Monthly Archives: May 2010

Un-News

The SCMP today has what promises to be a lurid tale, one that few could resist reading. ”Free drinks, young models a volatile mix at nightclub.” Club being singular there. And you’ve probably already guessed that the club in question is Dragon-i. But my question is, where is the story here? Ostensibly a report on under-age models drinking alcohol in this club, we are offered no examples or proof and denials (duh) from the club manager and the police.

So where’s the spice? Ah-hah!

Glamorous though it sounds to get free alcohol in a trendy nightclub, Maria, 20, from Estonia told a cautionary tale.

Ooooh! A “cautionary tale?” Tell me more!

A few weeks before a guy bought her a bottle of champagne in Dragon-i and she gladly accepted it. The models get free drinks but also get it bought for them – a bottle of champagne is normally the libation of choice.

However the customer started getting a little too friendly for Maria’s liking. She had experienced this kind of thing before and just finished her glass of champagne, thanked the guy in question and moved away.

Wow! I’m flushed with excitement now. You mean to tell me that some guy actually spent a grand or two on a bottle of champagne for some presumably hot girl he just met? And then he propositioned her? And she turned him down? And walked away? Be still my beating heart.

Actually, the whole thing reads to me as if writer John Carney wanted to hang out with some of the supposedly beautiful people that flock to this joint on a nightly basis. He couldn’t get in for free, flashed his press card, paid $150 to enter, bought a few over-priced drinks and then found some way to get reimbursed by his employer.

Far more news-worthy and frightening is this tale, also in today’s paper:

Two big pieces of art inspired by the Tiananmen crackdown were hastily thrown up in the Times Square piazza yesterday, prompting dozens of police to haul them and the organisers away after a hygiene official labelled the exhibition unlicensed “entertainment”.

Organisers linked hands at one point to stop officers from getting at the artworks, one a replica of the “Goddess of Democracy” statue built by students during the mainland democracy movement in 1989, and the second, a six-metre long relief titled Tiananmen Massacre. Police scuffled with the group, members of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China, and arrested 13 of them, including lawmaker Lee Cheuk-yan, before quickly taking down the installation.

The alliance says it was exercising freedom of speech in a public space, but the department viewed the activity as amounting to entertainment, which requires a permit. The Food and Environmental Hygiene Department rarely steps in to prosecute organisers of events at the piazza: yesterday was the first time in the past six months. It is a public use space, open to non-commercial activities and overseen by the mall management, Wharf (Holdings).

As soon as the statue was erected, an officer from the department told the group it did not a have a license for the exhibition and was in violation of the Places of Public Entertainment Ordinance. Police condoned off the area with crime-scene tape then replaced it with metal railings. The conflict escalated when Lee challenged the police’s decision to take the sculptures away. Members of the alliance stood hand-in-hand, blocking officers’ access to the art pieces.

Secretary for Food and Health York Chow Yat-ngok rejected claims the prosecution was political in nature. Officers from the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department were following existing rules, York said.

The Food and Environmental Hygiene Department? Really? This is the arm that the government chose to stifle a political protest? Freedom in Hong Kong isn’t getting just a quick bullet in the heart, it’s more like death from a thousand tiny wounds.

Cyberport Food Recommendations?

So, four weeks at work completed. One of my issues is lunch. I find it incredibly revealing (and sad) that when you go to Open Rice and select all restaurants in Pok Fu Lam, the resulting list (in order of reviews) puts Starbucks at number 1. Here’s where I’ve eaten so far:

1 – Take-away sandwiches and salads from Park & Shop International. About as average as you would expect but serviceable.

2 – Oh Sushi and Tappas. They can’t spell “tapas” correctly? Had lunch there once. Set lunch, bowl of ramen and three pieces of California roll and a tiny wilted salad for 70 bucks.

3 – Bar Umami – At the Le Meridien Hotel. Not bad but too expensive, even with the 30% HSBC Visa discount.

4 – Prompt – the western restaurant at Le Meridien. $78 set lunches, none of which are appealing to me. 50% discount on the $256 buffet lunch which, as buffet lunches go, was average. (One of the 3 English language reviews on Open Rice describes the place as “vile.” Another review says “everything in the restaurant sucks.”)

5 – Splendid Kitchens – the weird food court, all seemingly run by one company. The choices here range from noodles to Japanese curry to roasted meats, the prices run from $30-$45 and the quality runs from serviceable to abysmal.

