Gorillaz is coming to HK December 3rd at AsiaWorld, tickets went on sale today.  You can get them online here.   “In addition to Damon Albarn, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon, the Gorillaz live band also includes Mike Smith, Cass Browne, Jeff Wootton and Gabriel Manuals Wallace, as well as additional backing singers, brass sections, a full string ensemble and special guests. Artists that have performed in previous shows included among others the likes of De La Soul, Bobby Womack, Booty Brown, Mos Def and UK Hip Hop stars Kano and Bashy.”   I don’t think we can expect to see any of those guests appearing onstage here, but if the band really does include Jones and Simonon, that will be thrill enough for me.  The one and only time I saw the Clash live was at Bonds in NYC – almost 30 freaking years ago, holy crap.  And I never got to see Blur live in concert.

Not much else going on.  My search for restaurants in Kennedy Town continues, today’s lunch was at the oddly named Thalassic Thai Restaurant.  A set lunch of grilled pork neck, rice, vegetable soup and an iced lemon tea set me back HK$38 and was quite tasty.  And a lot of the dishes I saw on other tables also looked quite reasonable – I will return.

Dinner tonight was my first time at a Wanchai spot that’s been around forever – 3.6.9. Restaurant.   You may recall that I used to like Tai Ji back when they first opened but their quality went downhill after awhile and now they’re gone.  After swapping out a camera battery at the Wanchai Computer Centre, walked over to this place which was quite full at 7:30 PM.  My friend and I got a tiny little table in the back which left me literally leaning against the air conditioner.  We had chicken, pork belly with mushroom & bamboo, choi sum with “chicken oil” and of course xiao long bao.   I don’t remember the name of the chicken dish but it was quite nice.  The pork could have used a bit more sauce and a bit thicker but was okay.  The xiao long bao wasn’t very “soupy” inside but it was tasty.  $280 for these four dishes plus two cokes – not the best Shanghai food I’ve ever had but not bad and I think I’ll return there as well.  (Update – now that I’m thinking about it, my jaw kind of has that feeling that I get after eating something with MSG.  But I don’t know for certain.)

Also, regarding 3.6.9. – I wanted some Shanghai style pork belly.  The guy standing at the door to lure in customers brought out an English menu.  I asked if they had pork belly.  He said, “Of course!”  And then he flipped through the menu, couldn’t find it and said, “Oh, it’s not on our English menu, just ask for it.”  Which we did.  And it left me wondering what else they have that’s not on the English menu (which was actually quite extensive already.)  On the plus side, I see that one of the reviews on Open Rice notes that they stay open till 4 AM.

Last and maybe least  - for those of you who’ve mentioned to me that you’re not getting email notifications on new comments in threads you’ve subscribed to, the guy who takes care of my server says he’s finally tracked down the issue.  Expect a fix to be in place by this weekend.

Today is a day that I’m grateful that there’s a 7-11 on almost every street, that they sell umbrellas really cheap and that (I think) they don’t jack up the price on them when it rains.

I suppose that the total lack of comments on the previous two posts (despite a relatively normal number of page loads) is your way of letting me know what you think of the new “user must be registered and logged in to comment” policy.  So okay, back to “anyone can comment.”  But a warning that some bogus comments may slip through and please be careful about clicking on links in comments.

I’m home from Manila, btw.  Lots to do before I start the new job on Monday …

Okay, I didn’t want to go this route if it could be avoided but at least for the time being, anyone who wants to leave a comment will need to register and login.

The reason is simple:  the spammers are getting more clever.  Some days I get zero spam comments, some days I get more than a hundred.  Up till now, it’s been easy to figure out what’s spam because those comments generally fall into one or more of several categories:  links to crap that are probably masking viruses, Russian (and other non-western) alphabet, things that have nothing to do with the post that the comment appears under, blatant advertising.

But now I’m getting multiple comments that look reasonable.  They have a reasonable looking email address, reasonable looking web site URL and are relevant responses to posts.   But many of them are cut-and-paste jobs from previously approved comments.But click on those URLs and they lead to weird pages, like a blog but with no content.  I don’t know if these sites have viruses or not (I think I’m safe because I’m running Chrome and anti-virus software) but I can’t figure out any other purpose for them.

The end result though is that I can’t tell a valid comment from a spam one unless it’s coming from a source I recognize.   So I’m going to do this for now and see what happens.

If you feel strongly against this and don’t want to register to leave a comment here, I hope you’ll take the time to send me an email at hongkietown at gmail dot com and tell me why.

