More supermarket shenanigans

Posted in Hong Kong life, Opinionated rants, Tung Chung on 08/06/2009 10:25 am by Richard

Apropos of the previous blog post, something else I’ve noticed that they do in Taste/Park’n'shop is to leave the “This product is out of stock” label covering the shelf prices of products that are clearly in stock and piled up right there in front of you.

Why else would they do this, except to prevent you seeing the unreasonably high prices they charge? The individual items are not marked with prices, so the shopper relies on the shelf price. I have started confiscating “out of stock” tags that are untrue, so the prices are visible once again. I have quite a few already.

Truly, I wish there was somewhere else I could shop. There is a Wellcome in Tung Chung, but it’s woefully local and sells very little of any use.

 

Whine tasting

Posted in Hong Kong life, Opinionated rants, Tung Chung on 08/01/2009 10:44 pm by Richard

My local supermarket, Taste (part of the Park’n'Shop empire), pulled a neat bait and switch on me this evening. Many times on other blogs, or the estimable Not the South China Morning Post web site, I’ve seen articles about Park’n'Shop’s dubious product labelling practices. Today, they got me.

I was in the wine section. They had Banrock Station Unwooded Chardonnay.

(Wine tasting sidebar: Yes, I know Banrock Station isn’t elite or special, but the unwooded chardonnay is a nice quaffing wine, versatile for cooking, and it’s generally reliable. Suggestions for other wines to try are always massively welcomed, but lectures about my poor taste in Aussie whites will force me to open a Leeuwin Estate and not share it with anyone.)

The wine was labelled at $59 each or $100 for two. I took two.

At the cash desk, the special offer did not materialise. I got charged full price. I complained, and they said there was no special offer on the wine. I went back to check, and this is what I found:

  • The special offer price tag was for “Banrock Station Sem. Char.” You may safely assume the use of tiny print.
  • There was no Banrock Station Semillon Chardonnay anywhere in the wine section
  • There was no price tag anywhere for the Banrock Station Unwooded Chardonnay
  • The price tag for the Semillon Chardonnay was directly under the Unwooded Chardonnay bottles, up at one edge of the shelving.

Bah, humbug, Park’n'shop. You may be technically in the right, but I have no doubt that this little stunt was deliberate. You do know, Mr Li, that this is a shabby way to treat customers? You do know that this is a cunt’s trick?

So, what’s the big deal? It’s $18 difference. It’s nice wine. I’d probably have bought two bottles anyway, as I have a risotto to cook tomorrow. It’s simple enough: when I shop for food, I don’t want to be on tenterhooks looking for scams all the time like I’m in some crazy grocery-related find-the-lady game. Food-shopping is one of our most basic needs; one would expect it to be accompanied by some basic decencies. Now I know better; it’s time to learn some Cantonese and start shopping at the wet market.

 

Green dambusters

Posted in Opinionated rants, Security on 07/28/2009 01:55 pm by Richard

It’s not all over the news any more, but that doesn’t mean it’s gone away. I’ve been pondering the Green Dam situation a lot recently, because – for whatever crazy libertarian reason – I find that I simply cannot agree 100% with its detractors.

Actually, I love the idea. This is one of the two areas in which I am in agreement with the Chinese Communist Party, the other being persecution of Falun Gong. (I should add, though, that my motives for both are quite different from the CCP’s.)

See, I find the “protect the children” brigade thoroughly tiresome. The Australians went as far as trying to implement ISP-level porn-blocking to “protect the children”. Apparently Kevin Rudd didn’t just pick up some Mandarin while he was in China. But “protect the children” is an international problem, not just antipodean.

So we have this group who opine that the Internet needs to be “child-friendly”, i.e. everything unsuitable for children should be removed. That’s going to make the Internet pretty useless. You wouldn’t expect adults to watch nothing except childrens’ television, would you? Or just read childrens’ books? Then why would you expect them to approve of a “childrens’ Internet”? I’m all in favour of not letting kids watch porn, but if that means that adults can’t watch porn too, then something’s gone awry.

Call me a cynic, but isn’t “protect the children” a badly-concealed excuse for skirting around the true aims of the campaigners? I have a measure of respect for good old-fashioned bigots who are prepared to be honest about how they just want things that they disapprove of to be banned. Compare that to the dissembling of a “Focus on the Family” type organisation which has exactly the same agenda but hides it behind their “for the children” rubric. And, of course, “for the children” is rebuttal-proof. You can’t argue against a measure that is “for the children”, or else you’re a vile child-hater. You approve of Internet porn? Why do you hate children!? Etc etc etc.

