Edging into Darkness

I didn't leave the office at all today, which I think was a mistake. I try to take a promenade around the building at least once a day, to stop my mind and body seizing up, but I was too busy today wasting energy on arguing the toss about spreadsheets, and not spending enough time justifying my existence.

Medical

I went for my yearly medical check-up today, in the medical centre in the Admiralty Building. Usually I go to the Prince's Building, right in Central, but due to the idiosyncracies of scheduling, I had a 15 minutes walk today instead. I hope that doesn't play merry hell with the test results.

Flying around, United in boredom

I made a mistake flying back to Hong Kong from San Francisco; not only did that mean flying for two hours in the wrong direction to start with, the flight from SFO to HKG is much more punishing than going from Seattle to Tokyo and then flying on. You're just not meant to be sat on a plane for 14 hours, especially when the only entertainment is watching a movie on a screen at the front of the cabin. No screens in the seatback? No individual in-flight entertainment? What are we, animals?

Paranoid

We worked on our presentation until 11:30 this evening, which meant I didn't get a chance to go running. Instead I just skulked back to the hotel before I might turn into a pumpkin.

The strange smell of Google Sites

As I walked through Tin Hau tonight, the air carried a smell that combined electrical charge with motor oil, precisely the same as you'd get if you sniffed a Hornby 00 model train.

Don't Like This

Facebook is the third largest country in the world, as gurus of social media gleefully continue to point out. Which prompts me to misquote Uncle Joe:

How many divisions does Mark Zuckerburg have?

(Well, maybe there's thousands of US Marines updating their statuses in between jumping out of Humvees and shooting guns. That doesn't make Facebook itself a nation.) You don't pay anything to use Facebook. Up front. But as the axiom of the internet goes, if you're not paying for the product, you are the product.

How to get ahead in Chinese politics

Apparently a civil servant in China has published a self-help book for would-be apparatchiks, explaining the secret unexplained rules you need to get along.

Except now they're not unexplained, or secret.

Do you really know my name? My relationship with Starbucks

Because I have some fairly clear personality defects, I have a spreadsheet, and that spreadsheet logs how much money I've given to Starbucks since October of last year. Every latte, every mushroom pocket, every blueberry muffin, recorded there.

Well, not every muffin. That would be ludicrous; anal retentive I might be, but I've only got as far as recording how much I've spent. Life's too short to record everything in a spreadsheet.

Back to the gym

After a day at work that seemed to consist mainly of looking at my computer displaying farcically unhelpful messages about me posing a security threat to myself by wanting to generate a sales report, I went back to the gym for a work-out. Without the benefit of a personal trainer, but with an ipod with the volume stuck on LOUD.

California (fitness) blues, Hong Kong

Well, that was fairly depressing. I went along to California Fitness after work today, for my induction/personal training session/fear-uncertainty-and-doubt indoctrination. This consisted of another go on the scientology e-meter, with different results to last time: now I'm fatter than average and with low muscle mass. It's like my own body has helped them to perform a bait-and-switch manouvre.

Public Transport

I discovered today that a small notebook PC and a rattling tram are not the best of friends. I was planning on writing up the start of the Great Hong Kong novel on the way to work, but unlike my blackberry, my notebook just kept sliding all over the shop. It's hard to touch type if you're using both hands to stop your precious possession skimming off to its doom.

I'm not going mad, but ...

My computer is swearing at me.

Or more prosaically, every time I refresh a certain bit of data, something wierd happens with the formatting and the words 'Current Period' lose three letters for five minutes, and I wonder whether this is intentional or not.

Or perhaps my computer really is swearing at me.