It’s Friday once again and luckily this particular Friday leads into a long weekend. Pretty much every one of our offices in the Asia-Pacific region is closed on Monday for various reasons. For Hong Kong and Mainland China it’s for the Dragon Boat Races. I haven’t seen them but since we’ve sworn off local festivals here in Hong Kong that means that I never will. And I’m OK with that. Seriously.
Muse has created a new mommy blog for the upcoming hellspawn. The title of this new site is Baby Barie. There’s not much there but she has just started it up so head on over and bookmark. You know you want to. I need to get the latest ultra-sound images from her so I can scan them and post them for your amusement.
On a slightly perpendicular note, Muse’s photography site was recently completed and put back into live status. Go check out ShotSauce for a very small sampling of Muse’s photographical talents.
And since I’m busy plugging my wife (in the internet link sort of way you gutter-monkeys!) I’ll take a moment to plug myself (hehehe) as well. The latest comic of A Little Scary went live yesterday as it always does each Monday and Thursday. People seem to like the zombies in the comics so this one should be a treat for those fans. Sign up for the feed while you’re there so you don’t miss a strip!
I believe Muse has already let the kitteh out of the bag, so to speak, but we will be coming home to St. Louis this year. Muse will be leaving Hong Kong before me to get the pets all sorted and safe. I was the first to arrive between us and I’ll be the last to leave. I suppose I should take some comfort in that I’ll get to live here in Hong Kong for just a bit longer but I also remember the loneliness of my first month here. But that was a long time ago now and I’m no longer a stranger in a strange land with no idea of what to do/where to go/what to eat. I no longer need to subsist on ham sandwiches and cans of soup. Although I may just because.
Now, when the time comes, I’ll probably spend my free time leisurely walking the street markets and shopping malls without the worry of wasting Muse’s time or needing to feed or walk the dogs. Maybe I’ll go directly from the office to a local bar with people from work and see what the night life is like before I leave. Maybe I’ll go for a hike without worrying about time constraints or anything but my own ability. Or maybe I’ll just sit in front of the computer and play World of Warcraft all night. It’s hard to say.
Actually when I say we will be coming home this year that makes it sound like something that will be happening at some far point in the future. But really it’s nothing like that. Muse may be leaving in a month or less. I won’t be here any longer than mid-August. It’s scary close to those dates already. By the end of August we will be back in the United States of America and trying to figure out life once more. This time with a baby on the way.
When we moved we did so on short notice and also threw in our wedding because it wasn’t a stressful enough experience. Now with a baby coming, I see now that we just really like to complicate things. I can offer no other explanation. We sold our house and our cars and most of the rest of the stuff we didn’t ship to Hong Kong. So add in another layer of sphincter-clenching in that we have a baby coming and we need to buy a house and at least one car but really we need two and baby stuff and furniture and Oh My Gawd what are we insane?
Yes. Yes we are. Nice to meet you.
So I hear it’s a public holiday back home in the States. No such luck here; I had to work today. Although we do get about the same amount of holidays here in Hong Kong but they are at different times and have different names. Exactly the same only completely different.
I don’t remember actually explicitly mentioning it (and I don’t have much else to say today (OMG filler)) but if you use Twitter, you can follow me there via this link: http://twitter.com/cybrpunk Yeah there’s a feed for it over in the sidebar as well but then you won’t get to see the octopus again as he reigns supreme over my Twitter page. He also will not allow me to post all my Twitter posts as a blog post here as a cheater post. He thinks it doesn’t count as a post. I tend to agree.
Since I’ve got nothing much else to say today I’ll just plug A Little Scary once more. I’ve posted Monday’s comic which you should check out. Remember to check back each Monday and Thursday for new comics. Subscribe to the feed while your there too. It’s a lonely feed.
I have no idea what these are really called in English and I certainly can’t remember what they’re called in Cantonese. But they are edible and available in the seafood and wet markets in Hong Kong. Here they are for your amusement. Mutant shrimp.
Dealing with technical support at the best of times can be difficult. Dealing with tech support in Hong Kong can be absolutely infuriating. The DVD-RW drive in my Dell XPS M1710 computer has been slowly dying for months but Friday it decided to give up completely. This is a pretty fast PC but it would take six hours to burn 1GB of data to a DVD because it reset every two seconds. Now it won’t even read a disk.
