Markus’ Blog

It’s been a few days since my last post, and not surprisingly, we have seen and experienced a few more things since then.

We went shopping, Brigette mainly looking for stuff for herself, and ended up buying two shirts for me. The story of our lives. lol We rode the traditional double-decker tram from Central till almost Shau Kei Wan, making a stop near Happy Valley.

Took a few shots from Causeway Bay over to Kowloon

Rode the tram back and went for Thai food.

We had high tea at the Peninsula Hotel, which was quite lovely, with a few musicians playing. We shopped some more. We admired the night view of Hong Kong Island from Kowloon.

Watched the Symphony of Lights performance (I’ll post a video of it, it was impressive) and finally had dinner at PJ Murphy’s Irish Country Pub on Nathan Road. Interesting experience seeing a pub menu in English/Cantonese with photos of the dishes — presumably, because the translation may not mean all that much without a picture to go with it. It tasted very authentic, though — as much as a Canadian and an Austrian can classify Irish cuisine. lol Bottom line is we liked it and we got home way past our bed time.

Update: Here is the promised Symphony of Lights video:

We started our day by crossing the harbour in a ferry rather than via subway. The wind made the ride fairly “bumpy” (no comparison to crossing Burrard Inlet :-), and the views were impressive.

Then we made our way up to the highest point of Hong Kong today: the Peak. We took the tram up to get there.

The view was of Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, although very misty, quite stunning.

The lunch we had up on the Peak was, unfortunately, only mediocre (even though the price for it wasn’t).

After some more window shopping, we made our way on foot back into town. It was a nice walk, but we got a bit more than we bargained for. Not only was the path down quite steep in places, it was also quite long (90+ minutes to get somewhere near civilization again). Our calf muscles are sure going to thank us tomorrow. lol

Two things come to mind: exciting and humid. Exciting, because there’s lots of interesting stuff to see and humid, because it’s, well, freaking warm and humid. Like sit around, do nothing and sweat like crazy humid. — Not that I expected otherwise, but it’s even a little more extreme than I was anticipating.

Here’s one of the side streets off of Nathan Road:

And here’s Hong Kong Island seen from the Avenue of the Stars:

I am looking forward to exploring more of Hong Kong tomorrow!

We had a pretty eventless flight to Hong Kong. It was long, long, long, but otherwise not bad. We have certainly had way worse. I have to say, though, that I have only once before been as uncomfortable sitting on an airplane. We made the mistake of getting the first row of 3 seats in the middle (with 4 seats in front of us). That meant that our seats were narrower, as the tray table had to go in the arm rests and I couldn’t stretch out my legs due very well, due to the offset between the two rows.

Service on board was good, though, as was the transfer from the airport to the hotel (train + free shuttle bus). Finally we fell into bed at around 23:45 local time — and slept till about noon today (Monday, May 5). Now we are starving and will venture out to have some yummy food for lunch.

Finally, the day has arrived. We are departing for our two week vacation in Hong Kong. I hope the flight goes smoothly and Cathay Pacific is as awesome as they were last year when we flew to New York.

It’s going to be one tough flight for me anyhow. Not only will it be the longest I have ever been on a plane: over 13 hours. To top it off, I can’t sleep (very well) on planes. — We’ll see about the “very well” part. I hope it’s a “not very well” and not a “not at all”.

But being there and spending time there should be worth it. I am sure it’ll be a great experience. This will be, after all, my first time to any Asian country. I am very excited and very much looking forward to it.

Since we are bringing our laptop, there should be fairly regular updates (with pictures even!) while we are gone.

As indicated in a previous post I was scheduled to receive a new Canon Powershot G9. Well, about two weeks ago was the big day. After ordering a display model from a camera store in Toronto, my new G9 arrived.

I took it with me on my trip to San Jose to try it out a bit. The pictures are not too exciting, as I didn’t do very much other than go to the office and go out to eat.

I like it a lot. Not surprising, it’s got many feature enhancements over my good old G1, which I bought in 2001. It’s also a lot lighter.

Apparently, a father held his own daughter captive for over two decades, abused, and had several children with her. I stuns and disgusts me how people can even think of doing anything like this.

All this happened in Amstetten, Lower Austria, maybe a 90 minute drive from where I grew up.

The story is making top headlines on CNN and the BBC, and probably most news broadcasters in the Western hemisphere.

Not even two years ago, a different case of a child being held hostage was finally discovered. That one happened even closer to where I used to live: in Gänserndorf, a mere 40 minute drive from Korneuburg. In that case, the victim managed to escape and the captor committed suicide.

Looks like my server’s IP address is going to change at some point this upcoming weekend. I still need to coordinate the exact time when that’s going to happen. This change could result in an outage of this site for hopefully no longer than 1 hour.

Speaking of change, I also upgraded to Wordpress 2.5.1. I was waiting for the first bug fix release after 2.5 before switching. I didn’t feel like getting hit by new security holes introduced with all the new features in 2.5, hence the delay.

The upgrade took all of 45 seconds or so (that includes upgrading the database after installing the new Wordpress version). I used the Subversion upgrade process again. It’s still a charm as ever. No need to manually fiddle with anything.

Also, all plugins still seem to work.

The weather is not supposed to do that. Snow in April is just wrong. Especially in Vancouver. But it happened.

Getting back from a trip to San Jose, on April 18, I was welcomed by thick snow flakes falling from the sky. It even started to stick. About an hour after getting home, the view from our condo looked like this.

Of course it’s all gone again by now, but it’s still too cool for this time of year.

It took over a year to get 10,000 spam comments, but only six months to get another 10,000.

Not a good trend.

If it keeps up, I’ll be hitting 30,000 in July.