People’s Republic of Tung Chung – 东涌人民共和国

An interesting question from Dave over at Dave’s Wibblings:

Here’s my thought for tonight: if someone is blogging pseudonymously, but their true identity is trivially googleable, does anyone have a requirement to keep that identity quiet?

[...] why should I be required to preserve the anonymity of people who are only anonymous to preserve their lifestyle which depends on human trafficking for sex?

[...] why should I preserve the anonymity of some overpaid expat who is using his blog to boast about how much sex he pays to have? While he supports the triad gangs who traffick in women? Or some wanker banker bragging about his conquests. Especially now that these banker types are profiting at everyone else’s expense.

Here’s my take, Dave, as one non-pseudonymous blogger to another. Why don’t you mind your own business?

Has anybody actually asked you to unmask somebody in this manner? No, didn’t think so. Why should they? What you’re actually saying here is, “Ooh, I’ve just done some slick detective work on Google and found out who $blogger is… I really want to spread the word so people can see how clever I am! But I don’t want to look like a playground sneak. I know, I’ll get rhetorical and hope somebody asks me, then I’ll have an excuse to spill the beans!”

Good man. You disapprove of prostitution and fatcat bankers. Me too. But you’re behaving right now like one of those tedious fundamentalist Americans who photograph men coming out of porn shops and post the photos on the web. And I had you tagged as a decent, sensible atheist fellow too.

Dave, if you know the identity of someone who is doing something illegal then take it straight to the police. I’ll applaud you for that, in public if you want; but this snide “I know what you’ve been doing…” business is beneath you. Get a grip.

Edit: Dave deleted his blog posting. Good stuff.

Steaming coffee to hand, I flipped open my laptop first thing this morning and had two good guffaws in about two minutes.

From the BBC:

And, from my Facebook home page:

Ooo, vada the ‘ome. (Gay lingo has been around since long before Facebook.)

I remember, many years ago, there was a sudden hysteria about CDs. Perhaps it was put about by marketing droids on behalf of the vinyl and tape-cassette manufacturers, for – it was said – CDs were going to rot away. You’d have crystal clarity now, but next year… glitches and frustration. Like all good scare-stories, nothing came of it. My first ever CD (a Mozart piano concerto) is approaching its 20th birthday and still works perfectly well (although it hasn’t seen much service since being ripped to FLAC files).

The same was said, with rather more cause for concern, about early CD-Rs. When I started experimenting with writing CDs it was 1997, I was using a Yamaha CDR-100 hanging off an Adaptec AHA2940 SCSI card on a Linux 2.0.4 box running… a MicroChannel-patched kernel for it was, indeed, old IBM PS2 hardware! It was necessary to manually make the ISO image before writing. The burn process took forever. The computer had to be disconnected from the network and left untouched while writing because there was no write buffer: any interference at all and the burn failed. Even in ideal conditions the burn failed half the time anyway. Back then, blank CD-Rs cost several pounds each, and I was churning out the most expensive coffee mats in the office.

My managers, poor troubled souls, wanted to know why (considering this expense) we were archiving to CD-Rs at all. Weren’t they all going to be blank and useless within months? That’s what the trade press said, anyway. (Perhaps, this time, marketing fluff from the DDS-3 manufacturers.)

Well, I can officially set their minds at rest today. Rummaging through old boxes of things, tucked inside a logbook full of scrawl, I found a CD-R that I burned back in 1999 (on a Yamaha CDR-400), and to my delight it still works! I was able to retrieve 10 year old e-mails and review conversations and ideas long since forgotten. I found my old appraisals from 1998 (“… has a problem with authority…”; “… must learn that technical skills are not an excuse for rudeness…”). There was the source code for my unfinished squid redirector, and for my port of apache to CX-SX. Best of all, there were pictures!

Me and my CB500 at a bike show somewhere

Here, for example, is one of the few pictures of my favourite motorbike – my CB500 – which must have been taken in 1999 at a bike show, back when I was on the committee of the Honda Owners Club (GB).  I loved that bike – comfortable for long journeys, fast, and with Dunlop ArrowMax tyres on it it’d handle as well as a CBR600 in most conditions. I can’t remember anything about the next two bikes, but the bike on the far left is the world’s only immaculate CX500 “maggot”, belonging to a chap called Lennie.

I’m still rummaging through the depths of the files I copied from the antique CD-R.  There’s a lot of .tar.gz and ZIP files on there that have to be explored. I’m feeling really quite nostalgic about the whole thing.

