Fnord.

LED billboard, crashed and showing the Windows desktop. Lots of these kind of displays now.

Looking south to HK island proper

Working on the designs over an extended breakfast, Bjorn doing the rockstar pose.

Old clocktower on the waterfront.

Last but not least, I was in the fitting room at the tailor, which is fun because all the walls are covered with pictures and letters from famous clients. I took a bad picture of this one because in-law Heidi is a huge fan:

Yep, that's Bjork.

Looks to have been taken backstage, probably when she came through on tour. Cool, eh?

Some miscellaneous snaps and commentary as I regroup at home and work:

Nathan Road, Kowloon side, posing with a mug for a PB coffeehouse

A wedding party at the waterfront. Surreal.

Waterfront and ferry terminal.

Arts and culture building on the waterfront.

More waterfront.

I had some work-in-progress pictures to add, but I need to figure out how to pixellate out the details first.

Hong Kong is a really cool place. Go if you get the chance.

One of our vendors there took us to a very good Korean BBQ dinner. The stack of raw beef they bring out is kind of daunting:

and the array of tasty bits and sauces:

I strongly suspect that I gained some weight this trip. Lots of great food every day!

I just got back from a week in Hong Kong and wanted to write a few notes before my memory fades.

1. As previously noted, get a PCCW SIM card at the airport for use with phone and WiFi. I forgot my old one, didn’t get one at the airport and never did manage to buy one. None of the four 7-11’s I checked had them in stock for some reason.
2. Sam’s Tailor still rocks. I got a blue sportjacket, a couple of shirts and two pairs of pants. And two ties. I am now set for dress clothes.
3. I took my Yes Inca as my sole watch, and as expected it was excellent for the purpose. Dual timezones let me know when to video chat with home, the 24-hour display was nice perspective for the jetlag, and it went well with casual and sporty clothes. Not to mention it was good to wear to all of the meetings.
4. After reading this post, I went across the bay to Liii Liii Couture and am having a couple of pairs of shoes made for me. The guys there are very nice, and very accommodating. I have different sized and shaped feet, we discovered after tracing and measuring the hoofs, so I’m intensely curious to see how shoes made to fit will work. They are making pairs with more padding and high instep, so I am hopeful that these’ll last me long enough to make up for the high cost. I’ve wasted money on several pairs of dress and semi-dress shoes that don’t last.
5. We stayed in the Kowloon Hotel this time, and while it’s OK I’d recommend the Imperial Hotel instead.
6. The already-awesome Octopus card (busses, subway, trams and vending machines) now works some Starbucks locations, so be sure to buy one at the airport. These days, you can even buy an Octopus chip built into a watch! Very cool.
7. We flew Cathay Pacific again, the same 881/882 flights, but the experience wasn’t as good. Flights were completely full, and they now charge $100 per leg for exit row (WTF?!), so I was crammed both times. More room than American carriers, but still coach. Note that:
   1. their video systems are fantastic, which helps, but you need the airline adapter if you want to use your own headphones.
   2. Coach seats have a power jack behind the tray, but it’s HK/UK style plug only.
   3. They limit carry-on bags to a super light 15 pounds, so pack light. Or be prepared to be forced to check.
   4. I paid the $100 for exit row on my return leg, and when I moved up my departure a day they refused to give me exit row or refund my money. Needless to say, I was and am quite pissed about this, especially on a 13-hour flight. Very shitty of them.

I’ll be posting pictures later.

Grey Rock, outside Ft Collins:

The hike (2.9 miles each way to the top)

Near the top

As far as we go

We didn’t make it the last .75mi, where you see the massif in the second picture. The altitude was really getting to me after the hike from 5100′ or so. Good hike regardless, and really nice to get outside and up a mountain.

Via the guilty-pleasure site AoM, a site of astoundingly well made and beautiful… leather luggage. Really.

329 for a messenger bag (!!), but browse the site. They are obsessed with luggage, and in a good way:

Will your grandkids contest the will over your present leather briefcase?

If your last bag were empty and someone was trying to steal it, would you fight for it tooth and nail?

Ever been stopped by 5 strangers in the same day asking where you got your leather bag?

Have you ever placed your leather satchel so people could admire it?

Besides the soon forgotten cash, what will you leave behind that they’ll remember you by?

Great ad copy, that.

We just missed the chance to go to India due to illness, heavy sigh, so all I can do is admire from afar.

Took me a while, but the album of Hong Kong pictures is finally posted! I selected about a third of the entire set, so its not as large. I also resized all the pics to a max of 1200 pixels, so they should load pretty fast. Enjoy!

The explanation is that this is the Hong Kong Watch and Clock Show, biggest in the world, been running for 25 years. It’s a great place and I hope to return someday.

Tips:

1. Buy an Octopus card in the airport. It’s 150HK but works many places – subway, tram, vending machines, airport shuttle. If you remember you can get the deposit back by returning the card at the airport before you leave; I was not so clever.
2. Buy an PCCW sim card from 7-11; there’s one in the airport. This gets you a local phone and unlimited SMS. I used my unlocked iPhone, which combined with #3 rocked.
3. In many many places, there’s WiFi from PCCW, and you can signup for a free 30-day trial if you have a local phone number! Instant WiFi in most places, including subways and many phone booths. Yeah, the phone booths have WiFi; the US has become a second-world nation in many ways.
4. Thanks to Locke Lee, I knew to hit Sam’s tailor, on Nathan Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon. Suit, blazer, shirts and more, and they look fantastic and were quite reasonable. Highly recommended!
5. I stayed at the Imperial Hotel in Kowloon and recommend it. Cheap, very nice, centrally located, only complaint is that WiFi is 120HK per day.
6. If you’re into vintage watches, Berne Horology in Central is magnificent.

Yesterday was San Jose, CA:

Exactly one week before that was San Jose, CR:

…quite the difference, eh? One letter difference in the airport codes, too – SJC vs SJO. Anyway, the coincidence amused me, but thanks to good luck on Southwest my case of Traveller’s Butt isn’t too bad. Check out this luck:

If you’re me on an airplane, that is absolutely the luckiest you can get. Seat 10E (I think) on the 737-xxx has a space in front of it, for over 1m of legroom! Bliss. Doubly lucky since I had gate pass B30something.

Back home now, just ran out to Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve for a meeting this morning:

So I’ve been quite the travellin’ fool of late. Home sounds good for a while.

Click the image for or here for the pictures, a superfast 4-day trip to La Selva Biological Reserve in Costa Rica. Supercool, incredibly hot & humid, and not nearly long enough to enjoy.

For the JavaOne/MBARI trip, I took along my trust Omron HJ-720ITC pedometer.

This nifty little toy is a wonderful pedometer, and it saves up to 41 days’ worth of data onboard that you can download to your desktop for viewing and analysis. Unlike most of them, its based on an accelerometer chip instead of a tilt switch, so you can toss it in a pocket or bag and it’ll still count accurately. The included software is Windows-only, and I’ve not made a lot of progress in writing an OSX driver. I’ve gotten as far as USB bus enumeration and finding the device I want; it looks like all I need is to download and parse a single ‘report’, but anyway. Project page is here on googlecode if you want to help out.

Here’s a screenshot of the week of the trip, click for fullsize:

(That’s running on VMWare Fusion on my Mac, by the way.)

That’s a lotta walking! Over 12000 steps on two days, and 52 thousand for the week. Now you know why your feet are tired after a conference… It claims 30.4 miles, but I think I need to recalibrate my step distance, I doubt that I walked that far. Interesting regardless, I though.