Here are some of my shots from last week’s photo shoot and party at PASM Workshop, featuring model Jun.  Enjoy!

Yes, blogging was uncharacteristically light for me during the past week.  It was an extremely frustrating week both at work and at home – not going into details, just take my word on it.

Although there was one good lunch this week at that middle eastern spot, most lunch hours were spent at Cyberport and my hatred of the food choices there and the shopping choices in that mall seems to increase on a daily basis.  Thinking back …

One day hit this place, Hang Heung or something along those lines.  I ordered a combo of prawn wontons with brisket and noodles – there were no prawns to be found in those wontons and the brisket was 98% fat and tendons.  But I did better than my friend, who I suppose hasn’t been in Hong Kong long enough to figure out that when you go into a place where everyone is eating congee or noodles or roast meats, don’t order the fucking fruit salad.

Another day, Tutto, the ersatz Italian joint which has proved to be relatively decent although a tad expensive, which is probably why the place is almost always empty at lunch time.  There were three of us and we got burgers.  We already know that the bun is about 6 times bigger than the tiny burger they give you, but this time they outdid themselves with dried out lumps of what I think was once hamburger combined with bacon that had yet to see anything resembling a flame.

And Friday, trying one of the few remaining spots I hadn’t tried up till now, Beautiful Shanghai.  Like most third rate so-called Shanghai restaurants in Hong Kong, they thing if they put xiao long bao and pork belly on the menu that they can call it Shanghai food, and most of the other choices came from all over the map.  A $48 set lunch that included the absolute worst dan dan mian I’ve ever had in my life.

And this shopping mall, filled with its useless, empty shops stuffed with merchandise that no one in their right mind could possibly want.  Just to break up the monotony one day, went into this “art” place that specializes in recreating classic paintings using crushed up bits of left-over gem stones.  Van Gogh in oil not enough for you, you want smushed up bits of colored rock instead?  Tens of thousands of dollars.  Or if you’ve got more money than brains and an ego to match, you can bring in your own photo and they’ll “gem-ify” it – and it takes six months.  From the way the woman reacted when we came in the shop, giving us a 15 minute tour, we were probably the first people there in weeks.  Then again, given the prices they charge, they probably only need 1 or 2 sales per month to stay afloat.  I’ve heard a rumor that these shops pay either $0 or close to $0 rent so that the place doesn’t look like even more of a disaster than it actually is.

And while I’m at it, what about the pitiful magazine rack at the Park & Rob, aimed at the idle rich women living next door in Smell-Aire.  I mean, it’s one of only two places to buy some magazines in the midst of what is supposed to be Hong Kong’s high tech center and they don’t stock Wired or Fast Company but you can find People and OK and every global variation on those.

When I worked in Quarry Bay for 8 years, I used to tell myself how much I missed working in Central.  Now I’d give anything to be back in Quarry Bay again, where there are dozens of reasonable lunch spots across all cuisines and budgets and some places that have some actually useful shopping.

Thanks goodness the photo shoot at PASM on Friday night was fun.

That’s just a quick sample I’ve pulled out from the batch I’ve shot, more maybe later.  The model was a very sweet and very thin young lady down from the mainland who also spoke surprisingly good English.  She also posed topless in each session (but with pieces of tape covering the relevant bits).  I posted the above picture on Facebook and someone thought it was Chrissie Chau and looking at it now, I see a slight resemblance.  I was happy to hang out with a group of friends for the evening and actually managed to relax for a few hours, even if I was driving and had to restrict my drinking to 7-Up.  Anyway, we had a good turn out and as always I’m looking forward to the next one.

Saturday became the day to catch up on shopping.  Since I was in Quarry Bay to get my iPhone, we went over to Cityplaza to grab a few things we needed.  Lunch was at Ruby Tuesday and I have no idea why I bitch and moan about food choices in Cyberport and then choose this place for lunch.   Yes, another burger, and quite expensive at over $120 for a bacon cheeseburger and fries.  They also have a “wagyu” burger at $148.   This place is seriously expensive for a franchised American joint.  A half rack of ribs here costs the same as a full rack almost anywhere else.  Their deal is that they offer a 50% discount card but you gotta buy that and the thing costs $600 for 6 months or an uncool thousand for 360 days (why not a year?).  I actually shelled out for a $52 lemonade with bits of mango in it that was so ludicrously sour that it made sinigang taste like apple pie.

This evening, Inception, as previously mentioned, at Mega Box.  Only 1 movie trailer in between the 10 minutes of ads and it was a local film, City On something or other, with bits of action but lots of really bad CGI and even worse make-up effects.  It looked like the cinematic equivalent of most of the meals I’d had during the week, in other words shit on toast – but be grateful for the toast I suppose.

