But now a little something about our trip itself. We took the East Rail Line to Kowloon Tong and changed to the Kwun Tong Line to get to Lok Fu. The "Checkerboard Hill", the little mountain the checkerboard is placed on, is located in a small park right next to the station. Unfortuntely we didn’t bring along a map (d’oh) and since we thought the hill was a little further off we started walking straight into the wrong direction. After we walked into a few dead ends and around the complete park we finally got a glimpse of our goal through fences and plenty of vegetation. We then tried to climb up the hill to get both a view of the old airport as well as the board itself. But since the whole top of the mountain is a fresh water reservoir everything was tightly sourrounded by fences and it was prohibited to step about anywhere. Since both of us are self-confessed wimps who enjoyed a good education we didn’t dare to cross any of those lines of course. But obviously we weren’t alone in our pilgrimage and we met an asian couple who seemed to have the same goal as we did. Contrary to us they were quite a bit more daring and bravely ignored the old signs "blocking" the entry to some dirt tracks around the middle part of the hill. So we followed them and figured quickly that absolutely no one except us ever gave a damn about the signs…at least judging from "trails" they left . Shortly after we enjoyed an almost unobstructed view of the old airport (now a large construction site) and Kowloon. The checkerboard itself is in a miserable condition, covered by weeds and trees to a large extend and with the colors worn off over time. If it wasn’t for the water reservoir the whole hill would probably have already been converted into building ground for an office building, an appartment tower or, most likely, a mall. It would be really nice if someone could clear the board of all the plants, give it a fresh paint job and make it more accessible. This would keep a little piece of Hong Kong history alive… something that should have been done a lot more often in this city but was usually neglected.

Anyway, I can claim I’ve been there! You can take a look at a few of the photos we took here. And if you think we’re crazy…hey, some people fly around the globe just to walk around a stone in circles, so I can take the MTR to look at a checkerboard .

That should be enough of the personal stuff though. Now that my family, my girlfriend and even my roommate left, one might think there should be plenty of time to get some work done. And as I never found a way out of my motivational dive cruise I can’t see myself spending much time travelling in the very near future either. Perfect conditions to rot in front of the screen…and in fact, after I wasted yesterday by bringing malaria pills to the airport (thanks Mark ), today I officially started the work on the next major version of AirlineSim, namely 1.4. Don’t get too excited…not a single line of code has been hacked in so far. We’re having so many features, changes and improvements in mind for this milestone that the first thing to get done was some organizing. The result was a rough list of about 30 topics basically covering every aspect of the game in some way or the other. It contains mostly changes that will be applied to existing functions but there are also some brand new features on it which I will leave in the dark as of now of course . Still, you should be able to imagine that a whole bunch of work will come along with this wishlist and I expect it to have grown to easily above 200 tasks after we went into the details. Actually it feels like at the beginning of a totally new project whenever I look at this pile of stuff to get done. Unfortunately all this will have to take place under heavy time constraints as I will only have about one month of spare time before my internship with Agility Logistics starts in March. Naturally I’ll spend this time with my girlfriend to a large extend so we will have to see how AirlineSim can squeeze in. Either way I reckon that several months will pass until this major release will see the light of the day. And seriously…I can’t wait for it

Another small thing that might be interesting to some of you: Today I did what Hong Kong is known for best to many people…I ordered a tailor-made suit. Measures were taken today, first try-on will be on monday and the whole thing will be finished some days later. I’m really anxious to see the results next week. Mark and Norman already ordered theirs a few days earlier and had their first try-on today. The difference between a regular of-the-shelve suit and a custom made one is very obvious. The package will include the suit, a shirt and an additional pair of trousers…for the price of my current suit which I bought back in Germany last year. They will keep my measures and whenever I need a new suit I can reorder one and they will ship it to any place I need it at. As soon as I see the results I will let you know about it. Chances are you come by HK some day and need one too .

This of course is also due to the fact that everything’s close together in Hong Kong. I just had to take the subway and drop by to hand in the notebook. I did not have to send it in by mail or anything similar. The service office was very small and you always talked to the same person which is a great feature to me. So thumbs up for Asus’ support in Hong Kong. It was almost flawless!

PS: Now that I have a working, well-graded notebook at hand again this should put a (preliminary) end to my search for possible alternatives

Unfortunately the payment of our flight to Beijing is still up in the air although we have tried two different websites now. Obviously there is something wrong with Nils’ and my credit cards even though the bank claims everything should be working just fine. Anyway, Nils has to take over now since I’ll be out of reach for some days. I hope we get this stuff booked somehow…otherwise we’ll probably have to stay in Hong Kong and actually do some studying .

