Marcus’ Blog

Matthijs and I went up for a hike to the lookout point behind our house.

He’s doing very well walking up now - a good 300 mtr hill with lots of steps. If the weather stays nice we’ll do some more hikes during the christmas break.

Nadine is in Cebu - so Matt and I had a nice ‘men only’ weekend in DB.

Click the thumbnail for the picture:

Here he is with all his airplanes.

Not a weekend goes by or we do a little bit of playing with the airplanes. And if he’s lucky - he’ll get another one from either mum or dad’s trips overseas.

By now Matthijs knows more about airplanes then his mum - although he’ll need some more time to beat dad’s aeronautical degree!

An interesting and typical Hong Kong story happened today:

As I was strolling along my office area during lunch I noticed this excitement around one of the traffic junctions.

Two of the electric trams had collided somewhere smack in the Causeway Bay shopping area. Up to 40 of the
passengers have been injured in this collision - but fortunately no one was seriously hurt and most had minor injuries.

But the interesting thing is all the fuss around these two trams afterwards. I arrived at the scene when both trams
were already empty and all passengers had been carried away.

Still though - I counted FIVE ambulances, THREE fire trucks, FOUR tv crews, and about 50 odd staff of the various
public forces. Most of them were just loitering around, while their managers seemed to be frantically speaking into
their walkie talkies. Nothing happened here at all for most of the time!

It would have taken one of the tramway’s own maintenance cars to get the two trams back up the tracks and
scurry them off to the repair workshop.

This is just crazy!

This is the first hotel I’ve stayed at that has an indoor Golf course in the basement. I’m in Seoul, Korea, and golf is ‘a way of life’ here.

It’s been a while since I visited the Computer Center at 298 Hennessy Road to find new gadgets, stuff, etc.

Here are two key observations from this time:

16GB SD Cards now sell for a mere 248 HKD - very affordable, and it already hurts that I purchased one just 4 months ago for close to 500 HKD…

The other novelty this time around was the sudden increase in brands and types of digital video players on offer. The ones I found definitely indicate a trend towards low cost, reasonable quality devices, including 8, 16, or 32 GB storage, a 3 or 5 inch screen, and built-in speakers. Plays nearly every type of video format and retails here from 600 HKD up to 1300 HKD.

This certainly isn’t a new category, but the sudden onset of very affordable devices could put these devices into the hands of a wider group of consumers. Similar to what happened in the GPS navigation category some years ago. Unfortunately in the case of the digital video player though - this will be an “intermediate device”. I.e. it will at some point be integrated in smartphones and then the need for a separate digital video player disappears. This is already happening in the area of mp3 players. You can see less of these on offer these days!

Below a picture of some of the video playing devices on offer - sorry for the poor quality.

It’s hot and humid in Hong Kong. The summer has landed in full force. It’s 34 degrees and very humid and really the only places to be are the swimming pool or our airconditioned house.

We’re relaxing here in Discovery Bay before we’ll both be in for some busy traveling. It’s good just to be home.

Dit staat hier in Singapore overal in de plaatselijke winkels tussen het bier aanbod… In Nederland nog nooit gezien?

If you visit this site - make sure you read this.

Rgds,
Marc

When taking off for a flight I had a beautiful view over my home the other week.

This is Lantau Island in the morning sun (10am take off to the East, then a right turn over the Tsing Ma bridge).

You can see Discovery Bay in the foreground and Disney park Hong Kong on bottom right.

The Lantau mountains show up between the clouds in the background - and the nice thing is I’ve climbed them all so know all the peaks.

The first ridge is the one nearest DB, with Tiger Head Hill the highest peak (~450m).
The second mountain - to the left - is Sunset peak - about 850m.
The third and highest - in the middle - is Lantau peak - about 950m (and it’s a bastard to climb).

Nice to see them all from my relaxing seat in the pointy end of this airplane.

Cheers,
Marc