You think the new AIG Tower in Hong Kong looks like a mobile phone? Wait till you see this:
Crazy idea! The high-rise mobile
MILLIONAIRE mobile phone salesman “Crazy” John Ilhan has unveiled his radical design for a $40 million tower in the shape of a phone.
The distinctive 120m highrise in City Rd, Southbank, would house his multi-million-dollar communications empire and 166 luxury apartments.
Mr Ilhan, who put forward his “phone tower” plan earlier this year, hopes his distinctive building will become a Melbourne landmark.
“Every country has a building of some sort. Sydney has got the Opera House — why not this for Melbourne?” he told the Herald Sun.
Look. As you could probably see as I tugged my luggage off my taxi, I was there because I had a flight to catch, and therefore probably had no interest at that point in time in inspecting your hottest property in town. And as you could probably judge from my pace of walking, I did not have much time, if any, to entertain you.
Therefore, blocking the footpath between me and the entrance to the station would probably not raise my interest in your apartment deal. No, instead you just made me bloody furious and I am not sorry for bumping into you in full force together with my 20kg piece of luggage.
That BitTorrent case sure did cause quite a bit of stir around technology sites. But what’s this about spending years in a PRC prison and flea markets around the corner?
Hong Kong is not China. They are under completely different jurisdictions. Is that clear mate? Criminals convicted in Hong Kong never serve their sentences in a PRC prison, just as criminals convicted in the UK don’t get sent to a French prison.
Furthermore, Hong Kong is a common law jurisdiction, and I haven’t seen any Americans grasp the significance of that. Americans. Ignorant as always.
(BTW has anyone seen the full text of the judgement yet? Case number is TMCC1286/2005.)
KA207, Phnom Penh -> Hong Kong, October 26 20:05 (UTC+7) - 23:45 (UTC+8)
Australia launched their microchip-embedded ePassport today. Apart from the cheesy name (who still calls their stuff ‘eStuff’ nowadays?) and the price hike (AUD 19 more than before… wtf?), what caught my eye was that this will let them use automatic SmartGates for border control at airports, relying solely on face recognition. Is that really reliable? Hong Kong has these automatic gates too (e-Channel… damn, another e-Something), but they use fingerprints for that which is a much more mature technology. Face recognition, I don’t think so mate…
KA206, Hong Kong -> Phnom Penh, October 22 17:40 (UTC+8) - 19:10 (UTC+7)
Looks like the developer preview of Flock came out while I was on CX317. It’s certainly generating a lot of buzz. I’m playing with it right now, in fact this entry is posted using the built-in blog editor, where I can enter either raw HTML or use the rich-text editor; both are kept in sync on the fly. But annoyingly the rich-text editor keeps putting out superfluous <br /> tags. Some more impressions:
- Much faster than Firefox 1.0, as Flock is based on Firefox 1.5.
- Did not migrate my Firefox 1.0 settings. Others have noticed this too.
- Nice tools to work with del.ico.us and Flickr, but I don’t use them both. Seems there will be a way to extend Flock to integrate with other photo galleries and bookmark sites in the future though.
Overall, pretty slick. I will have to play around with it a bit more though. Also, can all the features be added to Firefox via extensions?
Apple’s been pretty busy lately… four of their product lines received updates:
iMac. Interesting, with the remote and the built-in camera. Cheap too. But I’m not in the market of new desktop computers at the moment.
PowerMac. I think this is as powerful as it will get before the switch to Intel. And it is pretty damn powerful, but alas, I’m not in the market for one at the moment.
iPod. Plays H.264 videos now. I’m not interested in the iPod; most of my music collection are in Ogg Vorbis format which the iPod doesn’t support. I know Sharon has been looking for a long time a large-capacity model to replace her iPod mini though.
PowerBook. Now this is a disappointment. Nothing actually was changed for the 12-inch model, the only model that can actually be counted as a portable… come on Apple, you can do better than that!
CX317, Beijing -> Hong Kong, 21 October 07:50 - 11:25
Back in Hong Kong for the Friday night before heading to Cambodia.
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