash awarded to teams for winning various events.

The day started with laser tag and other games.  The other games were necessary because there was 110 of us and the place we went to could only accommodate about 50 or 60 players at a time.  X-Game Square (the link is to their Facebook page) is located in an old rundown factory building in the industrial section of Kwun Tong.   I was driving since it made little sense for me to drive to company bus pick-up points around HK island or Kowloon, and my first laugh of the day was when I found that the closest carpark was a Wilson carpark located in a building named Candy Novelty House.  Who wouldn’t feel happy in the morning going to work knowing they’re going to the Candy Novelty House?

The huge space for the game was kind of cute – they laid it out like a city but on a very low budget.  There were signs for familiar businesses slightly modified – a “7″ shop stocked with dozens of empty plastic bottles, a “McDonnas,” various food stands, some movie posters, a Shelf petrol station, and so on.  It was cute.  I really didn’t expect to get into the whole laser tag thing, running, jumping, crouching.  But people told me that once I put on the gear – helmet, vest, plastic shotgun – I became a different person, charging into rooms and blasting away.  Well, sure, I couldn’t really get hurt or killed and once you got “killed” you could be “revived” by the “doctor” pointing a remote control at your sensors.

In the afternoon, we went up to the Sai Kung Country Park area to the Po Leung Kuk Holiday Camp.  I never knew about this place – they have a huge variety of sports and recreation facilities as well as bungalows and hostels available for over night stays.  Very good for groups or families.  The place has an interesting history.

In the late 19th Century, abduction and trafficking of women and children were serious crimes in Hong Kong. On 8th November, 1878, a group of local Chinese presented a petition to the Governor, Sir John Pope Hennessy, K.C.M.G., to set up Po Leung Kuk to rescue the kidnapped victims. The “Society for the Protection of Women and Children” was approved by the Hong Kong Governor in May, 1880, but as the petition was submitted on 8th November, 1878, that date was adopted as our founding date.

We were there, apparently, because we could rent  a large air conditioned room cheap.  We had video game competitions  (my suggestion, actually, since we are primarily a video game company) and some presentations.  They broke out the beer and wine around 3 PM.

We cleared out of there at 6 PM for dinner at Chuen Kee in Sai Kung.  Again, since I was driving, I got there way before the buses did.  So I’m sitting there outside the restaurant and I notice these two women posing for photos.  One is blonde, pretty, almost completely flat-chested and wearing a black dress open in front almost to her navel.  The other was even prettier, dark complexion, green bikini top and long white skirt, very very fit.  They’re attracting a fair bit of attention, asking passers-by to take their pictures with their iPhones.  And then one of them walks over to me, the one in the green bikini top.  ”Excuse me,” she says (British accent), “you probably weren’t looking but I’m wondering if you’ve seen where the people we were here with went?”  ”Oh, I was looking,” I replied, “but I only just got here.”  ”You’re sweet,” she said, running her hand up and down my arm, making my arm hairs tingle, before she smiled and walked away.   Her friends showed up and so did the company buses.

(Okay, maybe the above is a trivial aside, but my gf has been in the Philippines for two weeks visiting her family and doesn’t get back here till Monday, so it was nice.)  Anyway, it was a beautiful day in Sai Kung yesterday.

Some quick shots of the seafood on display.  I’ll take all of these, please.

I was told these are called bear crabs, because of their resemblance to a bear paw.  I don’t recall ever seeing these before, wonder how they taste?

Okay, this is just weird, these things are stuck into plastic drink bottles when they’re tiny and then grow in the bottles.  I assume there’s some point to this.

Given my company’s budget issues, I wasn’t expecting anywhere near as nice a dinner as we had.  Some people were joking that maybe all we could get would be roast chicken, fried rice and a sea view.  But it was a nice Sai Kung seafood banquet menu – steamed prawns, scallops with garlic and glass noodles, lobster in cheese sauce with more noodles (I know, I know, but local people seem to go for that cheese sauce), a really nicely done steamed garoupa, roast chicken, fried squid … actually I lost track because I was pretty full by the time we polished off the garoupa and stopped paying attention, going around the room and taking table photos.   Our CEO brought along several cases of wine and of course there was a lot of beer and several drinking games along with some final presentations and awards.

By 9 PM, everyone was exhausted and most people were drunk – sadly not me since I had the car.  I was expecting to do my drinking back home – I’d invited several people to come up after the dinner but by then, everyone was just beat, myself included, and I was glad when we decided to postpone for another time.

Anyway, as I said, the day was much much better than I’d expected and you might want to check out X-Game Square or Po Leung Kok.