Kung hei fat choi! It is the year of the ox (or water-buffalo). Last year I celebrated Chinese New Year in Macau in a regrettable boozefest that saw me almost stabbed by a Russian gangster, and which gave such offence to two of our party that they snuck away in the early hours of the morning to avoid us (a gesture that would have been much more successful if their passports hadn’t been locked in my hotel room safe, the combination to which was known only to me).

No such shenanigans this year. I’m home, getting some of my backlog of work done and slowly getting over a bout of flu. It’s bloody cold too, and the cats spend their non-eating time snug under the duvet, or both trying to fit onto my lap at once. They’ve grown thick winter coats that are going to be all over the furniture in a couple of weeks when the weather warms up.

And that’s about it, for now. I shall sit out the holidays and the cold at my keyboard like the curmudgeonly hermit that I am. I have a lot of things on my to-do list.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve declaimed (to clients, to journalists, to conferences, even on this blog) that the majority of security incidents occur because someone fails to take a simple, straightforward action that would have prevented the incident; it’s rarely anything complicated, and it’s often overlooked because “it’s never been a problem before, so it should be alright this time too”.

Today I have been hoist by my own petard. I have had a significant quantity of money taken from my wallet while it was unattended in my hotel room. Of course there was a safe, but I’d become complacent. I reported the theft to the hotel so they could investigate it, but I refused (to the bemusement of some friends) to request compensation or reimbursement. This attitude that we must be somehow protected from our errors and bad luck baffles me. You can buy protection, of course, from the insurance industry, but several friends were unable to understand why I didn’t storm the hotel manager’s office, demanding my money back. As I explained: whoever took it is a criminal, I’m a dumbass, so the responsibility is shared. The hotel’s an innocent third-party. Why should they pay anything?

This appears to be a minority view.

I’m in a very windy Miami now, exhausted from jetlag and travel. Time for some kip.

Just an self-indulgent little update today. Recently I asked Emily to arrange a company outing to the German Beer Festival over at the Marco Polo Gateway. The office is a sausagefest anyway, so why shouldn’t we enjoy one after work too? What’s the wurst that could happen?

Anyway, we chatted about the German Beer Festival, and it suddenly occurred to me that the 2006 Bierfest is the reason for Emily’s presence here in the office.

See, it went like this, as I explained to the mystified staff:

• I went to the bierfest with an industry chum who’d booked a table for many of his friends.
• One of those friends was Jami Gong, who told me all about the new comedy club he was about to open, and invited us to come along on opening night. (Takeout Comedy on Elgin Street, incidentally. I recommend it.)
• So I went. One of the open-mic acts was a lady called Kay. She stuttered her way through her material, referring regularly to notes on a piece of paper, but hell – she was up there at the microphone and I was in the audience so she’s got at least one more ball than me, maybe two, regardless of the quality of the act. Kudos.
• Kay told some jokes about these people called CouchSurfers who would come and stay in her apartment. She extolled the virtues of the CouchSurfing system and disclosed the URL.
• So I signed up as a CouchSurfing host, because I have a spare room and HK hotels are expensive.
• One of my early visitors was a girl from Wisconsin, called Tiffany.
• She had a friend who lived just over the border in the Mainland, but who was coming to HK to visit Tiffany. We were introduced at the TST clock tower. Yep, that was Emily.
• That was over a year ago, and she’s still hanging around.

“So there!”, I told the chaps in the office. “We must go to the Bierfest, because the Bierfest is the reason we have Emily.”

“Should have stayed in”, said David.

“The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”

And so here’s the list, complete with the following instructions:

• Look at the list and embolden those you have read.
• Italicise those you intend to read.
• Underline the books you LOVE.
• Reprint this list in your own blog.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’ Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

It’s obviously subjective (so much bloody Austen, no V.S.Naipaul at all), and strangely redundant in places (the Complete Works of Shakespeare and Hamlet? The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe? Who compiled this list?!), but it’s an interesting metric nonetheless. If any of my readers reprint this in their own blogs, do post a link in the comments section here!

I exaggerate. Not black as such, but particularly overcast. The weather forecast for the coming week promises rain, thunder, rain, more rain, showers, and – for some variety – rain. Today, it’s rained. Nonethelesss, it’s been a fairly full day.

