This morning traffic was a nightmare today. It took me 35 minutes instead of the regular 10 to get from ferry pier to office.

But interesting was my cabbie’s reaction. He was actually apologetic for the traffic and the congestion and kept making excuses. Yeah mate - like it’s your fault! Your apologies aren’t making me feel any better…

In the end he even volunteered to make the taxi fare 30 dollars instead of the 54.20 the meter was reading. That was a very courteous but insane offer I figured and I paid him the full fare.

This makes me think then how taxi drivers are paying / reporting their daily revenues. Isn’t there some kind of a tally that comes out of the meter thing and which should match what the cabbie is filing he’s made in a day? Well apparently not, since I don’t think the driver would have come up with this offer if he has to add the difference from his own pocket.

A nice band is playing here today, and there are lots of stalls around in the plaza selling various stuff and food.

Update: Unfortunately though I think I had a bad satay somewhere coz Sunday / Monday have been sick and miserable!

I had the pleasure to go to Macau a few weeks back - and when I was there I realized it was some time ago since I’d last been there.

In the 18 months I hadn’t been there the city has changed completely I would say. It’s always been a sin city / gambling city destination, but the recent arrival of some of the US and Australia’s biggest Casino chains has changed the city into a second Las Vegas.

Please note that I’m saying this without ever even having been in Las Vegas, but - as many US cities - we get a good idea of what Las Vegas would be like from media, films, and TV. Well Macau is starting to be very similar, with one big difference though; here really 99.5% of clientele is Chinese.

The upcoming middle class in China combined with the Chinese cultural affinity for betting money in large sums are the reasons for the amazing speed by which hotels and casino’s are being built. And a growing group of high income Chinese high rollers are driving the casinos to compete hard on attracting them with increasingly higher levels of luxury hotels. The whole inner city has a completely different feel after the Galaxy and the Wynn’s Casino’s are opened here. On my way to the southern part of Macau, I passed the “Venetian” which is being built currently, a huge and vast development that will probably open early next year.

This ‘new generation’ of casino’s is I believe a great improvement for the city. Macau’s identity was a kind of in-between picturesque Portuguese history and that of a sin-city / gambling / massage parlor city. The new casino’s are much cleaner and nicer and the hotels are not the shabby, shady and smokey type of places as before (but there’s still the old Lisboa of course for those hard core old style gamers, as well as several dubious other entertainment venues).

Although I don’t bet and don’t really fancy visiting some place that pretends to be Venice like the Venitian, the city has improved itself and I have some more reasons to visit Macau more frequently.

And still the excellent Macanese restaurants (Litoral & Fernando’s notably) remain!

I stayed in Wynn’s - great hotel; huge rooms, 42″ LCD TVs and TV in bathroom.

The gambling room in Wynn’s - mostly Baccarat tables - only a few Black Jack tables.

This is in “Fisherman’s Wharf” - a simulated miniature world. Here we pass the Colloseum.

Whooah - I’m in Amsterdam!

I had a couple of complaints from people that emailed me and claimed my site generated pop-up ads to them…

That was really surprising to me but I’ve now found out the source of it. And boy does this make me angry!

I’ve used a free web statistics service for a long time already - called Nedstat. Apparently Nedstat was taken over by Webstat4u at some point, and it now turns out that this company has also made some nasty, scary and shocking changes to the way they let you use their “free” service.

Here is the relevant excerpt from the current general terms and conditions:

webstats4U is a 100% FREE version for all webmasters. In order to finance the maintenance, hosting, new developments and to continue providing you with the world’s best FREE web analytics tool in the market, webstats4U will accept advertising sponsorships. These conditions are stated in our Terms of Use (http://www.webstats4u.com/terms/) and have also been communicated in on the front page of the reporting site as well as in our newsletters to all webmasters in August and September 2005.

These advertising sponsorships can appear as a pop-up or pop-under advertisement or slide-in flash format, and will at no point be implemented directly into your website as banners, buttons, links or similar.

We will keep sponsorships at a reasonable level by using frequency capping and always bear the user experience in mind by serving campaigns maintaining a code of conduct relating to the types of advertising we will accept. This means that users will not be exposed to the same ad many times and, importantly that no-one gets bombarded with ads.
Advertising is hosted and launched from webstats4U servers and will thereby not effect the performance of the individual website on which the user is surfing. It is our intention to provide the best experiences for websites, advertisers and end-users in our webstats4U network and for the web measurement service.

Scary isn’t it? Needless to say I was never updated on this small change in the terms and conditions - so I found out only recently.

I’ve dropped this service and the pop-up ads are history.

I now use my own webstat application which comes with my web hosting provider.

Webstats4u are sneaky weasels!

Here’s a video we created from recordings on one Sunday in the house.

On working days I take a daily ferry from Discovery Bay to Hong Kong Island. It’s a 25 minute ride, and on a nice and clear day as today, the sights are great.

I was too late to make this picture well, but two giant Maersk containerships were on their way out today. It was a nice angle, but before I got my camera phone ready, our high-speed ferry was already too far.

Still makes a nice picture though:

Hong Kong is still one of the busiest ports in the world - although no longer the biggest one. And other South Chinese cities are growing much faster then Hong Kong. So these big containerships in the Hong Kong harbour may at some point be a thing of the past.