There are about one or two dozen other places in the Cyberport Arcade, not one of which look very inviting to me. La Dynastie Restaurant, as odd a name as I’ve encountered for a Chinese restaurant, seems to have received some decent reviews but how many times per month am I gonna have dim sum for lunch? And do I really want to go to a fake Thai/Vietnamese joint called “Wine O’Clock”? And as far as I can tell, there is no place anywhere in Cyberport (with the possible exception of Prompt) where one can get a cheeseburger.

Maybe I need to try going over to Chi Fu Plaza where they at least have Cafe De Coral, which I assure you would be a step up from what I’ve had so far.

Or go to Aberdeen?

Any recommendations? Any ray of light on the food scene there?

Saturday Blahs

Okay, the weekend is the time when the least number of people are reading blogs, but this is when I have time to post ….

Just a couple of random notes from Saturday.

The first is that I went over to the Wanchai Computer Centre for a few odds and ends. One thing I needed was another USB hub, one with as many ports as possible. I spotted a 10 port hub in one shop, Japanese writing on the back of the package, and this shop was selling it for HK$280. I thought it would do but then decided to look in a few other shops as well. The next shop I went into had the exact same thing for HK$98. Seriously. Caveat emptor and all that.

I was also looking for yet another bag. I’d like a new day bag for when I’m working, something that will hold my iPad, two pairs of glasses in their cases, my Canon S90 camera, my pocket WiFi, ear buds, a Moleskine pad and some pens, keys, etc. Didn’t see anything suitable at the various shops selling cases at the computer center. A Crumpler bag came close but they didn’t have it in any color that I liked and actually I don’t like the fact that Crumpler bags are just one huge pocket; I like lots of dividers and spaces. I like the look of this one from Timbuktu.

Anyone know any shops in HK that sell Timbuktu bags? According to their web site, the only shop is on Cheung Chau and I’m sure that’s not right.

Dinner. Hmmm … I was with a group of friends at Doghouse but I’d already eaten there twice this week. Been to Sabah and Thai Farmer too many times lately. And the rain was pouring down so I didn’t want to go too far. Thought about Amici so we went up there but the joint was packed and noisy with people watching some sports. So I was ready to head upstairs to Flying Pan – haven’t been there in years and thought pancakes could be a good choice. But it was 9 PM and my gf got cross – “You haven’t eaten all day, you need real food, pancakes aren’t real food.” This was further complicated by the fact that my gf had already eaten so I couldn’t go somewhere for Indian or Chinese (can’t order so many dishes if just one person’s eating) and Uno Mas is outside of my budget at the moment. There’s that new Jack’s Terazzo joint above Typhoon but I haven’t heard anything at all about it yet.

So at a total loss at this point, we went over to Outback. The horror! The horror! $198 for a ribeye steak that was not only undercooked but completely devoid of taste. The portion of garlic mashed potatoes was clearly done via an ice cream scoop – a small ice cream scoop – and completely dried out. The Caesar salad was vaguely acceptable if you don’t know what a Caesar salad should taste like. The wait staff never brought bread. The only good food on the plate was the “chef’s veggies,” a decent selection and not cooked to death.

Part way through the meal, a couple of friends came in and we invited them to join us. The guy (British) went for fish and chips and everything about the dish looked wrong to me. I asked him if it was any good and he hesitated and said, “Well, um, uh, it’s okay,” clearly trying to make the best of what he also realized was a bad situation.

Just crappy, sad, unpleasant food top to bottom and the thing is, at 9 PM, this place was full! What do people actually like about this place?

Well, today is Sunday. A quiet day at home. And hopefully something better for dinner tonight than what I had last night.

Dennis Hopper, R.I.P., Sigh

Dennis Hopper never won an Oscar but to my mind he was one of the great actors of the past 50 years and had a career that consisted of repeated highs (pardon the pun), repeated falls from grace and amazing comebacks.

Starting on TV in 1954, the year I was born, a year later he was in Rebel Without a Cause and a year after that in Giant. From ’54 to ’68, according to IMDB, he made more than 60 appearances in films & TV series. He was in lots of westerns, many of them good, though he was rarely essential to those films’ success – Gunfight at the OK Corral, From Hell to Texas, Hang Em High; and on TV he showed up on The Rifleman, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, even Petticoat Junction. He wasn’t really famous but he was working constantly.