I’ve debated with a few of these types and asked why they don’t just take action to protect their children. The usual answer is that their kids are very well protected, but what concerns them more are all the other kids who don’t have the benefit of insane parents. And with that reasoning, they’ll continue their campaign to have porn blocked at the ISP level and make sure we all get nothing more taxing than Sesame Street on YouTube.

Hence, the logic of Green Dam was instantly attractive when I first heard about it. It’s the perfect solution: a content filter that is installed (or at least shipped) with all PCs, which will prevent the underage from stumbling on www.analmidgets.com, and which can be disabled or uninstalled by grown-ups with a tolerance for such things. It won’t shut the prudes up, but it might force them to admit the real reason for their complaints, and that makes them easier to debate. And critically, it moves the role of censorship away from the network and onto the workstations.

Of course, successful implementation relies on the software (a) not being filled with stupid security glitches that show a total lack of software quality control, (b) not being largely stolen from another company, (c) not being full of government back-doors (open source would be a sine qua non, I think), and (d) not being way, way too sensitive so that your applications are constantly shut down without warning just because you typed something slightly frowned-upon.

So: ten out of ten for the idea, but minus several million for the execution. I’m anticipating the release of version 2 of Green Dam with genuine curiousity. Of course, it will still be intrusive and flawed, but if it reduces the argument in favour of the Great Firewall of China even one iota, then it’s a step in the right direction.

 

Landlord of the flies

Posted in Hong Kong life on 07/26/2009 02:27 pm by Richard

Getting a deposit on an apartment refunded should be pretty easy, no? Once the landlords have checked that you haven’t stolen the air-conditioner or smeared faeces over the walls, they just need to subtract some routine costs and send you a cheque. You’d think.

I have been trying to recover the deposit from Emily’s apartment (see this posting) for a ridiculously long time. I allowed the statutory fifteen days to pass and then contacted the landlords to ask how much was forthcoming and what deductions there would be. Oh no, said the landlords, you’re not getting any deposit back, because you didn’t pay all the rent.

“Did so.”

“Didn’t.”

“I’ll show you the receipts.”

“You have receipts?”

The fact that I had every single payment documented changed their attitude entirely. I know from conversations I had with them last year before we signed the lease that they were resigned to the fact that nearly all tenants break the lease and run off with rent unpaid. It seems this is so routine that refunding a deposit is something they’ve never done before.

Moreover, it turned out they hadn’t even been keeping track of the incoming rental payments. “We need to see the receipts,” they told me, “so we know which payments were yours.”

“You mean, you don’t already know?”

Well. If I’d known that, I’d have stopped paying the rent eight months ago and just sacrificed the deposit money. What kind of a way is that to run a business? I’m glad I’m not their accountants! “We received a lot of money this year, but we don’t know where from. Then we spent most of it, but we don’t know why. Did we pass the audit?”

Having established that I wanted money from them, they deducted a massive amount for unpaid utility bills. By pure luck, in the detritus that Emily left behind in her apartment, I found a bank receipt showing that she’d paid a big slab of money to the landlords for precisely this reason. Yes, you guessed it, they hadn’t kept a record of that either. I sent them a copy of the receipt. They scolded me for keeping this information from them, and then revised their estimate to a more reasonable level.

Then they told me, “now we need originals of all these receipts before we can pay you.”

“Show me where it says that in the lease,” I suggested.

“We need proof that we’re refunding the money to the person who paid it in the first place.”

“I have an ID card. Or, you could pay it back into the same bank account that paid it to you. Oh wait, that would assume some degree of record keeping on your part. Silly me.”

In the end, though, despite the hoops that must be jumped through, it all worked out. The final deductions were small and reasonable. Now we just wait and see if the cheque bounces…

 

Tung Chung FAQ (part 2)

Posted in Food and drink, Opinionated rants, Tung Chung on 06/20/2009 09:29 pm by Richard

Apart from people seeking commercial sex in Tung Chung (see the FAQ part 1), the other search engine queries that turn up many times a day are from peckish people searching for food delivery services.