Checking my stats for the past 30 days, 41% of my traffic comes from referring sites.  I see that the number one referrer is actually people going to my old blogger site and getting redirected here.  Number 3 is people coming from Twitter and number five is networkedblogs.com, which I assume means people coming from Facebook.  Google is number 8 and people who misspell the blog name as “Honkie Town” is number 9 (fortunately I registered that domain, too).

My other top ten referrers?

• Gweipo
• Big Lychee
• Ulaca
• Joyceyland
• Fumier

Thanks guys and gals, really appreciate your support!

First, my apologies for not blogging as much as usual for the past few days.  This is likely to continue for a bit – almost all of my time and energy are focused on something else now and hopefully within a week or two I can share that with you, but not yet.

Also, those who tried to access here in the past hour or so may have been redirected to a screen saying that the site is unavailable. Everything should be back to normal now.   My apologies!

For those who care about this sort of thing, read on for the nerdy details.

This is the second time this has happened and as near as I can figure it, the culprit was a bit of base64 code sitting in my theme footer which added in an ad for a spam site. (That’s the “price” of using a free WordPress theme from a third party rather than trying to create my own from scratch.)

Although I used to be a programmer, I haven’t written any code aside from tiny bits of simple html in almost 15 years.  I thought the task of taking out that errant code would be a nightmare and that’s why I kept putting it off.   As it turns out, it took all of 2 minutes.  “Google is your friend” indeed – I found this free online base64 decoder and encoder which made it a snap for me to edit the file.  (The previous time I just deleted all of the code in there and it wreaked havoc with the site till I restored it.)   I have of course saved the old code in both coded and decoded forms in case I need to revert for some unforeseen reason.

It is possible that’s not the reason for this unwanted redirect.  While pretty much everything else I use to create the site and the blog is bog-standard, there’s always the chance that some link in some long-buried blog post points at some domain that expired and got taken over by a spammer (or worse).  I’ve got a friend whose web site keeps running into trouble over links that are in spam comments that were not approved but not trashed either, and I’m running at between 50 and 100 spam comments per day, so it can often be quite some time until I have a chance to go through them – which I always do, in case Akismet made an error in filtering out the spam (which it rarely does).

If you spot anything that seems unusually odd or wrong (I know lots of stuff here might seem odd or wrong, depending on who’s looking at it), please bring it to my attention.

I’ve redone the Photography page here.  It now leads to four separate sub-pages of photo galleries organized by general subject.  There are now separate pages for Hong Kong, Musicians, Food & Travel and Models.  Please check back on a regular basis as I plan to be adding more photos on a regular basis.  (There are 27 new shots of Icebox live at Amazonia added just this morning.)  The pages load very fast, just thumbnails with the Lightbox plugin so that you can see larger versions of any/all photos without leaving the page.  I hope you enjoy!

Gonna crawl back into bed and see if I can get some sleep soon.

Just wanted to note that it seems like everyone’s back in town from their holidays.  Monday was my #1 day for both unique visits and page loads since moving to this domain in November.  Thanks!

Just a few notes/reminders:

Please click on the Google AdSense ads once in awhile to show your support for this otherwise-out-0f-work blogger.

Also note that some of the DVDs, CDs and other stuff I mention here are accompanied by links to Amazon and if it’s something you think you might want to buy from Amazon, then please do so by clicking on the link here.  It doesn’t cost you any extra but puts a few pennies in my pocket.  If you click on an Amazon link here and then don’t buy that product but do buy something else, I still get a referral fee.  There’s a couple of Amazon widgets on the right hand side – one’s a “deal of the day” and the other is some product suggestion based on the content of the blog – take a look.

Also a reminder that if you want to view the site on your mobile phone, I’ve got a special mobile theme installed.  It loads really fast.  You don’t need to do anything, just go to the web site via your phone’s browser and the mobile theme will load by default.

Also a reminder that if you link to me on your site, I’ll not only reciprocate with a link here but will also display a banner or badge along with that link – just email the graphic or link to me and I’ll post it here.

Last for now – yes, I’m not doing much in terms of updates to the Spike HK facebook page.  However, I am very active on Twitter and you can follow me here.  Aside from the usual Twitter nonsense, I do post some quick links to stuff I’ve found of interest, links that don’t always make it to these pages.

I think I finally fell asleep around 9 this morning, woke up around 2 PM.  Sitting around, doing a little bit of this and that, my mind is a little on the dull side today.  I was going to go to Mong Kok and back to Sim City for some stuff but just couldn’t be arsed to get dressed and drag myself out of the house.  Dinner home tonight, a movie or two, get some more work done.  Exciting stuff, eh?

