Thursday, December 31, 2009

Going into 2010 the cold way (almost)

At this very moment, I could have been typing my final words in 2009 in a zero degree Celsius room, with a torch, a mobile phone and a 2-hour laptop battery being my only power source. Thankfully it wasn't like that.

On this very last day of 2009, I lost electricity at home. It's the stupid laptop power adaptor again; this is already a replacement but this time it even brought down the power of the whole flat. The circuit breakers inside the flat did not trip, but every socket and every light switch was dead.

I was fearing the worst and planning how to endure a long dark night in this holiday period without lighting and without heating - surely an unconventional way to go into a new year - when the guy from the letting agent came over and fixed that. Which I'm very grateful to and perhaps I should just slightly change my view about the agent.

An unusually nice journey

You don't often hear me say that, but my return journey this time could not have been better. Having picked a closer and smaller airport this time (which I should have done years ago - you see, the algorithm running in my head does produce something that converge to the optimal solution,
just very slowly), it turns out that one leg of the flight is less than 1/3 full, the passport control and baggage reclaim was exceedingly quick, and the train timetable somehow allowed me to catch unexpectedly early trains. The only worrying bit was that there were actually officers from customs standing there inspecting passengers' stuff, but I even managed to escape that. (Why can't they learn from Heathrow where there's nobody inspecting anything round the clock?)

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

「港足奪金」之曾蔭權在做甚麼

曾蔭權真是一個X街...
... 當晚唯一的遺憾,是行政長官曾蔭權於頒獎禮期間突然宣布有話要對記者說,害我「拿拿臨」仆過去採訪而錯過親眼看港隊站上頒獎台最高一級的機會。...