Hongkie Town

But first, an old joke ....

An old American guy goes to Hong Kong, gets off the plane, is met at the gate by his tour guide. "Welcome to Hong Kong, Mr. Stein. I imagine you must be tired after your long flight. Shall I take you to your hotel so you can get some rest?"

"No, Mr. Wong! I've dreamed about this trip my entire life, I've saved for this trip my entire life, I want to get started right away! I love Chinese culture, I love Chinese food, and the first thing I want you to do is to bring me to the most popular restaurant in Hong Kong!"

"Are you sure?"

"Yes!!!!!"

So Mr. Wong shrugged his shoulders and brought Mr. Stein to McDonald's.

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I needed a quick lunch today at 3 PM. A KFC just opened about a block away from my office so I figured I'd give it a try. I may have to call for an ambulance soon.

In 1993, I spent 9 months working on a project at Pepsi's global headquarters. At the time, Pepsi owned KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, so there was a lot of that at the employee cafeteria, at deeply discounted prices. (We also got all the Pepsi products we could drink for free. At the time, Pepsi was also the US distributor of Stolichnaya, but we didn't get that, as much as we could have used it on that messy project.) I mention this because once in a while I'd eat KFC and it seemed reasonably okay. But I can't recall the last time I went to one - several years at least.

So I ordered something I vaguely remembered, the Zinger, a sandwich with an ostensibly spicy coating. As it turns out, the side dish that accompanied this was not fries, not mashed potatoes, not corn, it was a chicken leg. One of the smallest chicken legs I'd ever seen, slightly larger than pigeon sized. Under the, ahem, Colonel's favorite batter was this dried out, sinewy piece of blech. The Zinger wasn't much better - beyond the lettuce, tomato, Russian dressing and sort of spicy batter was a greasy, tasteless blob of chicken (I think it was chicken).

People like this stuff? Why?

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Another thing I don't understand. I get a free email account from Google that gives me 7 gigs of space, growing every day, free. Yahoo and Hotmail also give out huge allowances for free accounts. My place of business, Miracle Pictures ("If it's a good picture, it's a Miracle!") provides me with a whopping 200 megs of space for email. Just think about receiving dozens of emails per day, most with attachments. That 200 meg gets used up fast.

As you start to approach that meager limit, you get daily automated warnings. Eventually, your mail box is shut off, no new messages can be delivered until you get below the limit again.

We oughta migrate our corporate email to Gmail. Probably in the long run a lot cheaper than the dozens of specialists we need to employ in order to deal with crappy Microsoft Exchange Server.