Later I received an email from our ticket system informing me about a ticket that has been escalated to me. After reading it I was once again assured that security checks are about useless in a webgame. The (intentionally unnamed) person frantically explained how he deleted his user account including all his credits although he actually wanted to delete only a holding. Now, for persons who’ve never attempted to delete their account or have never played AirlineSim, a short explanation: In case one wants to do so, he/she has to click a button clearly marked as dangerours by the text above. After clicking it the user is lead to a page that once again tries to point out the potential consequences of proceeding, including unrestorable loss of all account data and all credits bought for the account. This time the warnings are even highlighted in a clearly warning color. If you still decide to click the little button under this warning your account gets deleted. And what does this little story tell us? Players acting carefully don’t need security checks…the rest ignores them…bravely.

There are far more serious problems today though. I told you some time ago about our planned trip to Beijing and about all the trouble involved in getting the tickets for several means of transport. Well, we found a travel agency which made booking and paying far easier than the one before. But especially concerning the latter aspect they seem to be very selective. We all successfully reserved our flights and most of us were also able to pay for them, thereby actually booking it. But Nils and I were less lucky. We booked together and I wanted to pay for it using my Visa credit card. The next day I got a call asking me to confirm the given information and telling me that they will finalize the booking as soon as the credit check was successful. Some time later I received another call which I wasn’t able to pick up due to holding a presentation. I’ll never find out who called but since it’s more or less obvious I expect it to have been the travel agency which wanted to tell me the the credit check _failed_. I didn’t hear anything from them until today when I decided to write them an email asking what the status of my booking was. They told me that the credit check failed – thanks for doing so finally – and that I should "put money in the account". I assured them that the "account" had enough money in it so debitting the card should not pose a problem. But the reply was negative…"probably we don’t have an agreement with your bank, try another card". I acted as told and tried using the MasterCard generously given to me by my dad but the result as well as the response was basically the same. Now that makes me wonder…didn’t I get me a Visa card to be able to pay at any place accepting Visa cards? Isn’t that the whole point of having a card like this? If I have to care about what "agreement" a single provider has with my bank back in Germany, of what use is the whole thing supposed to be for me? After all this makes the card useless for its holder because he can not depend on being able to pay with it. I wrote an email to my bank about this story, maybe they can tell me what’s going on. Now we’ll try to use Nils’ card. Keep your fingers crossed!

]]> http://www.lunikon.net/2007/11/06/what-a-day/feed/ 0 http://www.lunikon.net/2007/10/27/touring-asia/ http://www.lunikon.net/2007/10/27/touring-asia/#comments Sat, 27 Oct 2007 16:58:44 +0000 Martin http://www.lunikon.net/?p=48 This must have been one of the most spontaneous decisions of my life: Tonight a buddy I met here in Hong Kong asked me whether I’d like to go on a trip to Japan. Four days in Tokyo, flight from Hong Kong on a Northwest Airlines B747, a typical Japanese Capsule Inn and a guide who has spent five years living in the city really sounded great. Only negative aspect was the price tag…but after thinking about it and imagining the possibilities to get this package once more I just said yes. He came down to my room, we booked the flight and reserved the "hotel" and now I’m sitting here, trying to realize that I’ll be sitting on a plane to Japan in less than two weeks. I have this sudden craving to watch Lost in Translation…

But that’s not it: While the trip to Japan will be over on the 13th, the next flight leaves from Shenzen on the 14th and has its destination in Beijing. Hopefully anyways…because booking tickets in China seems to be far more complicated (but therefore cheaper) than in Japan. Actually we wanted to take a night train from Beijing to Xi’an as well but the railway company obviously wasn’t willing to take our money: Firstly the payment and booking process was unbelievably complicated – say bureaucracy – and secondly European credit cards appear not to be as common around the globe as one might think. But oh well, Beijing will be nice by itself. I just hope that we will finally get the flights booked tonight.

The bus took us to a remote training area somewhere in the New Territories where we were equiped with a uniform, a protection mask, a BB-gun replica of a Heckler&Koch MP-5 (!!), one magazine and ammunition. The latter was a plastic bottle filled with tiny, 6mm plastic bullets. After some warm-up games and shooting practice we were split up into 4 groups and went to the theme zones. Initially two groups played each other in one theme zone of which 3 existed: one area consisting of trenches, one of shallow hills and trees and a third of a "building" surrounded by all kinds of junk (cars, barrels etc). Lead by some experienced players we practiced basic tactics and learned some fundamental concepts. Sounds very militaristic? It was

The games where a whole lot of fun though and really exhausting. Under the full body gear and the mask necessary to protect the players from injuries, sweat poured in streams. From all the crouching, robbing, ducking and jumping we all got several bruises, (extremely) sore legs and plenty of scratches. The bullets actually were the least problem when it comes to injuries and pain .

