Andre

With the ever-growing list of online social networks, invitations to join the latest "coolest" network flood my inbox daily. I'm not a fan of such sites, at least not the "friends" part of it. It's a different matter with the "business" networks. Too much hype and wrong or plain fake importance is given to sites like MySpace. People were aware of and met other people before such sites existed and with all personal information users put online about themselves and others, such sites recently began to become rather a problem than a source of opportunities for some.

The ever-growing list of new sites requires a huge amount of time just to keep own profile pages updated and track friends' activities. With new features added to every site nearly weekly, the risk is high to miss out on the latest extension and thus become "lame" in the view of others.

What bothers me most is the stream of invitations by total strangers to add them to my own friends' list despite me not even having a common language with some of them. What's the use? Many users are "friend hunting", basically just artificially boosting their friends' list into the hundreds to show off what cool, handsome, exotic, strange, foreign... people they "know".

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It's 20something degree Celsius outside, a bit of wind, perfect to go to the beach with high waves and a sea temperature of 25C. The problem with this scenario: it's November and we're in Hong Kong.

For most people in Hong Kong, the mainland China national holiday on October 1 (also a public holiday in Hong Kong) marks the day they switch from summer to winter clothes; no matter the weather outside. It's a day off work and no duties like ancestor worship to do. One can't wait until Christmas (public holiday in Hong Kong) to switch clothes, or even worse, actually do it on a weekend or any given evening (watching local TV dramas is way more important - to the point that most restaurants feature flatscreens in every corner).

What makes me question the mental state of these people is:

• It's hot (25C-30C) and lifeguards are on duty at the beaches until October 31; why is October considered winter? For those who don't know it yet: Hong Kong is located in a subtropical climate.
• Why dressing in the full set of winter clothes? Is it necessary to run around with a scarf and hat?
• Often, it is much cooler indoors than outdoors. While buses, fast-food chains, offices... usually hoover around the 20C setting (although the government recommends a more healthy and energy-saving 25.5C environment), people nevertheless take off all their winter clothes once inside. Then they wonder why they are sick (sweating outdoors in the clothes and freezing indoors without the clothes).
• Many show a total lack of common sense: jogging around in oversized winter training clothes and shouting to friends "so hot, so hot".

People keep trying, no matter how many times others have failed before. Not even to mention that their trials are so flawed it becomes amusing just to read how they failed.

Once again, an international counterfeiting gang tried to con a large bank out of more money than they'd possibly have in stock, with a method so commonly known as the Nigerian Letter. Targeting the Bank Of England, a group of 6 posing as fake lawyers and representatives of Chinese families from the preCommunist era who owned the money and wished to exchange it, came up with a story of 6 owners (aged 109 to 116) of special bank notes who'd like to cash them in before they'd die.

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Most of the time, there is no such thing as a free lunch, but sometimes you might just be lucky. Usually featuring some Hong Kong promotional video clips, a giant screen at the entrance of Victoria Park opposite of Windsor House ran a free ad for Symantec all afternoon; only this time likely nobody approved nor wanted this ad to show up:

Guess I came along a bug in the SMS handling of HP's iPaq hw6965. I noticed this strange behavior once before but quickly forgot about it until this morning when exactly the same happened again.

Using a 3 (Three) rechargeable SIM card, I get a text message (SMS) from the service provider when I am under 10HK$ after making a phone call. Going below 10 by sending a text message won't trigger that notification (at least I never had that experience). Anyway, the point is that if the balance is below 10HK$, outgoing SMS won't work anymore. A standard error message from the phone pops up telling me I first have to subscribe to the service before I can use it. Doing a recharge enables text messaging again and there won't be a problem if I wouldn't want to re-send the previously failed message.

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