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.