In a nutshell, here’s how the conversation went:
“My computer’s broke.”
“No it’s not, that’s normal.”
Yes tech support in Hong Kong will regularly flat out lie to try and keep from actually sending someone to fix something. It’s not just Dell or even computers. Getting service in Hong Kong is painful.
Actually the Dell Optiplex support line is pretty good and they speak English. When you call the Dell XPS support line, you get transferred to Mainland China somewhere and they don’t speak English. Knowing this, I had an admin make the call for me and warned her that they may not even speak guangdong hua (Cantonese).
Sure enough, the first person to answer speaks putong hua (Mandarin) only. Luckily most of the local staff in my office are at least able to handle most conversations in Mandarin but they still get mixed up sometimes. Oddly enough, the tech must not have liked the admin’s knowledge of his language because he hung up on her. So she called back and luckily this time she got someone who speaks Cantonese. Mind you, this is a Hong Kong phone number we’re dialing.
Instead of going through all the details of what happened, I’ll just give you the excuses that were translated to me. There may have been more that I didn’t hear or understand.
- “Has Windows been re-installed?” – This insinuated that it’s not the drive but that Windows is the problem and needs to be re-installed. No.
- When the call was made I had a burned copy of Symantec AV in the drive. He told the admin that “there was just an incompatibility in the way that the burned disk had been created.” So he told her she needed to put in a CD provided by Dell and if it worked then it wasn’t their problem.
- So I put in the XPS Drivers and Utilities Disk. Standing near the PC you can hear the drive spin and reset over and over and over. I told her to tell him about that noise. He responded with: “That’s normal.”
- When the Dell CD didn’t come up, he had her try another Dell CD because it must be a problem with that CD. We entered another one which made the same sounds and didn’t work. He told her “the drivers weren’t loaded” even though we told him it’s been working for almost two years. He had her check Device Manager and sure enough there was no Exclamation Point marking a problem.
- When I told her to tell him it took six hours to burn 1GB of data to a DVD-R, he started questioning the software we were using and blamed it on that. He told her then that “the software you use is just not updated.” By this point I was well beyond pissed and glad he couldn’t understand what I was saying on speakerphone.
The admin started getting confrontational with him at that point because he was wasting our time. We had spent 30 minutes on the phone at that point. Finally he relented and told us someone would contact us tomorrow to replace the drive.
Of course I thanked the admin since I’ve made similar calls before and they were just as painful except neither person understood the other. Imagine trying to convey “video card” to someone who only speaks Mandarin and you only speak English. Painful.
It’s Monday and I’m sitting at home still un-showered and working on comics. Today is a public holiday here in Hong Kong. It’s Buddha’s birthday! Who am I to argue? Sadly though, public holidays are a double-edged sword. Sure you get the day off, but unless you feel like pushing through crowds of people everywhere you go, you pretty much just sit at home all day. Like I’m doing.
We say Iron Man on Saturday afternoon and it was awesome. I’m a bit of a fanboy when it comes to comic book to movie adaptations and I know many of them aren’t that great. Iron Man definitely lived up to the hype in my opinion though.
After the movie, Muse and I split up and went with our friends to different places. Me and my friend went to Sham Shui Po to go to the computer and game malls to look for a Sony PSP for me. I thought about getting a second hand system but decided it was too much risk for too little discount. So I went for a new one. Unfortunately all the cool colors of the new ‘slim’ PSP are all twice the price (or more) of the standard black, white or pastel colors. So I found a shop that still sold the ‘fat’ versions. They had a few of the limited Japanese releases so I went for one of those. Just to make Colin jealous if nothing else.
Oh yeah, that is a metallic blue Sony PSP. Only released in Japan but everything ends up in Hong Kong eventually. Sometimes I love shopping here in Hong Kong.
Muse has already posted about our trip to see the Pink Dolphins so I’m just going to post a couple of the pictures I got from the trip. The boat ride was taken with the Hong Kong Dolphinwatch tour.
Like Muse said, the young dolphins are actually grey and they become pink as they reach adulthood. We got to see a few bright pink adults but they were always farther out and not as curious as the young ones. They’ve probably learned some hard lessons. So that made the adults pretty hard to snap pictures of.
At least we got to see them though. That’s the important thing.
It’s been a busy day at work today, but I had to stop for 15 minutes to get harrassed by a few people here in the office. About my shirt. I’m as confused as you.
Two of my co-workers stopped me and asked, with somewhat shocked looks on their faces, why I was wearing an orange shirt. It’s just a plain, solid-color, bright orange polo-style shirt: nothing fancy. It has an old ink stain on it but it’s hardly noticeable. So I told them why: It was clean. Then they laughed and said to each other “He doesn’t know!” The confused look on my face was threatening to become a permanant fixture.
The Olympic Torch is going through the streets of Hong Kong as I type this. I knew about this because cameras were setup this morning already and traffic was jacked up all to hell. What I didn’t know was that people were wearing Red color shirts to show their support of China and the Olympics in China. People were wearing Orange shirts to show that they are supporting human rights.
So, I’m thinking that supporting human rights isn’t such a bad thing, right? Well maybe. It seems that Orange is also symbolizing being Anti-Chinese and against the China government. Which truthfully I’m not terribly fond of their government but I wouldn’t go so far to wear a shirt that says so. Except today it would seem. I was also told by these co-workers of mine – who all seem to revel in my ignorance of things that go on in China – that a man from Denmark was denied entry into Hong Kong because he was some form of protestor or another. Presumably something to do with human rights, Tibet, the Olympics, Tiananmen Square or some combination thereof which got him pulled aside and give a full body cavity search. I made up that last part about the full body cavity search but these people are pretty thorough over here so there’s no telling really.
And what was this Danish man wearing when he was being questioned with rubber hoses and thumbscrews? A freaking Orange shirt. So now – much to the confusion of foriegners and color blind people everywhere – orange shirts have become a symbol of civil unrest and rebellion towards the Chinese government. I was warned to steer clear of police and military people and to definitely avoid going to the Olympic Torch route. Which is funny because I stood along that very same route for over 30 minutes this morning waiting for my bus to work.
So I was down in the mall that connects to our office building (because no self respecting office building in Hong Kong can be more than walking distance to a shopping center) and contemplating the purchase of another shirt for my long commute home. It was then that I saw a local delivery man wearing his company polo-style uniform shirt. It was bright orange. So I figure that if their company doesn’t think that orange shirts are a problem then I shouldn’t have anything to worry about. And I’ve never even been to Denmark.
If I don’t make it home tonight… someone please come looking for me. I’ll be the white guy with the chin beard sitting in a cell with a bunch of Chinese anarchists wearing orange shirts.
For some reason, most of our Asia Pacific offices are closed tomorrow, May 1st. Some offices are closed Friday as well. Well at least our mainland China offices are. This means that I’ll get to sleep in tomorrow! Yay! Although the dogs will notice that I’m not getting up and wake me up because that’s what they do. Or if they don’t do it, the cats will. They like a really inaccurate secondary alarm clock. Unless they’re feeling snuggly. Then they fail in the secondary alarm clock role.
I need to finish up tomorrow’s comic. I’m really behind right now which kind of sucks. OK that’s not true. I’m not really behind as I know I’ll complete tomorrow’s comic in time to be posted. However, I don’t have any others that I’m working on at the moment so my buffer is empty. Well, all except an unrelated comic I drew. I’m holding that one in reserve in case of emergency. But I should make some progress tomorrow and over the weekend.
Today I have edited a few existing comic scripts and wrote a few new ones. I keep all the scripts in a .txt file which is really odd, but it works. I also drew an explosion and a glass of liquid (seperate drawings) in Illustrator while on lunch. The explosion is over there. –>
Otherwise, the weather is still quite mild for Hong Kong. It’s crazy. Winter was so short last year that we were soaked in sweat by this time last year. Now, it’s nice. Not sure what the difference is, but I am certainly not complaining.
People really seemed to like the tech tips that I posted yesterday. If you’re interested, I could easily come up with a tech tip a week at least. Not sure if I can make each one interesting or humorous but I can certainly try. If you, the readers, would be interested in that becoming a regular feature just let me know in the comments.
General, Hong Kong, Internet | cybrpunk | 
June 6, 2008 4:40 pm | 
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