November 12, 2005 Archives

In relation with this (my current computer bg), other people thought of it before (thanks for the link, Mel), obviously. It's stuff from my nightmares, I was going to say. For someone who was born and raised in a city like Montreal, I suppose Asia might be extremely foreign b/c of Orient, etc, etc, but surely b/c of the population density, and general lack of anything old in the cities. If you go to Japan, most of the buildings in the city were destroyed by fire-bombing during WWII, and while it seems cool, I must admit, it's uniformly that way (concrete, white, geometric shapes). In HK, it's a constraint of space - although I never really understood that, b/c there is *so much* green space outside of the urban areas. There're mountains everywhere in HK, which vastly reduces buildable land for sure, and makes transit lines very costly to build in order to develop new areas. So people generally build up, in HK, whereas in Tokyo, b/c it's mostly flat (and b/c if you built up, earthquakes will make sure to flatten it pretty quickly), urban areas can expand and expand until you don't see a single area of un-urbanized land.

This makes for very interesting walks. If you go to Asia, or HK more particularly, it's fantastic to walk in old quarters like North Point, which were probably built during the late 60s, or 70s. It's also interesting to see the more "popular" districts like Chai Wan where the buildings are white, but with floors of concrete with playgrounds and basketball fields that haven't been renovated for at least a decade. You may also want to visit the newest areas, like Tseung Kwan O (built in the 90s), or the sub-area of Tiu Keng Leng (area was opened just a few years ago - now already bustling with new middle-upper class young families). Or even try Repulse Bay (while you spend some time at what's said to be the nicest public beach of HK), where the high-end flats are built.

Forgot the rest of what I wanted to say. Gotta go.

https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4426184.stm

Laurent's girlfriend took us there last winter when he came back from China for a month or so (b/c he couldn't just have Tianjin winters, he had to have Montreal winters, *in January*!), and I decided it was the first restaurant on the ethnic cuisine trail I had to have since getting my regular income again. It was featured in a Mirror article, so I thought the place was unusually-packed and I could get away with it tonight without making a reservation...

The "Coin du Mexique" (Corner of Mexico) is not your usual Mexican restaurant. Or at least, not your usual in-downtown Three Amigos, or Carlos & Pepes resto-bars. Tacos, there were, but not served the way you'd imagine it. Rather, you have the crunchy tortilla lying on a small plate, with the stuff on it - meat, cheese and lettuce. We had a cactus salad (cactus tastes like pickles?) and I had one fine Mexican equivalent of your Chinese peanut-butter dumplings, a spicy chocolate-sauced enchilada (it's called mole sauce). It can be pricey for what seem like small plates (the salad and enchiladas were about 10$ each!), but it's satisfyingly filling. S had the spiciest of all enchiladas on our table. Something with beans and lots of chili on it. I'm surely up for more Central American food.

I forgot the address as I went there tonight, but it was clearly as I remembered it, right across the street of Metro D'Iberville on the blue line, and no matter from which metro exit you come out from.

(The picture is of an old appartment block in North Point, Hong Kong Island, where my uncle's mother lives. A beautiful sunny afternoon - the pic turned out better than I thought it would, with all the sunlight, daily lives of the inhabitants hanging by their windows...)

There are quite a few non-trivial things still not working, but I'm finally satisfied with yet another Linux installation on my computer, the second of the Ubuntu distro (since the last one crashed on me a few weeks before Asia - to the dismay of other Ubuntu-lovers). Simply, Ubuntu is such a Desktop-based user-oriented distribution that it shouldn't crash, and everything you love on a Windows machine should be available on it, less the fanciness of a Mac (which I would probably get, if I were to buy myself a laptop, but as for desktops, a Mac is out of question, b/c of its lack of raw power, and design is not such an issue (in the portability sense) as it would be for a desktop laptop (a terrible lapsus making the whole sentence nonsensical - but my brain does not compute)).

Speaking of Macs, they successfully ran MacOSX on a Toshiba laptop, but I don't think they're news. Speculating, I would want to be optimistic and think that Apple is going head-on against Windows, on Intel/AMD chips, the i386/AMD64 architectures, which everyone has. It's probably daydreaming, when we consider that the sale of hardware has been the milk cow of Apple for several years. MacOSX on i386 is probably a leak (and I didn't read the recent reports to really know). I am putting my money on another clever marketing trick Steve Jobs pulls out of his ass on regular basis.

Some hopefuls: the iPod with wireless access, so that you can listen to web-streamed radio stations; a Flash memory based laptop, if I understand well that flash memory consumes less energy and is much much lighter than good ol' spindle HDs.

I run Linux now, mostly for work, b/c I was pissed at Cygwin/X not providing easy X-forwarding. Linux is cool b/c of X-forwarding, and not anything else (except the fact that it's free). The big desktop support for Linux is flaky on the latest ATI driver, so I have to rely on an older driver that doesn't accelerate my graphics (so when the really cool Linux-only 3D screensaver collection shows up, it's as if I *didn't* have hardware acceleration...). And b/c I choose to use the full "power" of my 64-bit chip (which really isn't required for the feeble desktop work I do), I don't get Flash, Acrobat or Java runtime to work properly. These are big annoyances people talk about in forums. You software companies can eat my shorts with those penetration rates you boast. :D