Drink Yer Phil

Last night I was invited to a private screening of the new Batman film courtesy of Standard Chartered Bank. I am not sure which is more memorable, the film, or the private cinema in which we saw it.

It was my first trip to Elements which sits on top of Kowloon Station. That place is not small. The cinema there has something it calls the “Standard Chartered Suite.” This is a private 24 seat theatre with huge remote controlled-reclining seats. These seats are like video game console controllers with force feedback. They vibrate in time with the low frequencies from the cinema sound system. It actually works. It brings the sound right into your gut. These seats are also extremely comfortable and open right out so you can watch the movie over your feet.

And talking of the movie, I was, literally, blown away. Batman Begins was a reboot which was much closer to the original tone of the comics. The Dark Knight is the perfection of that process. And the hype over Heath Ledger’s performance is spot on.

He is simply phenomenal. There is no Caesar Romero camp here. Just an utterly believable psychopath. You won’t recognize his face or his voice or anything he has ever done before. The truth is that all the characters are supporting characters to the role of the joker.

At 2 hours and 30 something minutes the film is on the long side, especially that last hour regretting the two pints I had before I went in. However, I was still sorry it was over when the final credits rolled. It is full of action but it is the characters which hold it together, the way it is supposed to be.

I loved this film. Please make sure you see it on a big screen before it is relegated to the LCD in your living room.

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Sorry it’s a bit blurred. Stupid Dopod PDA phone camera….

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I suppose to someone from Texas this might be considered a small car…

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The thunderstorms over the past few days have not only been very loud but rather expensive as well, especially on our roof.

Several (quite expensive) plants were ripped out of their pots. Chairs, stacked tightly in a corner, were distributed roughly all over the place. And even though I had taken the sun shade down out of the garden table and laid it flat on the ground, rolled up tight like an umbrella, the wind still got in there, picked it up, blew it open, and shattered two of the heavy wooden spokes.

I lost power for a little while and services like broadband TV were bought to a shuddering halt, although a network-wide reboot sorted everything out.

And it was loud. I have always counted the seconds between flash and bang. There was one that was right overhead. I thought a bomb had gone off downstairs. Apparently there is more of this to come.

Gotta love Hong Kong summers.

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So, Hong Kong has won the Skytrax Best Airport prize, a fact loudly trumpeted by Xinhau of course.

Obviously they were not there the day it rained and the roof leaked all over Terminal Two…..

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Happy Valley is now home to a new Marketplace, which I think is part of the Welcome chain. It is something like a cross between a 7-11 and a corner shop. The claim is “4000 products from around the world.” Personally I did not see much that was new in there. Until I saw this in the drinks section….

Made in Scotland. From Girders.

I haven’t had one of these in years.

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The other day it was zip lines. This week it is tunnels.

Police and customs officers discovered the opening of the tunnel in Ta Kwu Lin, near the border with the southern Chinese boomtown of Shenzhen.

Goods were smuggled through the tunnel — which measured just 15 centimetres– using an elaborate system of fibre-optic cables and electronic pulleys.

A custom official says as much as 1 point 3 million US dollars worth of electronic goods could be smuggled through the tunnel each night.

Eventually they will work out how to teleport this stuff.

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A brief hiatus there. I was hit with a denial of service attack. It was so serious that it bought down not just me but a ton of web sites with the same hosting company, A2 Hosting.

So the A2 Hosting booted me. Talk about blaming the victim.

Such is life. I have a new home. I believe I have made my piece with the dot army. I think they realise now that I never had anything to do with the spamming. Either way I am moving on. Normal service resumes…

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Here are the facts:

1. Thousands of messages about me and purported to be from me are posted on a forum in a mass spam blaze. None of them with one single isolated exception to attempt to explain what has happened are by me. Not a single one.

2. Many are absolutely defamatory, especially ones written in my voice, which any properly run forum would ban in an instant.

3. Posts from this blog are being stolen with no attempt at fair use or context as well as photographs that belong to me in other sites such as Flickr and posted and hosted on the FF site. For example.

I have written so many times to the board and hosting company privately to have this stop. He does not want the spamming. I don’t want the three points above. We are actually on the same side. But what does he reply with.

This is FF administrator.

I dont know who you are or what you want, but leave my board alone.

Mr dotarmy@gmail.com, I AM LEAVING YOUR BOARD ALONE. How can anyone be so thick and so slow?

I have a clear cut case of copyright theft against him and his hosting company and the complaint is being compiled and will be submitted tomorrow. How few brain cells does it take for him to realise absolutely none of the spam on his board linking back here is from me.

Did this man have parents or did he come out of a test tube which someone dropped?

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