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.

So what’s on my mind on this foggy crappy Tuesday?

First and foremost – a US based global company looking for a regional CIO for the Asia Pacific region.  Their definition of the region includes Australia/New Zealand, Japan, India.  But they won’t consider any candidates for the job who don’t speak Mandarin or Cantonese.  How will Mandarin help in India or Australia?  How does Cantonese help in Japan – or Shanghai for that matter?

Next, I love Taschen books.  They do some of the most creative packages around and my personal collection includes two of their expensive editions:  The Stanley Kubrick Archives, a sold out limited edition that weighs in at 8-1/2 pounds; and JazzLife, a huge book filled with rare photographs (the special edition is currently selling on Amazon for US$1,500).  They’ve got a new book out on Magic, covering graphics and posters from the 1400s up through the present day – it weighs over 16 pounds!  And Amazon in the US is currently selling it for around 35% off, which makes it very tempting.

Taschen also does these insane limited editions.  Norman Mailer’s Moonfire is limited to just 12 copies, unfolds into a table and includes a genuine moon rock – for the bargain price of 68,275 pounds sterling.  I’ll take two, please.  Whoops, they’re sold out.

Along those lines, I missed the announcement of a new limited edition book last year, Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made.  10 separate books inside of a huge book-shaped box and exclusive access to an online database of 17,000 images, it was selling for US$1,000.  But it’s sold out and I see someone’s selling one on the US Amazon site for $5,000.   I actually have a personal connection to this since I worked for Robert Gaffney, the producer of the never-completed epic, for four years (which is how I came to do some work on The Shining).  I don’t suppose that any of my readers are among the 1,000 people who bought this but if you are and you want to share the login and password to that online database with me, I’d be very grateful.

Nikon product announcements yesterday.  Two new lenses.  No new replacement for the D700 yet.  Drat.  I’m figuring a D700s with the same extreme low light sensor of the D3s and video capabilities (even if not HD) would be a must-buy for me.  Oh Nikon, how long are you going to make me wait?

Finally, for now, Media Wonk analyzes Sony Pictures’ recent lay-off announcements.  Similar to my previous employer, following a record year they are letting go of hundreds of loyal staff.  The excuse is a predicted downturn in future home video sales due to forces “outside of their control.”  The Wonk makes the point that most of these forces were not outside of their control but arose due to bad strategic decisions.  The people who made those bad decisions all retained their jobs while those who executed the crappy strategies lost theirs.   Who ever said that life was supposed to be fair?

It’s just started raining again.  It’s also pretty dark out for 2 in the afternoon and it may be 18 degrees but I’m feeling cold.  Maybe it’s just the letdown after a fabulous week in Macau but right now I feel as if I can’t be arsed to do much of anything.  Come to think of it, the only time I got out of the house this weekend was Saturday morning when I met someone over at Sunshine City (ha!) in Ma On Shan who bought one of my old camera bags.  The only “real” meal that I had was on Sunday, when my gf cooked a great lunch with some of the truly wonderful pork chops I’d picked up at Shek Kee Frozen Meat Co. in Sai Kung – she always does her sauces in an impromptu fashion and can be hard pressed to remember later what she tossed in the pan, but along with the Sauce of Unknown Origins were green beans, yellow pepper, carrots, red onion – great color and taste combination.

Among the movies we watched, there was the tremendously entertaining Zombieland.  Yeah, if you’ve got a weak stomach for gory special effects, it does get a little gruesome in the first half hour, but overall it’s a nice take on an overworked genre.  Maybe I’m telling you too much here but Bill Murray’s in it and his appearance is more than worth the price of admission (or a DVD).

My gf seems to really enjoy classic Hollywood musicals – not sure she even realizes how much she digs the genre but I put on one of these and it’s practically guaranteed that she will not lose interest or fall asleep.  Yesterday afternoon we watched The Music Man.  On some levels it’s incredibly hokey and creaky and plays out like a much older film.  But there are still a lot of joys to be found in this film, from the amazing costume design to an expert supporting cast that includes Buddy Hackett, Paul Ford, Hermione Gingold and dozens of other faces you will at least recognize even if you don’t know the names.  And of course there’s Robert Preston.  (And Shirley Jones, too, I suppose.)  And little Ron Howard with hair and a fake lisp.  Most of all, Meredith Wilson’s melodies are insanely catchy and his lyrics are kind of clever at times.  Let’s not forget that even the Beatles covered a song from this film.