His breakout came, of course, in 1969 in Easy Rider, as co-star, co-writer and director. Two years later, he self-destructed, directing what seemed to be the appropriately titled The Last Movie. In 1979 he resurfaced in Apocalypse Now but, if tales are to be believed, he was impossible to work with thanks to his various addictions.

Another comeback in 1986 in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet where he played one of the few genuinely scary screen villains. After that, it’s said that he never said no to a role and IMDB shows him making more than 100 film & TV appearances since then. Nominated for an Oscar in ’87 for Hoosiers. Directing Colors, an under-rated L.A. cop drama starring Sean Penn and Robert Duvall. The bad guy in box office smash Speed in 1994.

But for me, after Easy Rider and Blue Velvet, my favorite Dennis Hopper appearance, the one that I can watch over and over and over again, was his role as Clifford Worley in True Romance – something Quentin Tarantino wrote before Reservoir Dogs and then directed by Tony Scott, who pumped things up to 11. Hopper’s not the bad guy here, he’s one of the good guys. He’s a former cop, a security guard, a recovering alcoholic living in a trailer on the edge of town. And he has a scene with Christopher Walken, some of Tarantino’s best writing to date, and he steals the scene from Walken and makes it look easy.

He’d been ill from prostate cancer for some time and his death didn’t come as a surprise. Even so, when I saw the news this morning, I said to myself, “aw gee.” For me, what makes him great is that he was one of the few actors who elevated almost everything he was in. In the past ten years he was in some good stuff, he was in a lot of crap, but whenever I’d come across him on screen, he was always worth watching.

Some photos I’ve stolen from around the web:

Two Signs You Won’t See in Wanchai

This one from here.

Actually that second one might work really well in Carnegie’s.

Commercial Rents in Hong Kong

The ludicrous rents that landlords charge to commercial establishments represents a hidden tax that everyone in Hong Kong has to pay. Why does a burger and a beer (or, in my case, a Coke) cost so damn much here? At least 15% of the cost is going to pay the restaurant’s rent – and that’s apparently a significantly higher percentage than places in other “world cities.”

People complain about the prices here constantly and one big reason are these rents, which also discourage innovation in the retail and f&b sectors among others. Lord Donald “Boom Boom” Tsang and our mostly non-elected, mostly business-sector appointed legislature, has shown no inclination to upset the apple cart.

Time Out HK has an article on how this is affecting restaurants and bars in our SAR. Allora, on Staunton Street, is paying $160,000 a month in rent. Posto Pubblico on Elgin is paying $200k. And these rents are nothing compared to Lan Kwai Fong. I’m told that Hard Rock Cafe will be taking over two existing spots there for a HK re-launch and that their rent will be HK$1 million per month.

Here’s something I didn’t know – and I’m betting many of you also didn’t know:

It doesn’t help that landlords want to take a piece of a restaurant’s action as well. It is more and more common for lease agreements to take 10 per cent of gross turnover, which includes the service charge, and cash and credit card tips.

So now it’s not just rent, landlords are acting like organized crime, taking a cut of restaurant grosses – not net. And of course it’s all legal.

The article notes that “the cost of starting a new restaurant in Soho is $2 million minimum.” Minimum. I’ve got a friend who owns a bar/restaurant here and has located a space near Soho for a new place. He’s estimated he will need $5 million to launch the place.

I’ve got no particular love for Soho or Lan Kwai Fong, except insofar as they are relatively unique in the world (at least in my experience). On the one hand, I hate that many of these places are simply bland expressions of whatever some restaurant “group” thinks will be trendy for the next six months and seems to run based on design and cookbooks they bought at Page One. On the other hand, I do appreciate the convenience of having such “entertainment districts.” Lan Kwai Fong at least gets pedestrianized at night on the weekends – Allan Zeman has some weight with the government for some reason. Soho, which should also be pedestrianized, doesn’t enjoy a similar privilege – is that also a result of Zeman’s weight?

Of course, it’s still possible to dine very cheaply and well in Hong Kong. My favorite wonton noodle joint is still serving massive portions for under $20 a bowl and my favorite roast meat shop gives me massive amounts of roast pork and rice at a similar bargain price. Anyone who has lived here for awhile has a favorite place for congee or brisket or some of the other local traditional comfort foods. But if you want some variety in your life and you’re not doing it yourself at home, you’re gonna pay.