After the movie, we decided to walk around Megabox before heading home.  The joint was packed.  I mean seriously packed, with long lines of cars waiting to get into the car park, long lines of people getting on and off buses, every shop busy, every restaurant busy.  It occurred to me that as much as I (and some other English-language bloggers) love to make fun of this place, local people actually like it.  And why shouldn’t they?  Movie theater, tons of cheap restaurants, ice skating rink on the 10th floor overlooking the harbor.  Even Ikea was packed tight with people and at 9 PM on a Saturday night the 7 check-out lines were each six people deep.

So Sunday’s just gonna be a day to chill out, watch a movie or two around the house, get caught up with chores, relax in preparation for a week that I am hoping will be an improvement on the previous one.

(Oh, how nice, just as I was writing the final paragraph above, WordPoop gave me a message, “you have logged out, cannot save draft!”)

Actually, I was intending to go to Shenzhen Saturday, but the friend who was gonna go with me backed out and I couldn’t find anyone else to go at such short notice.  Could have gone on my own but one of my reasons for going was to hit a couple of favorite restaurants, neither of which make sense if I was going to be there alone.

And so I stayed home and … sigh … installed the 64 bit version of Windows 7 and a couple of dozen apps.  I figured it was time.   I’d installed Win7 before and was dual-booting but I’d never gotten around to installing most of the apps I use on it.   Lightroom 3 64 bit is noticeably faster than 32 bit under WinXP – not sure if that’s a fair point of comparison or not but what the hell.

Migrating iTunes with all my settings and playlists seems to have as well as can be expected.  I’m syncing my iPad now and it’s an hour so far and not even halfway through the back-up.   And that reminds me – I’m running Open Office here instead of MS Office, except that I’m still using Outlook to manage my contacts.   I don’t want to go the bloat-ware route and install Outlook here so I need another strategy for a contact list that syncs to iPhone – any suggestions?

Win7 may be the fastest selling version of Windows ever, or whatever it is that they’re claiming, and I can see some improvements but also, one day into this, I can see a lot of the same old errors and crap that’s been carried over from older versions.  Minor annoyances such as how File Manager still shows directories on tree on the left even after that directory has been moved or deleted and even after I’ve hit the refresh button several times.  You’d think they could at least get the simple stuff right.

So I’ll leave you with a link to Wired’s list of “cerebral sci-fi films.”  Actually it’s rather disappointing – no Forbidden Planet or Fantastic Planet, let alone Silent Running or Dark City.

And another movie list by Julie Gray at Huffington Post, she says this is an evolving list from GASP (without saying what GASP is) of films you should have seen if you plan on working in the entertainment industry.

Although it is simply not possible (or advisable) to have seen every movie ever made, the criteria for this list is that these are movies that have seminal, iconic or culturally significant performances, writing, direction, or premises. These are the movies that set the bar, raised the standard or innovated something new and oft-imitated.

I counted 156 films on the list and I’ve seen them all but I find the list rather distressing.  I counted a total of 3 non-English language films on the list and those are Amelie, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and La Dolce Vita.  No Kurosawa, no Bergman, no Truffaut or Godard or Antonioni or Rosselini or Satyajit Ray.  And the sad thing is, this list is the set of cultural touch points for Hollywood today, which is probably one reason why most American commercial film making is so unambitious.

I could probably sit down and do blogs that collect essential film and music lists – well essays more than just lists, perhaps group blogs with several trusted contributors.  The only problem is that I have this little thing called a job.  Could I jettison the job and do these?  Yeah.  Could I jettison the job and do these and earn a decent living from it?  Maybe not so much.

So the photo here, taken near Cyberport, liked the sign. Added to iPad with Camera Connector kit. Edited on iPad with PhotoPad. Posted using WordPress iPad app. Neat or what?

“I before E, except after C.”   How difficult is it to remember that?

Friday night – at a bar in Lan Kwai Fong that I never go to, Coconuts.  An old friend was visiting from the UK, and it ended up being a reunion with a group of people I worked with a dozen years ago.  So that was nice.

The reason I never go to Coconuts is because I can’t think of a single reason to go there.   This is a bar utterly devoid of personality.  The name might suggest a tropical theme but aside from surfing videos on the TV screens and t-shirts on the waitresses that read, “Come taste our nuts,” there was nothing there that would differentiate it from any other bar on the street.   Same drinks at the same prices, same music playing, bland bar snacks – why choose this bar over any other?  I suppose they have a good location and you get a decent view sitting there.  Ditto Zinc, a bar on D’Aguilar that just celebrated its 3rd anniversary and to me is also completely lacking in providing people any compelling reason to go there other than that if you sit in front you have a nice view of the street.

