Went to see Prince Caspian lastThursday night, at the new cinema, the Grand at the Elements Mall above Kowloon station. The cinema is nice, if a little expensive for Kowloon, but the toilets are downstairs, and the food stall was too cramped. Comfy seats with - apparently - vibration and/or bass stuff setup so you got a bit of a jolt in your bum when something want bang onscreen. Wouldn't rush back, but wouldn't mind going there if someone else suggested it. As for the film - nothing too special, and I'm not sure it was the best choice for the second in a possible franchise. It's somewhat light on Aslan the crowd-pleasing lion and other cuter talking animals, a little dark for some kids, and has a slightly disturbing overall story of Spaniards ruling over England.

My phone fell off my bed last night - which has happened before. The LCD cracked and the screen died - which hasn't happened before. After a bit of dreaming and reading up on various other 'smartphones', I called Palm who offered to replace it for HK$1400 (about £90) in a few working days, which seems to be the sane thing to do - I assume it'll be a reconditioned model. I'll leave it until later in the year to look at things like Android phones. It's slightly shocking just how attached I am to this thing...

Firefox 3 happened. Anyone who hasn't downloaded it should do so - there's really no reason not to at least try it out. I've been running the release candidates for a while and it's a pretty good piece of work, feels better than 2.0 did.

New flatmate has been here since the start of the week. She seems to be settling in well, although there is a slight separation which wasn't there with the old one - quite understandable, since she's just moved in with a stranger. Still not sure how long she's planning to stay, but hopefully I'll have the option to get in someone else or keep the place to myself by the time she does leave.

Might need to learn some PHP in the near future, unfortunately.

Off to Shenzhen today - remind me to write that place up sometime soon. Plan is the usual, shopping, food (teppanyaki today) and massage. Back for the second major "friends leaving HK for good" do of this summer, so far.

We've gone from serious flooding, constant thunderstorms and people dying in landslips two weeks ago, to a 'Very Hot' weather warning today. Time to break out the shorts, I think, since the forecast high for today is 33°C!

Went to Web Wednesday last night, running a bit late, to hear the end of talks about Relief.Asia and The Library Project, both very good causes, and both doing interesting stuff online and important stuff offline.

My flatmate - who I originally moved in with over a year ago, for 'a few weeks' - left Hong Kong on Tuesday evening. I wish she hadn't gone, and I will miss her, but bloody hell it was a drawn-out process. It took her something like 6 months of indecision, agonising, and stressful planning and packing before she finally went. On the other hand...

The reason I was late for Web Wednesday is that I was meeting with a potential new flatmate, who - unless things change in the meantime - will move in next week. Lucky timing, I guess, but she posted a message on GeoExpat at the weekend looking for somewhere, and it will be rather helpful to my finances to not have an empty room. It's going to take a little time to get settled living with a stranger though, after a year with a friend and two years alone before that.

I live in Sheung Wan, a neighbourhood just to the west of the central financial, retail and commercial district of HK (called, sensibly enough, Central). A number of significant financial institutions have their global or Asian headquarters within 30 minutes walk from here. Sheung Wan is an old neighbourhood by Hong Kong standards, and is particularly well-known for streets dominated by shops selling dried seafoods, herbs and roots and other slightly arcane Chinese medicine-like stuff. I noticed, walking down one of those streets recently, that a lot of the staff in the shops are carrying and using abaci. I was quite surprised to see that, in modern and pragmatic Hong Kong.

Also, Sheung Wan is relatively low-lying, and my place is only a couple of blocks from the waterfront. During the storms this weekend, not only was there quite serious flooding in streets near here, but craters appeared in a few spots along the (brick) pavement afterwards. It looked like places where work had been done, and the holes had been packed with sand which simply washed away in the rains. A weird thing to see.

A random tip: using a modern version of pilot-link, assuming your Treo is already paired with your computer, you don't need to do anything special to sync over Bluetooth, since the pilot-link libraries have native support. Just specify the port as bt: and it will do the right thing, so something like pilot-xfer -p bt: -s ~/treo/syncdir is all you need.

3G iPhone? Meh. Nice devices, nice software, too locked-down for me. If/when my finances loosen up, I might be tempted to hunt down a 1st gen iPhone, assuming the price will drop through the floor.

My Slashdot account ID is 1327. I rarely read it, past the headlines, and even more rarely post comments, but I wonder how many of the 1326 people with lower ID numbers still use the site at all. To be honest, Slashdot jumped the shark (or 'nuked the fridge') years ago.

Am I rambling? Time to finish up.