Wednesday, November 09, 2011

Manly pursuits in Hong Kong

This evening I was intending to ride a BMX at the track in Tsing Yi. There comes a time in early middle age when a man feels the need to ride a child's bicycle down a ramp and then snap both his wrists in a completely avoidable crash.

But tonight was not that night. The constant rain of the last two days had left the track waterlogged and unrideable, so having carried all my gear down 12 flights of stairs, and battled through the rush-hour MTR to get it to the office, I was left with a gap in my evening, rather than the testosterone-and-adrenaline filled joy of serial concussion.

To fill this chasm, my wife and I went jewellery shopping, and after picking out a few things, took the even more romantic choice ... and went to a cut-price electronics shop to buy a new DVD drive for our computer. Say what you like, but I can still show a girl a good time on a wet Wednesday evening.

We had to buy the drive because our Mac obstinately refuses to mix with non-region 1 DVDs. My far more proletarian Hewlett Packard was much more promiscuous, playing any DVD you cared to stuff in its orifice, but it's now gone the way of all things, and stopped working entirely.

However, now I have two DVD drives we should be able to play both region 1 and 2 discs (which covers my wife's Canadian discs and my European ones) and until the Xbox gives up the ghost we'll have the ability to watch region 3 as well. But seriously, why constrict computers so? Every extra region control and restriction only makes it more tempting to download something for free. And you can compete with free, but you don't do so if your unique selling point is increased inconvenience...

Now at this point I should have gone home and watched Confessions Of A Dog, a Japanese movie only released through Hong Kong and shipped from the UK (confused yet?) but instead we each ate a bowl of salad as big as our head and then went to the Four Seasons for cocktails. My wife had earlier told me I wasn't butch enough for some of the jewellery we looked at, so I had something to prove about my masculinity.

Which is why I'm sat here, drinking a white chocolate martini. Shaken, not stirred, innit?

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