The friend from the UK commented on the price of Guinness at Coconuts, HK$62 during “non-happy hours” (unhappy hours?) as being noticeably higher than back in London.  I suppose one could joke that you’re paying more to be in a relatively more pleasant place (that is, if you consider Lan Kwai Fong to be more pleasant) or the cost of shipping Guinness here from Ireland (or do they have some regional brewery as well? Just looked, they do have a brewery in Indonesia) but the truth is probably that the difference in price can be attributed to the ludicrous rents that these bars have to pay.   Assuming for the moment that the monthly rent for a bar in LKF is now around the HK$250k mark and assuming that there is a gross profit of $50 on a pint of Guinness (during unhappy hour), that means a bar needs to sell 166 pints per night just to cover the rent.

It’s one of the reasons that I didn’t open a bar when I knew I was going to be unemployed last year.  Because after talking with a number of bar owners, I realized that the ultra-high rents not only carry with them a high degree of risk but they discourage almost any sort of innovation.  If you want a prime location, you are going to be paying mega-bucks to the landlord and that generally means sticking with the tried-and-true.   Or get some smaller place on a street that doesn’t get major foot traffic or that’s not at ground level and hope that you can do an amazing job of marketing and coming up with some sort of proposition that gets people to go that extra mile to your place.  I didn’t want to open a sports bar or a hooker bar and I quickly came to the realization that what I wanted to do wouldn’t be financially viable.

For many westerners in Asia, owning a bar seems to be the dream.  Open a bar, hang out in the bar all day long and drink with your friends and watch the cash roll in.  It generally doesn’t work that way though, especially in Hong Kong.  I know more than a few bar owners in town and most of them have sunk their life savings into the bar and get so little back in return that they still need a day job.  Some of them will end up okay, some will get rich and some will lose everything.

One bar in Wanchai that I like is The Canny Man, which is on Lockhart Road in the basement of the Wharney Hotel.  It’s got a Scottish theme and a long list of single malt whiskies.  (Doesn’t that word look odd?)  You may say that it’s not authentic to which all I can say is, whatever, at least they’ve made an attempt to do something unique here.  It’s a comfortable spot and a place where you can have a conversation and actually hear what the other person is saying.   The only drawback for me is that, as a smoker, you gotta walk up the stairs and navigate through the hotel lobby to get outside to get your fix.

Smoking in bars, there’s a topic.  The Hong Kong anti-smoking ordinance is so stupid, so poorly written and enforced, by my estimate probably 90% of the bars in HK ignore this law.  In my experience, almost every bar not in Wanchai or LKF is now allowing smoking (and even some in those districts, especially ones that are not open to the street).  By fining the smoker and not the bar that allows smoking, there is no reason for bar owners to stop customers from smoking.  I was in a 4th floor bar in TST recently and everyone in that bar was smoking – staff as well as customers.

There aren’t a lot of agents or police or whatever who go around and enforce these laws and most of them seem to go home early.  (Just like the parking meters on the street – it’s an open secret that even though you’re supposed to feed the meter in some districts till midnight, the “meter maids” all go home by 8 PM except during crackdowns which only happen once every few months at most.)

The Canny Man is one bar that can’t flout this law because they not only have to be concerned with the police, they have to follow strict policies set by the hotel that rents the space to them.  This is, of course, good news for you non-smokers out there.  But they are one bar that has lost a lot of business since the no smoking regulations came into effect – they have to uphold the law and people can’t get out to the street easily and so smokers are choosing other bars where it’s easier for them.

The Canny Man is the only bar I can think of that has a blog.  It’s called McPherson’s Rant. Here’s an interesting post there, about what they see as unfair competition from 7-11.  Hell, even the NY Times, a year or two ago, said that the way to do HK on a budget is to go to Lan Kwai Fong, buy a cheap beer at 7-11 and stand in the street and drink it.

They don’t need a liquor licence.  The don’t need fire escapes or toilets, or any of the other mundane criteria required by the Liquor Licencing fuckwits.  They’re allowed to sell alcohol which is fair enough, IF it’s for taking away.  But they break the law with impunity!  They allow people to drink on the premises, they open the bottles for you, they’ll even supply you a paper cup if you fancy sharing a bottle of wine, they sell to kids and drunks… all of which are against the law… but no authority will do a thing about it.

Well, of course, as my dad used to say, you pays yer money and you takes yer choice.  Speaking of which, Canny Man is running a bunch of special promotions that include Carlsberg for $22 from noon till 6, beer and a burger for $88 Monday through Friday and two for one dinners on Monday nights.  You might wanna check this out.  (I’m not getting paid to mention this, just in case you’re curious.)  I’m definitely gonna check out the burger and beer special one night – hope I can substitute a coke for the beer though.

So one reason I’m in Manila is to return to the Asian Hospital and finish up stuff I didn’t have a chance to complete two months ago, including the virtual colonoscopy. I’ve never had one of these, virtual or otherwise, but they tell me I’m of sufficiently advanced years that I need to get it done.

