Lunikon

If you’re wondering what the things mentioned in the title of this post have in common let me tell you: nothing . This is meant to be a short entry covering a few of the more mentionable topics of last week since another week has passed since my last article. Which, by the way, means that I’m already in Hong Kong for a whole month. This again could be expressed as "20% of my time in HKG is already over". Quite a shocking thought…I’m getting old I guess

It’s said that you can eat anything and everything around Hong Kong. Although I haven’t found places serving cats or dogs yet (probably due to my lacking knowledge of Cantonese) we occasionally eat at a thai restaurant which has a dish containing frogs on its menu. Last week I finally decided that I’d have to try this. First of all: The comparison to chicken isn’t too far off. If you don’t know what you are eating and you’re not paying attention to it you might think it actually is chicken. If this isn’t the case though you will notice some differences: The bones are very different in shape and nature, the meat is far softer and has a shape you usually wouldn’t find on a bird of any kind (the biologist in me tells me that this must be due to the fact that a frog is a "jumper" while a chicken is a "runner"). Besides that I was surprised at how big the bones where which is for me the only reason to keep in slight doubt about whether I actually ate frog or something else. Afterall I might want to mention that the dish was perfectly edible and not disgusting in any way. It looked and felt just like a regular asian meal and any weird feeling went away shortly after getting used to the mere thought of eating something a regular German might not be eating in his strangest dreams.

Last weekend we went to Mong Kok again. The place is said to be the second most crowded spot in the world when it comes to inhabitants. The streets in the area are filled accordingly and since it is a major shopping quarter for people from Hong Kong as well as foreigners the situation is even worse on weekends. Well, we didn’t care about this obviously and went there nonetheless. The reason was that Mark’s computer decided to suddenly dislike his operating system *cough* so we had to get a copy of Vista. Mong Kok is the address of choice when it comes to computer supplies since it accomodates a huge computer center spreading over 4 stories filled with uncountable small, independent stores, each more or less specialized on some kind of computer equipment (keyboards, software, "Apple", screens and so on). While the others were trying to find an OEM version of Windows Vista I finally got the memory update for my laptop that I was planning on buying since I got it in december of last year actually. Instead of one gigabyte I got me two…it was only around 1000 HK$ which is quite a lower price than I would pay anywhere in Europe. Now developing with Eclipse, a running Tomcat- and MySQL-Server and several additional developing tools should work considerably faster.

Which leads me to my mandatory AirlineSim statement: Actually we already wanted to start a second server this week but since both Marcus and I are still working on some bugfixes it will most likely take till the end of next week to get everything ready for the launch. Besides that I’m working on a revised version of our portal page to replace the simple teaser which greets visitors at the moment. This will be necessary as soon as more than one server is in place and it should also make it easier for new players to find their way around especially to the various sources of help and support the team and the community have to offer.