Now, eating out in Tung Chung is woeful, for the most part. We have:

  • The Aviator: poor food at high prices
  • Pizza Hut: poor food at high prices
  • Delifrance: Incredibly poor food at high prices
  • Starz Bar: Microwaved plastic food at high prices
  • Spaghetti House: Bland but inoffensive, although they did once serve a friend of mine with a pizza that included a plastic bag between the base and the topping
  • Food Republic: Well, it’s a food court. You wait ages for your food while standing up, and when you have it you won’t be able to find anywhere to sit. Once you have sat, you are haunted by other people hovering nearby holding rapidly cooling meals and waiting for you to leave. Also, Food Republic manages to have a back door but no front door.
  • That new restaurant under the cable car, whatever its name is: Can’t even be bothered to go look, because the menu they dropped in my mailbox had “Chinese Western-style Food” scrawled all over it, i.e. bad steak, overcooked and served with fried rice. I’m the last person to lambast Chinese food – I love it in all its forms – but they cannot butcher, so anything involving western cuts of meat is a guaranteed failure. Also, some of my chums have tried this restaurant and say it’s pretty bad.
  • KFC: KFC
  • McDonalds: Gone, in accordance with CityGate’s policy that an Outlet Mall must contain nothing other than outlets, which is why we don’t have any HSBC ATMs any more either.
  • Eastern Gate: Nice dimsums (but a very limited menu; where’s the tripe fried in black pepper? where’s the no mai gai?), long, long queue, and the wait staff get incredibly surly if you overstay while they’re trying to set things up for the Sunday afternoon geriatric mah jong sessions.
  • The Thai in the Basement: Some say they like it. I find the food unsubtle and unsophisticated; the sweet-and-sour tastes like ketchup. If you want Thai, go to Melody Thai in Tung Chung Village, where the phanang curry will make you squeak with pleasure, and the full-strength tom yam goong will just make you squeak.

There are other options, but generally I don’t bother eating out in Tung Chung. Kowloon and the Island have a million better alternatives.

You can get food delivered in Tung Chung and it’s not always a bad option. The Handi Tandoori (again, out in Tung Chung Village) does magnificent and authentic Indian food and will bring it right to your door. The aptly named “Pizza and Chicken Experts” will deliver… well, I never used them, but I see their bikes about the place. I assume they’re delivering pizza and chicken.

And now McDonalds claim to deliver as well. I guess they bike it over from Yat Tung, where clothing outlets know their place. In fact I actually tried to order food from MaccyD’s delivery service recently. The nice lady telephonist, whose English was unexpectedly good, told me that “the chef is very busy” and the order would arrive in “one hour and forty minutes”.

Firstly, chef?

Secondly, who waits nearly two hours for a quarter-pounder? McDonalds food is the very last resort for a terminally tired guy who needs a protein-stuffed comfort food fix before lapsing into unconsciousness. It has no features sufficiently redeeming to justify an hour and 40 minutes delay. I cancelled the order and, as a result, added two days to the far end of my lifespan.

And just to annoy all the folks who’ve waded all through this diatribe in the hope of finding phone numbers for Pizza and Chicken Expert, McDonalds, or the Handi Tandoori – yes, I have them all, and no, I’m not publishing them. Not unless they start paying me commission.

 

The backlash against celebrity chefs

Posted in Food and drink, Made me laugh on 06/19/2009 04:27 pm by Richard

ainsley

 

Winnie the flu (and piglet too)

Posted in Hong Kong life on 06/14/2009 01:09 am by Richard

I just love this. With H1N1 now a declared epidemic, and cases popping up all over Hong Kong, the government has taken the sensible step of closing all the kindergartens, infant and junior schools for two weeks. The summer holidays start in two weeks, so actually <alicecooper>school’s out for summer</alicecooper>. Not a bad idea, really. Keep the kids at home, stop them from congregating, and limit the H1N1 spread vectors.

So how has Hong Kong Disneyland reacted to this? Well, they’ve launched a “bring your bored kids to Disneyland” promotion, selling tickets that allow unlimited entry during the school-closure period.

Do you get the feeling that somebody has missed the point? Or worse, is so desperate for revenue that they’ll ignore government advice and endanger children? Good old Disney!

 

Tung Chung FAQ (part 1)

Posted in Made me laugh, Tung Chung on 06/07/2009 11:48 am by Richard

Whenever somebody out there in the great tangle that is the Internet uses Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu or any other search engine and somehow lands on my blog, I can see their route to the site. For the non-techie readers I can quickly and easily explain how this works. Whenever you click a link on a web page, your browser requests that page from its web server, and the request includes the address of the page you were on when you clicked the link. It’s called an “HTTP referrer”, and it’s useful to help web site owners work out how people find their web sites.

