Gmail went down late last night. TechCrunch reports that Google took down some request servers for maintenance and the remaining servers couldn’t handle the load, killing web access for an unspecified amount of time. IMAP and POP access still worked, which is why I was able to get email via my iPhone during the outage.

People crying and tearing their hair out over the outage turned to Twitter. TechCrunch reports that within minutes of Gmail going down, there were more than 20,000 tweets on Twitter on this topic.

In other news, Ebay has sold Skype for $2.75 billion to a group of private equity investors that includes Marc Andreessen. No one could figure out why Meg Whitman bought Skype in the first place. I guess she did it because she could.

Oracle’s acquisition of Sun has been approved in the US. They’re still waiting to hear from the EU before the deal is completed. Poor Sun. Once the king of the hill, with servers everyone loved, a nice version of UNIX and of course Java. But they were never diversified in the way that most of their competition (HP, IBM) was and a tight economy, high prices and lack of new ideas led to their downfall.

Snow Leopard STILL hasn’t made it to Hong Kong. Apple HK store says “estimated ship 3-5 business days.” And my source says he still hasn’t received it.

S.P. Li has a letter today in the SCMP that makes some sense. He says that it is not the role of commercial television broadcasters to do anything more than make money and that if we want educational and informative programming, we need to establish a public, non-profit television station, just as many other cities and countries around the world have done.

The ending of his letter is a little bizarre. He’s decided that if one takes the revenue that the broadcast stations earn from advertising and divide it by the number of households in Hong Kong, then we are each somehow paying HK$200 per month for TVB and ATV. I don’t follow this logic, as I’m not out of pocket on this and somehow I don’t believe that if there was no TVB, that the advertisers would have otherwise joined up and sent me a check for $200 each month. In reality, it’s probably the reverse – unless our tax money was funding these stations, then they are income generators for the people of HK because the corporations and the employees are presumably paying taxes on their income.

One might claim that there is a cost in terms of time. If my employer pays me X per hour and in the course of a day I watch the equivalent of an hour’s worth of commercials, then that’s the virtual cost to me. Except most people run to the toilet or the kitchen when the ads come on. And I never watch TVB or ATV, can’t even receive them in my home, so I never see their commercials.

There’s a story in the SCMP today about a former jockey and current horse trainer who was accused of rape and acquitted yesterday. Guy went to a bar, met a woman, they got drunk together, got in her van, drove somewhere and then at that point depending on who you believe, either he raped her or they had consensual sex. The court decided it was consensual. But the judge in the case, one Pang Chung-ping, said that the accused’s testimony left him with a “feeling of disgust.” The judge said that by going to bars looking for women to have sex with, he was a “midnight hunter.” Soon to come …. a Wong Jing movie with that title, 27 bloggers and 316 Tweeters using that handle.

Oh, all these hospital foul-ups? Woman’s breast removed? Babies switched or given the wrong medication? The SCMP reports that “the two patient-safety audits these hospitals had conducted since last year had found the three biggest risks to safety were medication errors, missing labels on patients’ specimens and falls by patients, particularly elderly patients. ” What’s the cause? Fung Hong, chief executive of hospitals in the New Territories, says the main reason is a lack of team spirit. That’s the best he can come up with? As the chief executive, it has nothing to do with him, the problem is his staff all have a crappy attitude? Way to inspire, Mr. Fung!

Hongkie Town
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