I was talking with someone last night and he said that the contrast seems off in my studio shots and asked about my monitor calibration, suggesting I might want to try the hardware route instead of doing it by eye.  Here’s a web site that provides a very nice online calibration tool.  Here and here are two looks at hardware calibration tools.  So, yeah, maybe get out to Mong Kok and find out what’s available in Hong Kong and for how much.  I also told my friend that I had the picture control set to Vivid on the D300 and he said he thinks that works well for landscapes but not for skin tones.  Well, it’s a never ending process, isn’t it, learning this stuff and then internalizing it so it becomes second nature.

Anyway, here are two very different shots taken with my new 24-70mm lens.  Neither is anything special as a photograph, just testing out the lens.

This first, taken on a cloudy day, my neighbor’s yard and his dog.  The point of this?  By all means, click to view the full size photo and feel free to zoom in – the bricks, the steps, the flower bushes.  To my old and tired eyes, this lens appears really sharp.  (70mm, ISO 200, f/5.0, 1/100 sec – and I know it would probably be sharper still if I backed off a bit from 70mm and and went with f/8 or f/11, right?  But still I’m really happy with this.)  Actually, the full sized shot on my computer is 4288×2848 and looks amazing for what it is, but a “full sized JPG” file is 12 meg, so I’ve just uploaded this hence the reduced shot here at only 1024×688 – hopefully the detail comes across.

Something a little different, a place many of you know, same lens, handheld, 38mm, ISO 800, f/5.0, 1/160th of a second:

Probably could have reduced some of the noise a bit by shooting at ISO 400 – actually I did shoot a few at that speed, but not from this angle.  But again, zoom in on this, you can see the details on the metal struts holding the sign together.  Think I wanna go back with a tripod and shoot a longer exposure at 200 ISO and compare the results.

Both shots from RAW, tweaked slightly in Lightroom (hey, I like saturated colors).

Hongkietown.com has been live for just over a month, but I didn’t get Google Analytics going until December 1st.  Reviewing my month end report, the results are surprising and gratifying.

Special note to other Hong Kong bloggers:  please read down to the end of this post for a special message.

Special note to potential advertisers:  please read down to the end of this post for a special message.

Last year I wrote a total of 681 blog posts.  This is not a group blog, there are no “substitute Spikes,” this is all the work of one person (who, admittedly, has a lot of time on his hands these days.)

In December, 2009:

Just under 35,000 page views

Over 10,000 unique visits by 2,400 visitors from 55 countries.

• 51.3% from Hong Kong
• 21.2% from the USA
• 6% from the UK
• 1.5% from China

An average of 3.36 page views per visit.

54.75% coming here directly, 39% coming here from links on other sites, the rest coming from search engines.  (84.64% of those coming via a search engine came from Google.)

39% using IE, 34% using Firefox.

This was the most popular individual post in the past month.  The Links page remains extremely popular – which is why I’m working on expanding my links listings.

Note to other bloggers:  I know that you’re a huge reason for the good numbers above.  I sincerely appreciate everyone who links to me and especially those who updated their links to my new domain.  You may have noticed that on my HK Links page, I have separated those links into three different groups, the first being those who have linked to me.

I’d like to further highlight your site.  So if you do link to me and you have a small logo or banner for your blog, I’ll display it along with your listing on this page.  Just send it to me at hongkietown at gmail dot com.

If you link to me and I don’t have you including in my links, first of all I’m sorry!  Second, please send me an email or leave a comment here and I’ll take care of it ASAP.

Note to potential advertisers:  As the saying goes, if you’re here, the chances are good that your customers are here as well.  If you’d like to show support for this blog by placing an ad, please send me an email at hongkietown at gmail dot com and let’s discuss it!

And to everyone else, thank you for your support, your comments, your constructive criticisms and brickbats.  It’s really important to me.

Sitting around, crappy weather, not in the mood for much.  Added Google AdSense to the blog on the right, as you can see.  Finally got the formatting sorted out.  Also added a couple of Amazon widgets, bottom right.  And text ads only to the RSS feed.

No, I don’t think I’m going to be able to earn a living from the blog.   But if you do enjoy it here, I hope you recognize that keeping this going requires a lot of my time and I hope you’ll accept the blatant commercialization.  The ads don’t take up much bandwidth and if you don’t like ‘em, don’t click on ‘em.  But if you do want to show some measure of support, please do click on this stuff from time to time.  (I’ve earned US$1.18 from people clicking on Amazon Associates links embedded within posts in the past month.  It may seem small but it’s a chocolate bar or an ice cream cone.  Thanks for the treat!)

Guess I’m just an old hippie at heart, apologizing for doing the same thing everyone else does?