The rest of my time this weekend was spent “in” Lightroom and, as previously noted, I’ve uploaded new galleries to Flickr, one for last Friday’s Fallen Angel shoot at PASM and one from our Macau trip.  There will be more to come.  Looking back at photos from 6 to 9 months ago, I’m struck by how much I’ve learned in the past few months – both in terms of shooting and also in using Lightroom, though a big part of the improvement also comes from spending the bucks on the Nikon 24-70mm f2.8 lens, expensive as hell but well worth the money.  I’m so in love with the results that it gives me that I find that I have no desire to go out with my Panasonic GF-1 anymore and I’m thinking about selling it off.  If and when I do get another job, one of the first things I plan to do to celebrate is to get the Nikon 70-200mm f2.8 VRII lens, a huge and expensive beast.

Speaking of getting a job, with Chinese New Year just a week away, things have hit the doldrums.  I’m sending out CVs, making follow-up phone calls (perhaps not as many as I should) and while I’ve managed to generate some interest, I don’t think I’m being egotistical when I say that I don’t think I’m getting the level of interest or the quality of offers that I believe I deserve.   It could be that the kind of job I’m looking for doesn’t exist in Hong Kong at the moment – or it doesn’t exist for someone my age or for someone who is not multi-lingual.

If you take a look at my profile on LinkedIn, you’ll see that I’ve received recommendations from the co-inventor of the DVD as well as an SVP, an EVP, a VP, a Managing Director and 3 Directors and some of my former staff from my previous job.   I think that stands as darned good evidence of my skills and accomplishments.  So excuse me if I’m feeling a little frustrated at the moment.

Sorry, don’t mean to whine.  Probably need to drag myself out of the house tonight and have a couple of drinks somewhere.

TweetDeck, the client I use for Twitter, has a special version that they call JobDeck which builds on top of a site called Twit Job Search.  All this really does is skin TweetDeck and add in two columns, one for Twit Job Search and one is tweets from “Job Search Experts.”  I’ve gotten a lot of good links this way – no leads for actual jobs but lots of good information on job hunting, resumes, interviews and of course utilizing social networking sites in your job search.

Here’s a few things I found today.

Fortune’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For 2010.  If you’re going to directly target companies rather than relying purely on recruiters, why not target the best places?  Checking out the web sites for 100 companies, seeing which ones have decent presence in the region, seeing if any have any currently open positions that are a fit, sending them tailored resumes and cover letters – yes it takes time but hopefully could lead to an interview or two.

Another category is scams that appear on the job search boards, even the legitimate ones like Monster.  I can tell you from first hand experience that my resumes on these boards generates a lot of junk responses – especially from JobsDB, where I get about a dozen offers to train to become a financial investment manager each time I update my CV there; and from Monster, where I get those “too good to be true” offers that undoubtedly originate in Nigeria. Here’s a good summary of the various kinds of scams a job seeker may encounter.  It makes sense from the criminal perspective – people who are desperate for work may more easily fall prey to some of these.

Aside from those unscrupulous companies that advertise fictitious jobs in order to build up their resume database, there is another class of job listing that I didn’t know about, again jobs that most often are advertised as “Financial Manager” or “work from home” and that are actually fronts for money laundering organizations!  Two web sites that focus in on jobs, What Would Dad Say and Diggings have more details on this “money mule” scam.

Diggings also has a link to a good post on Ask The Headhunter regarding job sites that charge the job seeker to post his or her resume on their site or to search their listings, in this case a site called The Ladders that charges you US$180 to search listings of jobs paying over US$100k – you pay the money, search the listings and only then find that a significant number of the posted jobs pay far less than that or that the advertised job doesn’t even exist!

So people, if you’re in my current position or unfortunate enough to find yourself here in the future, beware.  Job searches on the web are every bit as scam-prone as everything else.