So a couple of days of fasting and purging later, weight down to just 160 according to the hotel scale, there I was this morning. For those of you who don’t know how this is done, here are the deets. First they shove a catheter up your butt. Then they inflate a small balloon at the end of it to ‘anchor’ it inside. And then they pump 2 liters of air “up there.”

To say that this is extremely unpleasant is an understatement. Imagine the worst stomach ache you’ve ever had and multiply that by 7.42. Then you lie on your back and get slid into the CT scan machine for five minutes. And then repeat everything, this time lying on your belly. “Did it hurt a lot?” the doctor would later ask. “No, my second divorce was much more painful.”. But it does hurt quite a bit and if you screw up somehow (like fart) or they screw up somehow, they gotta do it all over again. Fortunately, everything went well and it was finished on the first attempt.

The rest of my time at the hospital, I asked everyone I met, nurses, doctors, orderlies, if they could show me that special room in the basement where they store the brains. “You know, come on! I read on the Internet you got a room, shelves floor to ceiling, glass jars with brains for scientific experiments?” They all pretended not to know about this. I wonder if any of them will ask about it at their next status meeting?

With a couple of hours to kill to wait for the results of this (plus some other tests), after I’d finished getting that 2 liters of air out of my body (guess how?), we went to a nearby mall and camped out in a wifi-less Starbucks. I think the homogeneity of Starbucks is starting to bug me. They’re almost all exactly the same, down to the last focus-grouped test-marketed detail. We’re in Alabang and it’s exactly the same as if we were in Taikoo Shing or Burbank. Then again, buy two small drinks, settle into those comfy chairs, recover for a couple of hours, it didn’t suck either.

Anyway, test results came back negative and the doctor said I could go a few years before enduring that again. A 20 minute taxi ride to the hospital at 7 AM but a 75 minute ride back to the hotel at 1 PM and finally my first full meal in almost two days.

Tonight was a low impact night at popular hang-out Cafe Havana at Greenbelt 3. We weren’t very hungry but I noticed they had “Cuban pizzas” on the menu – Cuban in name only, of course, but not horrible and something light to munch on while we sat outside under the full moon, letting the night go by.

Time for a bit of shopping tomorrow before flying home tomorrow night.

So here I am in the hotel, possibly my first trip in 15 years without bringing a laptop and everything seems to be working okay. I knew in advance that this hotel doesn’t have in-room wifi so I brought along an old Asus pocket wifi router that I had sitting in a drawer. Getting the connection going didn’t work and I needed to call support – which in this case meant Docomo, they manage the hotel’s Internet services. Gotta say, the guy wasn’t at all fazed when I told him my hardware setup, took about 5 minutes and then he did the Internet sale/authorization for me and since then it’s been smooth. Email, web, Facebook, etc. all good. Only thing I couldn’t do for some reason was download a free app from the iTunes app store. Most importantly, I was able to get mail from my future employer, open and view the attachments. Of course i don’t need to edit them at this point; haven’t purchased the ipad ersatz-Office apps so can’t tell you if they would do the trick or not. Now I’m posting via the iPad WordPress app while I’ve got some music playing. So in summary, my backpack was much lighter and everything is pretty much working okay!

I use Gmail for email.

I use Google Reader as my RSS reader.

Last week I switched to Chrome from Firefox.

Today I migrated my calendar from Outlook to Google Calendar; will probably do the same with contacts later on.

It just dawned on me a moment ago that each time I open Chrome, I have it set to open with tabs for Gmail, GCalendar, GReader (and 2 or 3 other non-Google things on top of those).  Is it too much reliance on one company’s products – but if you feel that way, what’s the difference between that and relying on a combination of Windows, IE and MS Office?  Same approach, different vendor, subjectively different experience.

There are of course two problems with this approach -

1 – Accessing data when internet not available, presumably/hopefully resolved by having current sync of that data on iPhone/iPad

2 – My account getting hacked and someone else accessing that data

But I need somewhere to keep this and it’s finally hit me that Outlook is an awfully heavy program to run when I’m not using it for email anymore.

Anyone else have some alternative platform/software to suggest for contact/calendar/task management that’s multi-platform and syncs across platforms/mobile devices?

Less than perfect but I think not too bad.

Driving home tonight, I realized that thanks to the factory closures in China for Chinese New Year, it was a pretty clear night, so I decided to seize the opportunity and grab some photos.  These are all hand-held, as I didn’t have my tripod in the car.  I’d like to go back to the same spots with my tripod to do slightly longer exposures at lower ISO settings.  These are shot at 3200 and if I wasn’t so cold, I would have stayed longer and tried more combinations of settings.  But now I know what I’ll do differently the next time I can get to these spots to shoot.

Bonus pic:  there are what I’ve been told are feral cows in Sai Kung and I often see them during the day but very rarely at night.  Driving up the hill to my village, I spotted this one just plunked down, happily chewing its cud and grabbed this shot.