May 2004 Archives

It's a good 'un:

Go read the whole thing. Remember when America had Presidents, not a Junta.

When googlebombing, I do believe that the text in the link has to be the desired search term.

Shaky's having trouble with asiaxpat.com,

That should do the trick. I loath referrer spam.

Update: following comments from Shri below, all general terms removed, but the obvious one left in.

Terry Jones, writer, film director, actor and Python has something to say about Bush:

(Link found via The Sideshow.)

I remember when one of these was the bee's knees in portable computing technology. It's probably still got some uses today. 20 hours of battery life in use!

Tempting though it is, I'll stick with my 16MB Palm Pilot...

(As seen on Charlie Stross's Diary)

Now that I'm a registered voter, you can rest assured that i'll be voting for Hemlock when the election comes around.

Riverbend, an Iraqi lady in Baghdad, has some advice for the American Empire:

If you didn't know about it already, here's a link to Project Gutenberg, a collaborative attempt to have all books in the public domain available on the internet. It's an invaluable resource for old books and classical works. It's been going for 33 years already, so it's one of the oldest Internet projects around.

Orcinus is a site well worth reading regularly. He's just put up a great article on the state of the news media.

There's been a few incidents of the site being off-line over the last few days. There's a few causes of this. One is that there's been renovating happening in the flat upstairs and they managed to cut one of our power lines. This took out the power for most of the flat. The other thing is that the router isn't keeping the connection up like it should.

The power has been temporarily fixed, and the builders will come down and do a proper repair job sometime next week.

The router problem is a bit harder to solve: it has an option to keep the connection alive by 're-dialing' if the connection is down for longer than 60 seconds. This isn't working. I'm going to try and write some simple perl (or bash) script to monitor the connection and hopefully push the 'connect' button on the router's control page when necessary.

A side effect of the router being out of action is that mail doesn't work. This isn't really a problem if the outage is a few hours. A longer outage does start to pose a risk of email bouncing due to there being no server to receive it on this end. Generally speaking, a proper Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) like Sendmail or PostFix will retry every hour or so until five days have passed. Some poorly written MTAs will give up after only a few hours.

Yesterday, I went to Immigration Department to sort out a new ID card. I was able to book an appointment over the internet, although it wasn't very busy. I can remember when getting an ID card was a half day's work. Yesterday, I was in there for about 90 mins, so it was just a long lunch break. Mind you, working a few minutes walk from Immigration Tower is a big help!

The drill is the same as normal: turn up with your form and supporting documentation, get your picture taken, your fingerprints recorded and every thing put on record. There's then a short interview with an Immigration Officer just to make sure that they haven't given an ID card to Osama Bin Laden or George Bush or some other undesirables.

These days, everything is digital, so you have a good few tries to get a decent photograph and you don't have inky fingerprints for a while.

In my case, the supporting documentation was my letter of Right of Abode, so I guess the whole process was very streamlined. Sometimes, if you have an employment visa, your company can cock up the supporting documentation with a bad sponsoring letter.

Now I've got my little docket - basically a paper copy of my new ID card, and an appointment to pick up the real deal in two weeks. It'll be interesting to see the differences between a conditional and permanent ID card.

in March 1997, I came out to Hong Kong for a three month contract. Today I got my Right of Abode in Hong Kong, which includes Permanent Resident Status. Now I have to book an appointment to get my new ID Card.

Excuse me while I sing loud Billy Bragg songs in yer ear to celebrate May Day.

I was a Miner, I was a docker...

I'm watching the Harbour Fest video right now: Hong Kong Rocks. The music's good, but the commentary is awful. It's completely banal, frequently innacurate (The Jumbo floating restaurant is 'a must-see'?), and pitched at about the level of the frequent HKTA adverts which show, that we (people watching local TV in Hong Kong) should really come to Hong Kong.

My taxes paid for this? Give me $100 million Hong Kong dollars and I'll personally go and make tourists come here.

It was one year ago today that the unelectable miserable failure, Preznit Dubya declared Mission Accomplished.