When somebody uses a search engine, the HTTP referrer usually contains the words that they searched for, and if they’re coming to my site, the search terms get written into my web server log file.

I can see, for example, that somebody found my site just this morning after searching Google for “thousand steps hike hong kong”.

What makes me laugh, however, is the number of people evidently using search engines to seek out seedy nightlife in Tung Chung:

  • “bar girls tung chung”
  • “tung chung escorts”
  • “sauna extras tung chung”

These are just examples, but I see such things all the time. So this entry is by way of being the first part of an FAQ for Tung Chung, based on my web site hits from search engines.

Whoever you people are, researching the dark and secretive underbelly of Tung Chung, I’m sorry to have to disappoint you – but there isn’t one. We’ve only got one proper bar, and it’s enough of a challenge to get them to serve drinks and food, never mind any additional services. The restaurants are all closed by 10:30pm. Even our McDonalds has packed up and gone away. My advice would be: get back to your search engines and focus on Tsing Yi and eastwards. Sleepy suburbia is no place for you!

 

No good deed goes unpunished

Posted in Opinionated rants on 06/02/2009 09:35 pm by Richard

Remind me never to do money-related favours for anyone again. It’s too much trouble.

So here’s a fun little backstory for you. Way back at the beginning of 2008 I was in a relationship with an American girl called Emily Falenczykowski-Scott*. She’d been living in Mainland China for over a year and wanted to move to Hong Kong… and to do that, she’d need a little help.

Being a trusting, loved-up fool, I agreed to help with those things that she couldn’t do herself, since she lacked a Hong Kong ID. So I signed up for a mobile phone contract for her, and signed the lease (and paid the deposit) on a smart, bijou apartment in Kennedy Town.

By mid-2008, we’d split up. She remained in Hong Kong, living in the same apartment and using the same phone, but paid her own bills. That is, until I got back from my Christmas holidays in January 2009 – she’d packed up and vanished back to the Mainland.

She very kindly left me two things:

  1. A gigantic unpaid mobile phone bill (and I mean, extraordinary large). It turned out that her claim to have migrated the mobile phone account into her own name was not true.
  2. A bill for unpaid rent (because she didn’t pay the last two months of rent on her apartment before leaving town), and hence also a big hole where the deposit money on the apartment used to be.

Either of these two amounts would be an impolite liability to dump on someone. Both together are simply obscene. And here’s the thing: I don’t have enough money to pay them and still meet my commitments.

Now I’m looking at a final demand from CSL (complete with solicitor’s letter; hey – perhaps that’s what CSL stands for!), and some very dirty correspondence from the landlords of her apartment.

Of course, I’ve been in contact with Emily regularly over the last few weeks, advising her of the situation and telling her: settle your debts. I don’t want the unsympathetic reader to think I sprung this on her. She will have been receiving e-mails from CSL for months before I got a letter through the post advising me of the overdue bill. Same goes for the rent: the overdue payment will not come as a surprise to her.

But will she pay me? Apparently not. She just makes excuses, and finally “ordered” me not to contact her again! So she generates huge bills, leaves me to deal with paying them, and has the nerve to tell me to stop bothering her when the situation becomes a genuine emergency. Classy. The messages I’ve sent her today have all been totally ignored, despite their urgent tone and reminder that tomorrow really is the last day to pay and avoid legal action.

So what next? Well, let’s have a campaign! If you have a spare moment, why not ask Emily to Pay Her Bills! Or suggest that she should Stop Being a Deadbeat! – You can e-mail her on *redacted*, telephone or text on *redacted*, or perhaps drop her a note on *redacted*.

Maybe that’ll help her realise that it’s not my job to finance her lifestyle.

Edit: She sent me enough to pay the phone bill. Still no back-rent; so I’m still being pursued by her creditors and I still can’t get my deposit back.

Edit 2: Outstanding amount repaid in full, so the campaign is over and contact details redacted. Thanks to everyone who chipped in!

* Edit 3: When Emily’s landlords finally, after I pestered and negotiated with them for weeks, told me how much of the deposit they would refund, I e-mailed Emily and asked her to pay me the difference, which was mostly her unpaid utility bills. She agreed to do so, but only after I removed her family name from this post. I did, she paid, and now I have put it back. If someone wants to buy a favour from me, they shouldn’t try to do it with something that is already mine.

 

Sunday ramblings

Posted in Made me laugh, Tedious journalising on 05/24/2009 02:10 pm by Richard

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:

10things

And, from my Facebook home page:

quiz

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

 
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