This is HONG KONG ..... poker

(The title of this post was a reference to 300)

This is how Poker is done in Hong Kong. Rent a room in a Mahjong parlor (which is legal in HK), which offers poker chips ("chou ma"), cards, and dinner for additional fees. Note the fat size of the HK Do-sun chips. Unfortunately, they do not offer the plastic bricks worth $100 mn each, which you see in Do-sun. Also disappointing was not seeing any fights where mahjong tables are flipped, or gangsters with watermelon knives "chop" people.

It was also interesting that many people fold-out when they don't have to (on a check), just to prevent opponents from seeing their cards.

Some key poker words in Canto:
Fold=Tseep

All In=Sai Lang

Put you all in=Sai le lang

Put you and your #@$! family all in=Sai le tong le gou pok gai hum ga cham

Do you have the balls to X? Do you have enough courage=Lai gou mm gou geurng?Scared=Luuuut

Pics of the poker room:

Viacom "takes it up a notch" against the devil YouTube

Viacom formalized its complaints against YouTube/Google by filing a $1 billion lawsuit. I particularly like this statement by Viacom, which echo's what I've been saying since Day 1 of the Google acquisition.

"Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws."

On the flipside, in the same BBC article, it notes that they've done a legit deal with YouTube, which could be evidence of some potential for business dealings... (but it's really just a sign that the BBC has no backbone)

Separately, the BBC has struck a content deal with YouTube to showcase short clips of BBC content.
The BBC hopes that the deal will help it reach YouTube's monthly audience of more than 70 million users and drive extra traffic to its own website.
The corporation will also get a share of the advertising revenue generated by traffic to the new YouTube channels.

Happy Valley Racetrack's unsung side

Walking home from work today....

(above: views from East end of track)

(left: view of field hockey practice)

(about: views of joggers and soccer/football players, with nice high rises in background)

(above: view of race-stands on North side)

(above: view of east side)

Lantern festival in Taiwan

Went to Taipei's Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall on March 3rd, for the annual "Lantern Festival" (called Shang Yuan Festival). There were a lot less people there than last year's Dog-theme lantern festival. It should be noted that there are Pig lanterns across Taipei city (probably across Taiwan as well, but can't yet confirm) in honor of the GOLDEN PIG.




Behold, the rotating pig light show!

Frog/Toad

Interesting Frog or Toad in a Taipei pet store.

Further evidence that YouTube will fail

March 1's Financial Times ran an article titled, "Viacom hails fight against YouTube". This excerpt says it all:
"Viacom said on Thursday that traffic to its MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon websites rose sharply over the past month, validating its decision to force YouTube, the video sharing site bought by Google, to remove all Viacom video clips."

This supports what I've been saying since the announced Google acquisition - that YouTube's business model is flawed, and has no real value after video content with copyright protection is removed.

Burn baby burn.