Milestone today.

One year ago I quit smoking while on a hiking trip in Nepal. Didn’t smoke a single cigarette ever since, although I like the occasional cigar…

Quitting wasn’t that difficult actually. Makes me think that if it’s that easy to quit, why not start again?

Calculating quickly - I saved myself abt. a thousand bucks US… Lost revenue for Philip Morris Inc, but for the most part lost revenue for the Hong Kong tax authority…

Here’s a crop of a picture I took of Nadine Sunday. Quite happy with how this worked out.

From RTHK Online:

Asian earthquake may have caused slight wobble to earth’s rotation
2004-12-29 HKT 10:55

The deadly Asian earthquake may have permanently accelerated the Earth’s rotation and shortened days by a fraction of a second according to U.S. scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion laboratory in California. Richard Gross, a geophysicist with the lab theorized that a shift of mass toward the Earth’s center during the quake on Sunday caused the planet to spin 3 microseconds, or one millionth of a second, faster and to tilt about an inch on its axis. Gross added that changes predicted by his model probably are too minuscule to be detected by a global positioning satellite network that routinely measures changes in Earth’s spin, but said the data may reveal a slight wobble in the earth’s rotation.

Hi all,

Its weekend again and we filled it with the usual mandatory exercise in the pool and in the gym, as well as watching “Pirates of the Caribbean”. Good film with good acting by Johnny Depp as Ct Jack Sparrow.

The Typhoon Dujuan has passed by and has not been too destructive on Hong Kong. However, the next day (after my previous post) there were plenty of uprooted and broken trees along the roads in Discovery Bay. Five days later (it’s now Sunday) they’re still clearing up the debris. One window fell out of a neighboring apartment building and that was it - no casualties fortunately.

Till later,

Marcus

Managing a weblog is fine, but my biggest issue so far has been what in earth to publish on this space? Is our life so boring? Or are we too busy? Or are we too busy with boring things?

Let me share with you my latest frustration with living in this city: In the last week two companies have been in the news for using Nazi-related pictures and material to create a Nazi theme around the product or service they were trying to flog.

One is a fashion chain that was using Nazi symbols on in-store promotional material as well as in their line of clothing. The other was a Karaoke bar, where one of the singing rooms had - for the last four years already - been decorated with pictures from the Nazi era.

Now what exactly is happening here? Is this just plain ignorance by some Hong Kong residents towards the real meaning of these “trendy themes”?

Reactions in local newspapers rightly condemned the offensive actions and this fortunately (or hopefully) indicates that any ignorance is not widespread among the population.

I’m puzzled as to how a commercial company like the mentioned fashion chain (www.izzue.com) could have been this foolish.

Good day. This is the very first entry into my web log.

It was a little bit of a struggle with the software I use, but I think now I got it working, and am ready to update it regularly.

marc