What Comes To Pass

Hiya Well I'm here in

Hiya Well I'm here in Hong Kong.. The whole ticket fiasco was bizarre to say the least.. The Fedex dude never arrived ("everything we can" my arse!) and we had to make 50 phone calls to various persons involved in the booking, astoundingly the guy from our Hong Kong booker actually had the office calls diverted to his mobile and he went down to the office at 11pm to sort out the tickets! Now quite apart from the fact that according to the tracker fedex UK did sweet FA for 2 days this says a lot about the nature of Hong Kong folk.. They get things done with extraordinary devotion to duty, completely flying in the face of this modern british mentality of "ooh err.. ooh gonna cost ya.. not in my job description that!" I mean English folk never used to be like that!!! You look at folks like David Attenborough and see people who still keep that sense of true British pride alive, they work no matter what the job and they won't complain about it once - its the reason Hong Kong is the way it is today! It was built on the foundations of an English Colony, in fact it pretty much is and English colony still in all but name. Anyhow the plane was fantastic.. We got one of the new Virgin planes. I've done the HK to UK flight about 50+ times in my life (we've moved lots and enjoy holidays from one to the other =] ) and that was by far the most enjoyable flight I have ever experienced. The interior has *gasp* style and a very tangible cool factor.. The screens in the seats in front are now much larger than before and it had tv on demand (you chose the show/film out of the massive database) with full Pause/Rewind/Fast Forward options - with all the big films from this year. Then there was the Music library of about 60 great albums from today - all free play on demand. They also had groovy networked games to sadistically abuse other passengers on (If you were on that flight, I was John.S in seat 54F handing all your asses to you on trivia - and they said my accumulation of trivial knowledge was useless! Hah! Who's laughing now? Certainly not you mr ABBA of Seat 14A.. So, sitting in first class and feeling all superior were we? Yeah I opened a can of whoop ass all the way back in Economy and had one of the stewardesses deliver it to you along with your complimentary free martini and massage.. Vivre la resistance de l'economy!!) The big one was of course on flight email and instant messaging between seats and the ground =] Of course its bloody impossible to type with a puny remote control so the SMS'ing was kind of impractical but cool nonetheless.. Plus the whole doodah ran on Linux (hey, anything but Windoze) as you occasionally saw 'Tux' the penguin on some terminal loading windows =] So anyhow today I went out into central to get myself a haircut (Hey gotta look good for the photo shoot on thursday haha!) and Mac Addict - man I've missed that king of macintosh magazines... Took Denning my MP2100 along with me and realized my copy of Dashboard had expired - doh! so now I'm back to the original button-bar =] Kind of odd not having all that cool stuff but I figure I ought to actually use the Button-Bar for once as it is the true Newton configuration, at least thats how I'm planning on presenting it to myself to mask the fact that I really can't be bothered to pay the $25 registration fee at the moment - is it worth it? Hell yes! Can I afford it? Heck no! =] Mac Addict has a cool article on the Newt on its 1st news page! woo! In fact "Woo" is mentioned - Woo from the Newtontalk Mailinglist that is =] Not bad for a "dead" platform! =] Well tonight I have a party to attend for New Years Eve, sadly I'm also kind of shattered but I'll be damned if I'm missing out on a chance to meet up with folk from Shatin College.. Which reminds me to call Sean as it'd be really stupid of me to fly to Hong Kong and miss talking to a best mate of mine =] Cya Later! John