I got up at 10:45, due to an attack of insomnia last night that had me up and fiddling with software at 2am. I have been experimenting with VirtualBox on my Linux system, for those occasions when I need to be able to edit Microsoft Word documents. It’s the best damn VM ever – I love it to bits. Last night I made “Seamless Desktop” work. What’s that? Well, instead of Windows XP running in a window on my Gnome desktop, seamless desktop integrates the two operating systems. The windows owned by XP co-exist with the Linux applications, as the name would suggest, seamlessly. If you want to try it yourself you’ll have to install Windows XP on the virtual machine first. Then boot it up, select “Install Guest Additions…” from VirtualBox’s Device menu, follow the instructions, reboot and the “Seamless Desktop” menu option will be available to you. It’s a wee bit buggy in the open source version, but still easily good enough to use, and impressive as all hell.

Prodded by a mild cabin fever around lunchtime, I went to see Hancock at the cinema down in the town square. Capsule review: piece of shit.

Then I cleaned the kitchen from top to bottom in preparation for cooking up a big pot of something delicious for dinner, and then for bringing into the office in plastic boxes. I threw out all the packaging from when I built my new PC (and isn’t it a bloody nuisance having to tear all the boxes up to get the warranty certificates off of them?), ripped a few CDs, backed my home directory up onto a portable hard drive, wrote a time-triggered script to transfer spam from a folder in my mailbox onto my spam filter so it can learn to recognise the spam that it’s currently overlooking, had a can of Tsing Tao, and finished a book.

All that, and it’s only 5pm. I think it’s time to go to the supermarket.

I’m not a dog person. In my whole life, which has seen a dazzling procession of larger-than-life cats, I’ve enjoyed the company of only two dogs – both white German shepherds – who were sufficiently well-trained and well-kept to dispel my long-held convictions that dogs were smelly, servile morons.

So it’s come as something of a surprise to discover that a certain small, malodorous, intellectually stunted animal, loosely descended from wolves, has me wrapped around her little finger. Ladies and gentlemen – meet Mumu. Mumu is not my dog, I should hasten to add. She belongs to a young lady who has the dubious and somewhat complicated honour of being simultaneously my ex-girlfriend, my terrific drinking buddy, and one of my employees. This young lady (I’ll call her Emily, because that’s her name) likes to slope off to the Mainland at weekends to drink inexpensive baijiu and eat delicious Xinjiang lamb-toothpicks, and during these times, it is incumbent upon me to take care of Mumu.

Mumu is actually an ideal starter dog for a cat-lover. She’d certainly disappoint any real dog lovers. Like cats, she sleeps almost all the time. In common with the felines, she is generally silent and reserved. And a final comparison to the cat – Mumu is completely untrainable (although cats are this way because they choose to exercise their veto in all matters, whereas Mumu is powered by a vestigial ganglion and two double-A batteries, and is – genetically – 70% tuber). Moreover, Mumu is old, emits gas, is blind in one eye, and has a tongue like a piece of crispy bacon because she forgets to put it back in her mouth after using it, and so it dries out. And yet she sits, sans eye, sans taste, sans gorm, spilling white hair onto my black couch, and I can’t help but feel a pang of affection for the creature.

I can draw my own conclusions as to why, but I leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out what they are. Suffice it to say, I’m starting to see the point of dogs. But it’s going to be a long road before I invest in my first rottweiler.

Two consecutive posts about identity. Except this one isn’t about government shenanigans, ID cards, and national identity databases – the identity in question is simply, mine.

Most HK bloggers work anonymously (or nearly so). I decided at the outset that I wanted to blog under my own name. I felt, when I started this web site, that I had no need for anonymity. I’m not a regular visitor to Wanchai, and wouldn’t feel the urge to blog about it even if I were; neither am I a well-connected socialite seeking to leak titbits of juicy gossip.

Well, if you’re wondering about the extended lack of updates, it’s because of the lack of anonymity. There’s so much going on right now that I’d love to blog about, but I simply cannot. It would be too indiscreet. I wish it were good, unadulterated filth that I was withholding from you, but it’s not even that exciting: it’s all over the compass – drama, trauma, wry amusements, self-criticism, defiance, the occasional cliffhanger… real soap-opera material, except the acting is even worse.

Sometimes, you can’t wait for a conclusion before writing about your situation. John Diamond’s book about his terminal cancer, for example, would have been rather less successful if he’d waited to see how things worked out before putting pen to paper. I’m not so heroic, and neither do I have Nigella Lawson cooking for me, so I’m going to bashfully avoid going into any further details until… well, I have no idea.

In short: I’m still here. But I’m not sharing right now.