I have lunch at the food court at Cyberport on most days and you can get a ludicrous amount of food there for $30. Some of it is okay, a lot of it is crap (like the really sad “Taiwan-style noodles” with MSG-laden sweet and sour sauce with bits of pork loin that were mostly fat and gristle that I had on Friday – lesson learned).

Organizers have given up on the concept of weekend street fairs along Lockhart Road in Wanchai, even though the one or two held there years ago were very successful, thanks to non-representational district councils that are more interested in tearing down old buildings to create opportunities for the mega real estate developers rather than approving events that they think would only appeal to non-Chinese but which, if properly run, would not only appeal to everyone in town but could also be a draw for tourists from around the world. Our government only seems interested in tourists from the mainland, carrying sacks of cash to buy Rolexes and overpriced cardboard flats. Perhaps another reason we don’t get these street fairs (aside from one or two crappy ones in LKF every year) is that the landlords haven’t figured out how to make money from these yet – if Li Ka-CHING! was pocketing some change off of these, you’d bet we’d be having them every weekend.

Of course, you don’t have to launch a new place in a trendy area, you don’t have to be in Soho or Lan Kwai Fong or even Wanchai. You can go for Sheung Wan or Kennedy Town or some other place where the rents haven’t approached the Extremely Silly Level yet. But then you’d better have deep pockets for advertising and marketing because you won’t be able to depend on street traffic.

Sorry, the above is a bit meandering, but I suppose if you’ve been reading me for awhile you know I have a habit of doing that.

Bettye LaVette – You Need This Album

Finally got to listen to Bettye LaVette’s new album, Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook today. This album does not disappoint.

LaVette is a classic soul singer. She’s been recording since 1962 but has only found fame in the past few years. Most of the songs are not songs you’d expect this kind of singer to tackle and yet she really connects with the lyrics of each song and in many cases these versions are radically different from the originals. She’s bringing a life time of experience to these songs. Here are the songs she sings on the album:

The Word – The Beatles
No Time to Live – Traffic
Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood – The Animals
All My Love – Led Zeppelin
Isn’t It a Pity – George Harrison
Wish You Were Here – Pink Floyd
It Don’t Come Easy – Ringo Starr
Maybe I’m Amazed – Paul McCartney
Salt of the Earth – The Rolling Stones
Nights in White Satin – The Moody Blues
Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad – Derek & the Dominoes
Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me – Elton John
Love Reign O’er Me – The Who (bonus live track)

I mean, who would ever expect a soul singer to cover Pink Floyd? I really love her version of the Traffic song, one of my favorite Traffic songs, from their second album, and she’s finding things in this song I’ll bet even Steve Winwood & Jim Capaldi didn’t know were there. (Expect me to write more on this album in an upcoming issue of BC.)

You need to hear this.

Techie & Businessie Thoughts

Android is getting me curiouser and curiouser. I note that bizarrely named HTC Droid Incredible (google it) is getting great reviews in the US; it’s not available in HK yet. But then again, I have downloaded 247 apps for my iPhone(s) and iPad from Apple and that’s a big investment to walk away from, not to mention the fact that the next generation iPhone should be announced in the next couple of weeks and they’ll probably leapfrog Android. But I’m worried about Apple’s development cycle. It’s little wonder they’re losing ground overall to Android when they are releasing just 1 or 2 phones per year.

Though it’s not as if Apple is losing any sleep over this, what with their market cap passing Microsoft. Is this permanent or just a temporary blip? Either way, pundits are saying this represents the sunset of the Microsoft era and to some extent I agree. Microsoft is winning in precious few categories these days. Most of their market dominance in Windows and Office comes via their entrenched corporate user base – it’s just too expensive for large companies to move away from these tools without a more overwhelming reason than anyone has yet offered.

It’s clear that Bill Gates was right again – that the war for the hearts and minds of users is being fought through browsers and mobile devices now. Too bad MS couldn’t deliver – whatever users IE has are simply because the thing is built into Windows. And Windows Mobile is desperately trying to play catch-up but like Windows, it’s simply band-aids on top of band-aids, hauling those 16 tons of legacy code up the side of an infinitely high mountain.

