Just watching out our 9th floor window in Wan Chai for 15 minutes or so:
… and countless big black Mercs. I get the F430 or the DB9 — those cars are dead sexy; but it seems looney to drive a car as hyperbolically fast (if desperately ugly) as a GTR in a city with traffic this wretched. I mean, a GTR isn’t even that stupidly expensive — but I guess that’s the way the sexual selection cookie crumbles. Gotta keep impressing those peahens.
Later:
Spent the day today recording and rerecording a video for the Y Combinator folks. I think it came out pretty well, but it’s longer than a minute. I’d post it here but I want to make sure that Thomas is cool with that. We’re going to go get some BBQ pork to celebrate.
How I know that I’m being sensible, now that I don’t have a job: I haven’t made an appointment at my tailor to get any new clothes made. OH, THE SACRIFICES WE MAKE.
Yesterday we got started a little late — I didn’t rewake until 8:30 or so, so we didn’t get to the office and started until 9:30. Still, we made good progress on the application. Future directions are starting to become clearer. Some conceptual fuzziness I was grappling with has receded. Seeing other people’s successful y-combinator applications was very helpful.
For lunch we went to a BBQ place around the corner: I had some pretty delicious pork:
Mmmmmm rich in porkly goodness. The restaurant was totally awesome, too; we got seated, Thomas ordered, we got the food — all in 30 seconds. I wolfed down my plate and ordered some extra BBQ; a Yakult was definitely in order, but man was it delicious.
Then, back to the grind. The office is tiny and way too cold, but
they’re turning off the A/C this weekend, so it’s going to get a lot
warmer. I’m hoping to get the answers in our app tightened up a bit
so I can go to the beach on the day after we submit it.
After work, we had a bowl of noodles and then hit the Cocoaheads meeting at a local Mac reseller. I have to apologize to George the speaker, because I was disassociating from jetlag and basically incapable of standing up straight. But I met some of the local nerdery, who seemed cool, and learnt some about the app advertising business on the iPhone — not directly relevant to what I want to do, but useful and intelligently presented. What I can remember of it, that is. I made Thomas take me back to my room, because in my fugue state I was as likely to end up in Macau as the Yesinn if I wasn’t being shepherded about. But now I have the route back from the MTR burnt into my brain, so I’ll be OK.
Last night went much better vis á vis the sleeping; I powered through until about 10:15 and slept to 6am. Gonna take a shower and go get a coffee and a paper.
Arrived yesterday at noonish; Thomas picked me up and we grabbed some lunch in the IFC mall — wonton soup and pig’s knuckles. Then, off to the room I rented for the duration. The office is right near the Fortress Hill MTR stop, but they put me in a room in Causeway Bay; it’s tiny, but has a private toilet/shower, free WiFi, and plenty of room for what I need (read: sleep the sleep of the dead; change pants). Awesome! And $55USD/night! Thank you, Yesinn!
After checking in, I took a quick shower, and felt much more human. We went SIM card shopping. US people, imagine if you could actually shop for a phone — on features — and then shop for wireless service — on price. It all felt a little The Gods Must Be Crazy to me, coming from a third-world telecoms market to a first-world one. My shiny new iPhone (provider unlocked, naturally) works fine on my shiny new Vodaphone pay-as-you-go plan. Of course, the needs of Qualcomm’s lobbyists for new yachts and a slavish boot-licking deference to the 19th century business models of convicted monopolists are more important to USAn regulators than, you know, serving the public, so don’t expect a mobile phone unfucking any time soon, America!
OK, so the level one Maslow needs having been met (shower, pig’s knuckles, mobile phone), Thomas and I set out to rent a service office for the two weeksish I’ll be in town. We got a place in Wan Chai; it’s tiny, but servicable, and we got started writing stuff last night. Rock! Mostly we sorted to-dos and got stuff up and running on various Linode systems. Next up: serious work on the y-combinator application process, and application architecture. Too, learning Ruby.
Dinner was at a Shanghainese place around the corner, where we had some hairy crab, among other delicacies. It was pretty goddamn good, but maybe I’m just feeling the HK euphoria, wherein everything tastes good because I’m so excited to be in HK. Dinnae. I started to fade out around 8:30, though, so I walked back from the office to my room, stopping in Wellcome for water, soda, and Yakult.
Woke up this morning at 3:30, wide awake. Sucks, but I got some blog software development time in. We’ll see how I do today.
We’ve been here for three days; hung out with friends, went hiking on Lamma, ate a spectacular Sichuan meal (beware cruddy Flash website), visited Cheung Chau and ogled the view of HK and Lamma on a clear day. There’s been a typhoon so the air is clear, if thick as library paste, and pretty much everything about being here is fan-fucking-tastic.
I did run into the last fucking child of Ungoliant while hiking, however, and so I don’t maintain sole possession of spiderthing related night terrors, here’s a picture:
