February 2003 Archives

I've just finished reading "McCarthy's Bar", by Pete McCarthy. It's a travelogue through Ireland, showing the real country and the real people. It should be compulsory reading for anyone who thinks they know the country.

Iain Masterton now has a website featuring some of his fine photographs of the Hutongs in Beijing. Iain's a long time Hong Kong and China resident who's a very talented photographer. For many years, he lived in Beijing and took many, many photographs of the older parts of the city. www.hutongphotography.com is his new website. The site has some of Iain's wonderful photographs. You can contact Iain at Iain Masterton - Hutong Photographer.

Iain speaks, reads and writes Chinese and, as well as being a very accomplished photographer is a professional writer and Bridge Engineer.

Iain was a major contributor to the Cathay Camera Club and very many of his Hong Kong photographs feature in In The Heart of the Metropolis, the book by the Royal Asiatic Society, concerning the rapidly disappearing older parts of Hong Kong. Buy the book!

The parents have been put on the next best thing to the plane: the "Airport Express". This is a train which goes directly from Central district to the airport. It's a great arrangement: you can check in your baggage at Central and hop on the train with only your carry on baggages. This brings you directly to the airport and onto your flight with no further worries about rushing to get to the airport to check in. Now if only if didn't cost so much...

I found a few places deep-linking to some of my pictures this morning: www.undergroundhiphop.com and www.network54.com. In both cases, there was no attempt to credit me as the photographer and one of the images was of Roxanne, my daughter. I will absolutely not tolerate my bandwidth and my images being used in this way.

UndergroundHipHop.com responded to my complaints and removed the link, which was posted by a user named Mathematics. Network54.com have done nothing. The user there known as Alex is no better than a thief. He's incompetent too: he used the image on the left and claimed that it was a picture of a building by Frank Lloyd Wright. what a maroon!

Local Hong Hong Kong band Ultrastatic have a website now.

They're playing the Wanch next Saturday 15th Feb, so go down and support them, if you're in the area.

My folks are in town for the next two weeks, seeing their first grandson for the first time and being tourists.

Link of the Day: Big White Guy.com is an interesting site with plenty of stories of life in Hong Kong. I like the site; he writes well and affectionately about life here. Also, his site design is clean and elegant. Good stuff Randall. He does have a lot of paranoid nonsense about crime in Hong Kong, which is probably coming from his wife. The absolute rubbish about being afraid to put your wallet in your back pocket is the kind of tripe which comes from an addict of the local trashy newspapers.

Jerry Pournelle's site.

"We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth;
Let us rest our eyes on the friendly skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth"
-- Robert A. Heinlein

Happy Lunar New Year.