Microsoft’s had some high level departures in the past week. But someone there must be looking at Ballmer and saying he’s not the right guy to revive the company and one of these days Ballmer will “retire” – and if not a Steve Jobs-style success at Microsoft, let’s face it, the guy will retire a billionaire, so no tears in my beer (or my Coke) for him.

At work, they’ve given me a Dell laptop running Windows 7. At home, I dual-boot Windows XP and 7 on my desktop, but I’ve just never acclimated myself to Windows 7 and I’m finding no particular love for it at work where it’s all I have. My first Dell there (a hand-me-down) died after three weeks. Data transferred to another Dell hand-me-down, I chunka-chunk along all day but I’m on the edge of asking to switch to a MacBook Pro, something I couldn’t do at my prior job but could do here. Almost everything I do at work is via Chrome and MS Office – and there’s the problem, MS Project. Which means dual-booting the Mac (which of course is not really practical) or running VMWare.

My car is now semi-fixed. A recommendation for a different repair shop in the SK area brought me to HP Cars and they have much more expertise with BMW’s than the last guy I used to bring my car to. That last guy, I’d bring the car, give him a list of 5 things, and 4 days later he’d say my car is ready and I’d ask about the 5 things and they’d only done 3. This guy – one day to check things out, give me a quote, buy the parts; one more day to do the work and all of it’s done (and the list I gave him was 10 things). This guy also told me about all of the things that the previous owner had done to mess with the car, some of which is reversible, some of which isn’t (at least not without spending a whole lot more money than I care to spend). At any rate, the car is now running not just properly but also much more comfortably, and given the fact that I’m in a serious negative equity position on it, I’m now much more content to stick with it for another year … or even two?

Couple of links to videos you might enjoy:

A run-down of all the questions that Lost asked but couldn’t be arsed to answer.

And for corporate drones like myself, a fascinating 10 minute animated presentation from Daniel Pink (author of Drive and other books) on the surprising truth on what really motivates employees. In a nutshell, it’s not more money. (But that’s if you’re already following his advice on paying your staff enough to take money off the table as an issue – meaning that you pay people a decent salary so that they don’t spend half of their work day worrying about money problems at home.) What I find in things like this presentation or in the current best-selling book Rework and even in that book I mentioned a couple of posts back (Team Leadership in the Game Industry) is that the great majority of what these people are writing (and successfully selling) is just basic logical common sense stuff; there’s no rocket science in any of this. It’s all stuff I know on at least an intrinsic level, based on my own experiences. So, to paraphrase the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz, what is it that they have that I lack? The talent or focus to collect their thoughts and get this stuff down on paper and pixels in an easily digestible format.

But following the old dictum that you hire a consultant, hand him (or her) your watch and ask him (or her) what time it is, it may very well be the case that when I say, “We should do this,” people may not pay as much attention as when I say, “Jason Fried and Dan Pink say you should do this.”

And that’s just a part of my problem. My larger problem at the moment is that the workload for everyone at my current company is so overwhelming that no one has time to do anything except act on a reactive basis. I’m trying to focus on strategic thinking but there is just such a mountain of stuff that I’m getting sucked into reactive mode as well. And that’s not good. The answer probably lies in the advice that I’ve been giving to someone else – “you better step back and start figuring out what you need the organization under you to look like and then start finding a way to implement that.” Spike, heal thyself!

Amazon + DHL = Fast

Sorry Cat Cat. But I gotta say ….. I ordered 4 books and 1 blu-ray movie from Amazon Wednesday night HK time. They arrived Friday afternoon!

Amazon has 3 levels of shipping options – super quick & freaking expensive, decent and moderately expensive, and slow cheap boat to China. They always say that “decent” takes 10-14 days but in my experience, it’s around a week. So I go with that. Thursday morning, a notification that my order has shipped. Friday mid day, my order arrives. Amazon’s price for these 5 items was about US$90 below the total list price so it was well worth it for me to pay US$40 for shipping. And get it 36 hours after I order? From the US?

Okay, maybe I’m just super tired tonight. But after my Amazon/Kindle rant the other day (which I in no way retract), today I’m impressed.

Quote of the Day

“Vision without execution is hallucination.” Thomas A. Edison

(Which I found, oddly enough, in an interview with Steve Case over on TechCrunch. I say “oddly enough” because as a former employee of “AOL TimeWarner” I have no admiration for the man at all.)