Last night I was up until 4 AM working and that meant that I woke up a tad late this morning.  So I quickly get dressed and run out of the house, stopping to give my gf a kiss and tell her I had to go to Causeway Bay.  So OF COURSE this afternoon she’s not talking to me because I didn’t tell her further in advance that I had a lunch meeting, I didn’t tell her who it was with or the purpose, I didn’t give her enough advance notice so that she could get dressed and get a ride to the MTR and probably a host of other sins that I unwittingly committed.   Hey, we’ve been living together now for 19 months and if by now she doesn’t know that I’m pretty damned far from perfect but that when I do stuff she doesn’t like, it’s not on purpose and not aimed at her, when will she realize it?  (And hey, it ain’t like she’s perfect either, even if on the overall scale she’s a far better person than I am.)   And then she wanted to sort it out by SMS, which I won’t do, thank you very much.

Anyway, my lunchtime meeting was with the guy assigned to me by the outplacement service that my former company is paying for.  And that’s okay because he’s a genuinely nice and smart guy and while he can’t seem to help me much on the job front, I enjoy talking with him a lot.  Today I met him at his office to give him a crash course in LinkedIn and a bit of Facebook and Twitter and blogging and a review of his web site.  Not that I’m the world’s greatest expert on this stuff but I guess I know a little about a lot of different things.  In return, he took me to lunch – we went to Sorabol, my favorite Korean restaurant in town and a place I haven’t been to in more than a year.  Did you know they do $55 set lunches?  Or for $88 you can get a barbecue set that comes complete with all the usual side dishes and your choice of other sides including bibimbap (did I spell that right?) or soup.  And they still serve some damned tasty food there.

Then a few other errands and a bit of shopping and then finally back home.  Finish off this post and zombie out with some TV for a little while.  But first, a few bits ‘n pieces from the past couple of days.

Roast Pork Sliced From a Rusty Cleaver (what a great blog name!) has the full list of this year’s Hong Kong Film Awards nominations.  “Bodyguards and Assassins” is now the most nominated film in HKFA history with 19 nods – probably a good thing then that I picked up the Blu-Ray yesterday.

The Hughes Brothers are talking to Warner Bros about doing two live action films based on the Akira manga.  I really enjoyed their “From Hell” and think they could actually do a decent job with this material.

How stupid are record company executives?  Very, apparently.  They’ve only just figured out that by raising their prices on iTunes, the amount of legal downloads and revenue would decrease.  Warner Bros. Records’ chief Bronfman says that, oh, maybe it wasn’t a great idea to increase prices by 30% in the midst of the worst recession in decades.  Hello!

Stephen Colbert called Sarah Palin “a fucking retard.”  But it’s satire!  See it here.

Sigh, the line-ups for summer music festivals are being announced.  Here’s just a partial list of who’ll be at this year’s Bonnaroo.

* Dave Matthews Band
* Kings of Leon
* Stevie Wonder
* Jay-Z
* Tenacious D
* Weezer
* The Flaming Lips with Stardeath and White Dwarfs perform “Dark Side of the Moon”
* The Dead Weather
* Norah Jones
* John Fogerty
* Regina Spektor
* Jimmy Cliff
* LCD Soundsystem
* Thievery Corporation
* Tori Amos
* John Prine
* The Black Keys
* Steve Martin & the Steep Canyon Rangers
* Jeff Beck
* She & Him
* Daryl Hall & Chromeo
* Kris Kristofferson
* Medeski Martin & Wood
* Tinariwen
* The Gaslight Anthem
* The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
* They Might Be Giants
* Miranda Lambert
* Calexico
* Japandroids

HK$2,000 would get you all the above goodness and more.  If you’re in Tennessee.

A quick overview of Google Buzz.

A 5 minute video of photographer/author Rick Sammon’s “top ten digital photography tips.”  Useful stuff worth remembering.

And that’s about it for now.  Big Bang Theory beckons.

I’ve been lucky enough to count Graham Earnshaw as one of my best friends for more than 15 years.  Graham is one of those people who has packed several lifetimes of adventures and experience into one and he’s still going strong.   A former Asian editor for Reuters and one of the few foreigners to be in Tiananmen Square as the tanks rolled in (you can read his account of that event here), he’s also recorded two albums and owns more businesses in Shanghai than you can shake a stick at.

Graham’s been walking across China.  Every weekend he starts out from the point that he left off the week before, and in 5 years he’s covered more than 1,500 miles, which is even more impressive if you know that he’s got a physical disability that would keep most people from venturing much further than their front door.  Of course he’s been writing and photographing as he goes along and I was privileged to review an early draft of his book in progress – at the time it was called “Walking West” (a title he’s now using for one of the songs on his next album).

So I’m thrilled to see that the good folks at Blacksmith Books will be published The Great Walk of China:  Travels on Foot from Shanghai to Tibet, at the more than reasonable price of HK$130.  (It will be released in North America at the end of the year.)    You can pre-order it now from Blacksmith here or look for it in local shops at the end of February or early March.  I know it will be well worth your time.