How long does it take to get boring?

When I was a teenager, IBM was going bust, a senile old man surrounded by the young turks like Intel and Microsoft. Well, except Intel had been around for an age, and Microsoft never felt young and exciting. But what do adolescents fed on overcaffeinated beverages know about anything?

Back to the Chocolate Factory again

Another day, another visit to Google. It was a beautiful sunny day, the androids at the ground floor reception area were less enraged/enraging than yesterday, and we got to our meeting with a minimum of pain and fuss.

Our meeting was with a very cheery chap, and afterwards he took us to lunch. That's not quite as generous as it sounds, because it was lunch at Google's canteen, rather than a posh restaurant where they muddle up my order and bring me venison when I asked for a pasta salad.

A visit to the Chocolate Factory

I realised halfway through this morning that I was feeling incredibly calm and relaxed. This may partly be because it's my first day in the office in a week, but I've usually got stressed fairly quickly when I get back to work.

Last night we went to bed early, in preparation for my wife's first day at her new job, so I'd had a full eight hours of sleep. I'd got up, done some stretching exercises before work and still managed to be in before eight thirty. I haven't drunk any coffee since last Monday. And I've taken my first steps to kicking my email addiction. Together, I think they've contributed a lot to me feeling better this morning than for a long time.

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.

You can't go round just saying stuff because it's pretty

Every so often, I like to put Magnetic Fields song lyrics into a search engine, and compare the results.

Here's you can't just go round saying stuff because it's pretty through Google and Bing:

Bing Maps, Google Earth, and further misadventures with KML

Today I got to play around with some geographical data, and I felt amazed by how far we've come. Back in 2004, I was still reduced to plotting customers on a map by sticking latitude and longitude into Excel, making a scatter graph, and looking at the results, which resembled a bowl of peas that had been stuck to a map of Britain.

Waving, not drowning

The air quality is back down to normal levels, which doesn't account for the continuing smell of burning biscuits every time I leave the MTR in Causeway Bay.  Maybe it's a fragrance like freshly baked bread, that encourages people to purchase more frequently.  Or move out of the way to let taxis past.  Who knows how the psychological engineering of Hong Kong is conducted, what its hopes and dreams are, what laudable goals they aim to reach?