Yearly Archives: 2009
Hong Kong 2009 (Part 2)
Another day comes to an end.
Hong Kong 2009 Photos now available.
Last night’s visit to the Temple St Night Market was a good one. After leaving the Pacific Coffee House, I wandered down to the Market’s edge and found a good seat at my favourite roadside restaurant. The place doesn’t look like much and the cheap plastic tables and stools don’t necessarily get your taste buds into overtime, but the owners cook the best sliced beef and vegetable satay, this side of the Pacific.
I sat in the warm humid afterglow of the afternoon, happily munching on this spicy dish and washing it down with a large chilled bottle of the local Tsing Tsao beer, watching life go by and the stall owners finish setting up for the evening. An hour later I was strolling through the markets, haggling for all I was worth with the stallholders and having a great time into the bargain (no pun intended). 
At the end of Temple St, I watched the many fortune tellers plying their trade and as always, it was interesting to see the range of clientele; from wizened little old Haklo boat ladies to young business executives in their tailor-made silk suits, everyone wanted to know what the future held in store for them. Just around the bend is a place I affectionately refer to as: Karaoke corner/
+24Hong Kong 2009 (Part 1)
Hong Kong 2009 Photos now available.
Anyone who reads this blog (or the Bandanna Club website) – even occasionally – will know that I’ve made a number of visits to Hong Kong. Certainly it’s my favourite stopover whenever I head back down under and I don’t generally miss the chance to stroll down it’s streets and sample the wares of it’s markets
+29Harvest Time
It’s been more than 20 years since I helped with a fruit harvest on my folks’ orchard. Back in those days, when the orchard primarily grew citrus fruit, my folks would hire a handful of staff to help them pick the crop and we would work at a steady pace for weeks, filling bin after bin. I can remember some harvests taking as long as 6-8 weeks to complete.
+18Rant:Tesco in the Doghouse
Being away from my normal patch (on the other side of the big pond) catching up with uncles, aunts and cousins in a long-overdue reunion has been terrific.
Over a fairly sunny weekend, we ate, drank and laughed together, catching up on the news and each others’ lives, in between a couple of games of Petanque (French Bowls) and a jam session or six with one of my cousins who is learning to play guitar (left handed) and who has made impressive progress in a very short time.
+32Two Nights in Bangkok
Well here I am, sitting in a Bangkok internet cafe, on the last morning of a flying visit to Thailand, sipping a freshly brewed cup of Jasmine tea and collecting my thoughts…
I arrived yesterday afternoon into a typical late Thai summer day of 40°C with 99% humidity. The roads from Suvarnabhumi Airport to my hotel (the Royal Princess Larn Luang in the old part of the city) were choked with traffic (thank all the Gods for airport limos with air conditioning) and it took about an hour and a half to get to the hotel.
+25Rant: Pharmacology’s True Colours
An article on the Beeb’s website entitled: Life: A medical condition has addressed the growing trend of psychoanalysts wanting to categorize all aspects of human behaviour as some form of abnormality.
New “disorders” (which in that annoyingly American style always seem to have a 3-letter acronym) are being “identified” on a daily basis by the psychobabble brigade, all of whom are keen to make their mark in the American Psychiatric Association ‘bible’ and then reap the material rewards from the book deals, lecture circuit tours, overpriced consulting and other pseudo-academic bollocks that invariably follows.
+28The dark art of Navigation Manager
In a slight departure from our normal style and content, and especially for my fellow RedDot CMS sufferers, I modestly offer my first white paper, submitted to Markus Giesen’s Unofficial RedDot CMS blog.
Markus has turned it into a proper article and made it available to download as well. Hope you find it useful…
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