Countdown So I am finally at the tail end of this project I've been working on for most of the year. This week is the final week of development and then we have a couple of weeks of testing, and then we are Live.

It's been a great experience, although two trips to Tokyo were ridiculously busy - I only saw the 100m stretch between the hotel and the office on each occasion.

Most interesting has been watching (yet again) how the worlds of business and software development intersect and how the same old problems keep on cropping up. Business people don't know how software developers do what they do, and the developers think business people are insane. To be fair we've kept that to a minimum on this project, but we still get things like

"Adrian, I can't publish anything!!!!!"
"Ah, yes, they took that away today while they fixed something else."
"Yes, but, we can't PUBLISH ANYTHING."
"Don't worry, we'll put it back in 30 minutes."

Whee.

  ¶ 3:22 PM (0) comments links to this post

  Grey Ghosts Revealed Every so often the Navy (usually the US Navy) moors in the waters off Kennedy Town. Over Halloween there were two destroyers and an aircraft carrier - the USS George Washington.

This week the destroyers returned for a couple of days. Usually it's quite hard to make them out through the haze, and they can often be moored quite far away and far apart from each other. Wednesday was an unusually clear day this week, so I managed to get a snap with my phone. I had to wait for the ferry on the right to get out of the way, hope that the fishing boat on the left wouldn't wander into the shot, and all before the bus left.

  ¶ 8:42 PM (1) comments links to this post

  Macau, brought to you by Ballard

Ballardian - defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard’s novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments."

Ballard would have loved present-day Macau.

A small post-colonial enclave, dominated by the gambling industry's overblown temples to greed, run by a venal gang of thugs who all seem to have the surname Ho, totally reliant on a capricious Communist master for its survival.

What's missing? Ah yes - typically in a Ballard novel the bleak landscape is the result of an environmental catastrophe. But no problem - Macau's got that covered.

High-rolling Macau is on the verge of a crisis, with hotel and casino operators - as well as legislators - only now hearing about a critical shortage of drinking water. With key supplier Zhuhai facing woes of its own and Macau having drinking water in its reservoirs for just 10 days, rationing is a real possibility. (from The Standard)

10 days - that's it. And the Macanese government has only now just bothered to tell the city's people of the impending shortage. What were they hoping? That it would miraculously rain huge amounts in the next ten days? And in fact that's probably what they were hoping. They have no control over their water supply and are totally reliant on Zhuhai for water. They are screwed.

Hong Kong could theoretically be in the same situation, except the city has an agreement that supposedly guarantees supply until at least 2012. That supply is interesting - it comes from Dongjiang in Guangdong, and the area that supplies the water has to some extent sacrificed its own economic development to keep the source river clean. I wonder how guaranteed that supply really is if there were to be a prolonged drought such as there's been in Australia for the past decade. I'm not sure the people of Guangdong would be too keen on sacrificing their drinking water just so their rich compatriots in Hong Kong could carry on showering and drinking in the manner to which they're accustomed.

Meanwhile, I was hoping to go to Macau for lunch in the next couple of weeks - might have to stock up on bottled water before I go.  ¶ 9:36 AM (0) comments links to this post

  The best thing you will see all day

He can only load the machine with one at a time, he makes between 20-30 per day.  ¶ 3:08 PM (0) comments links to this post

  My city's better than yours nyah nyah nyah I noticed today that a number of papers have published articles about the Mercer Quality of Living Survey. Depending on where each papers' city ended up, there was then a certain amount of crowing or eating crow in each article. I kind of get the idea of measuring a city based on infrastructure, or "quality of life", or maybe even some other intangible factors such as Art. But I do think all this pointless crowing or worrying about where each city ended up in the survey should be tempered with this one point - to create the survey Mercer measure "Carefully selected factors representing the criteria considered most relevant to international executives."

Let's see - what would an international executive look for in a city? Low tax rate (hello Singapore), good airport, cheap domestic help, sizable expat community, no need to learn the local language (hm, this is all Singapore).

But what does that have to do with the needs of the city's permanent inhabitants? Things like the environment, town planning, vibrant arts scene, easy access to good quality education, diverse employment opportunities, good government etc etc.

Let's face it - an "international executive" will go wherever they (or their company) think they need to go to do business. Even if someone didn't want to be transferred to Seattle (50th on the list), you can bet it wouldn't be too hard for the company to find someone else that would be prepared to go.  ¶ 4:21 PM (0) comments links to this post

  Smog, gloom, time It's been some time since I posted anything here - time flies when there's a bub in the house. Also since it seems our lives really only revolve around the bub it feels like there's not much to say anyway.

However the world goes on, so here's an update from my corner of it. I was hoping the economic crisis would make an impact on the smog that rolls across the China border, but no such luck. The smog is BACK this week, as foul and putrid as ever. Which raises an interesting question for the Hong Kong government - if all the factories in Guangdong are closing , where's the smog coming from? Could it be - gasp - Hong Kong? The government's smog abatement strategy continues to be hoping the wind will blow it away. So as the Chinese economy continues to deflated we may see some more pressure on the HK govt to Do Something.

And the economy, by the way, really is cactus. Property prices are dropping like smog-confused pigeons, who might also have bird flu, which has reappeared in the territory. Planeloads of broken expatriate bankers are leaving, someone is throwing bottles of acid at crowds of shoppers - and on and on it goes. Which is why we're taking a short break in the land of Oz. Merry Christmas!

  ¶ 8:40 PM (0) comments links to this post

  Once again, Time Magazine picks the peak If Time Magazine features something on its front cover, you know that "something" has jumped the shark. I'll never forget the breathless article about the new generation of internet entrepreneurs - the cover featured a guy whose genius idea was an online dating concierge service for nerds, and had attracted huge amounts of venture capital. That was back in 2000 (I think) and looking at that cover I knew instinctively that the internet bubble was close to collapsing - too much money being thrown at bad ideas, and the clueless editors of Time Magazine had fallen for it.

So earlier this year, on the cover of Time Magazine, they featured the headline "NYLONKONG: A Tale of Three Cities". See what they did there? New York, London, Hong Kong. The article goes on to describe the three cities as:

Yet these are places that know how to meet a challenge. They've done it before. From being dismissed as long past their prime a quarter of a century ago, New York, London and Hong Kong have gone on to extraordinary heights. Tying themselves together, they have also knitted the world into a seamless fabric, financing and transporting the container vessels and the streams of data that have made today's global economy a phenomenon that has increased the life chances of countless millions. Welcome to Nylonkong, and the world it made.

Contrast and compare with this quote from today's Wall Street Journal:

The financial crisis is hitting many drivers of London's growth as a global financial capital in recent years. London's economy appears to be changing in fundamental ways, and, with it, the psyche of the City.

And in The Standard

Thousands of workers gathered outside a shuttered toy maker in Dongguan, southern China, demanding unpaid wages as factories in the region, hit by falling demand and now the global crisis, struggle to survive. Manufacturers in the once-booming Guangdong province have suffered over the past year and a half from tight curbs on loans, rising labor costs and China's stronger currency, which makes their products more expensive.

And of course New York is the home of Wall Street, where all this mess started anyway.

So the lesson is this - if you, or your industry, or your country, or your culture, are featured on the cover of Time Magazine, your time is over.  ¶ 10:21 AM (1) comments links to this post