After the lunch break – food was included – we began to play more serious and complex scenarios. In computer game language you could call it "assault" and "capture the flag". Game time rose considerably and the challenges were quite a bit harder. One group of players, mainly consisting of lecturers (oO), obviously did wargames for a hobby on a regular basis and brought their own gear including own weapons all of which were some kind of stunningly realistic replicas. Overall they left the impression of real soldiers and they changed weapons for every scenario depending on their tactics. All this made them a hard nut to crack and in a final game they were hidden around the area and all the students left – about 30 or so – had to "search and destroy" them…after maybe half an hour "we" won…with 6 men left . We got home totally exhausted but had a great day of fun.

What I think about this? Well, I can’t quite understand why we make such a fuzz about something like this in Germany. I tend to believe it’s only due to historic reasons and can’t really be explained by anybody. It most definately is a physically demanding sport and I don’t see why it should be worse then kids staying at home watching TV (which is mostly crap in Germany anyway). In a context of the greatly criticized "killer games" my opinion is that a wargame like the one we played takes away a lot of the "abstractness" of a computer game. You don’t care about getting hit in a pc game but when you get hit by a BB you suddenly think "oh, in reality I would’ve lost my finger right now" or "I would be laying around with a bullet in my leg…for hours". I’m sure there are negative aspects to it as well and probably an age limit would be recommendable (it’s 18 years over here) but I don’t think it should be categorically condemned as something "negative"…Germany is the only country in Europe where softair weapons are not categorized as toys.

Afterall the organizers, being lecturers from the department, explained their reasons for doing this event. In their opinion it trains and teaches teamwork and decision making in uncertain conditions. There are even some logistical problems to it: For example the ammo bottles I mentioned earlier. At the end of the day some of us were running out of BBs while others still had half of their bottle filled. One lecturer mentioned that this was a serious problem in real warfare since soldiers tend to use up all their ammunition if you give them an unlimited amount of it thereby wasting valuable resources. On the other hand they try to spare every single bullet if you only give out a very limited amount which might keep them from using every given opportunity. So maybe we actually learned something by playing this wargame…but I won’t try to judge this.

]]> http://www.lunikon.net/2007/10/22/playing-wargames/feed/ 2 http://www.lunikon.net/2007/10/12/fieldtrip/ http://www.lunikon.net/2007/10/12/fieldtrip/#comments Fri, 12 Oct 2007 17:30:24 +0000 Martin http://www.lunikon.net/?p=45 Yesterday we had a nice fieldtrip to Da Chan Bay, a container terminal in Shenzen which will commence operation some time around December of this year. We had our own chartered bus which brought us from the PolyU to the site. At the border everybody had to leave the bus and walk through a large and very modern terminal-like structure to pass customs. We met the bus again on the other side and continued our journey. On arrival we got a brief presentation by the terminal managers of Da Chan Bay which took place in the temporary administration containers since the final building isn’t ready until November. After that we took the bus again to visit the actual terminal. The whole project is divided into 4 phases of which phase 1 and 2 are currently being realized. Phase 1 will, as mentioned earlier, be ready in the end of this year, phase 2 is just entering construction. The sheer scale of the area is quite impressive and the construction work going on at the terminal and all over Shenzen covers everything in a layer of dust which blows into your eyes when you face the wind.

The technology deployed at Da Chan is state-of-the art and ready for the largest vessels currently in service and anticipated for the coming years. Especially interesting are the double-spreaders: The quay-side gantry cranes are equiped with this latest type of spreader which is able to pick up two adjacent containers in one move. As soon as loadplanning considers this possibility the operators expect to be able to rise container handling capacity by 30% which is really some figure! The yard will be served by fully electric, rubber-tired gantry cranes which are supposed to be a novelty aswell.

After the visit to the terminal we had lunch at a very nice chinese restaurant. As it’s the tradition in China the tables where filled with various kinds of food until no spot was left empty on the table. The leftovers where plenty but the food was very good. Unfortunately I didn’t take a photo of it, it was quite a sight.

The last station of the day was a warehouse of the China Marchant Group. They where doing added-value services for a large electronics- and entertainment company I don’t want to name on this blog (same reason why I have not put any photos of this online, sorry). It was a very valuable experience to get an insight into the strong differences between this kind of operation in Europe and in Asia.

Afterall the trip was great and considering everything including the bus and the food only cost us 50HK$ it was unbelievable cheap. Well, the multi-entrance visa to China cost about 50 Euros, but as the name suggests were able and going to use it again in the future. The pictures of the trip can be found here, so take a look.

Slightly late but still a little reminder: Mark and I did a little bit of sightseeing last sunday while Nils was busy accompany his parents on their visit to Hong Kong. We went to the Chi Li nunnery and the attached Nan Lian garden. Both can be entered free of charge and especially the architecture of the nunnery’s buildings is very impressive. The garden is absolutely clean and you see gardeners around the place at any time. Take a look at a few photos here.

Since Mark was the one taking pictures that night take a look at his blog for impressions and (this time) even videos (unfortunately only in German).