A few years back (2001, even), I was in Hong Kong, with a colleague of mine.
We went there to have OS Migration discussions with the kind folks in the Sun Hong Kong office.
OS migration typically occurs when a customer is fed up with an IT vendor. "out you go..." is kinda how that sounds like...
Or that IT vendor is fed up with its customers (and sells, quits, goes underground).
In either case, the customer has come to a fork in the road and needs to go left or right.
Right this way to Sun Solaris is what we used to say. I think the kids these days say right this way to OpenSolaris... it's essentially the same thing, just a more modern, hip language.
Now, there were a few people interested in what we had to say at the time. This groundswell of discontent hadn't yet reached the tipping point, so we only had a small interested group of individuals listening to us. And being in Asia, most of the participants of our session slept. Not sure what this cultural artifact is, but for a North American used to having people listen to a lecture, I am bemused by the nodding heads. It's better in a small group, you can interact with a crowd of 8 much easier than a crowd of 800... maybe that's it... Asians need interaction or else they go to sleep. Come to think of it, it's the same with North Americans. But I digress. Hang on...I do have a rant here somewhere... oh yeah... I flew a gazillion miles and my clock is totally day for night, and these guys are dozing? Come on! Wake Up, Jeff!
Anyways, one of our benefits of flying all this way in an undersized seat with no leg room and crappy cellophane wrapped 5 day old sandwiches, was the opportunity to go to visit another part of the world.
Through family connections, my colleague and I got chauffeured, wine & dined by the Hong Kong elite. (Okay, well, you might never of heard of them, but in my books, they were the hong kong elite...salt of the earth.)
They packed as much site seeing as one could possibly imagine in that Saturday and Sunday. My colleague had a grand old time. I, regrettably, slept through most of it. I am really not good with jet lag. Ironic, I suppose that I can stay awake through a lecture through the nuances of Sun's binary application guarantee but throw in a car drive through the New Territories and I am out cold...
Okay, I am tired of talking about me. Why don't you talk about me for a while. :)
One of the sites that we didn't get to see during our highly customized, highly personalized guided tour was the Wan Chai district. It's probably not by coincidence that our local guides elected to forego this part of the tour. When we asked about it, they did suggest it might be worth our time to see how business is conducted in Hong Kong. Very different, we were informed. Up to us, we were informed. And the easiest way to go there is by ferry. The Sun office is in the Kowloon district, the center of big business in Hong Kong, while Wan Chai is the center of little business in Hong Kong.
On one of the workday evenings, my colleague and I decided to head over to Wan Chai and stroll around.
This, too, is a North American concept it seems... Strolling around a business district.
Huh?
You must be shopping if you are here... so let me help you...it's one big store that encompasses the entire district, not just the physical storefronts and the leased floorspace.
It was a sea of voices, a groundswell of folks who had something and would be willing to part with it for a bit of currency. A thousand sales pitches over the course of that evening. Kowloon was a ghost town compared to the volume of people milling about in Wan Chai.
Some of the sales pitches were sophisticated, some less so. Some were respectful, some were in your face. Well, my face. Literally. One gentleman in the combination of unsophisticated sales pitch and lack of respect stepped right into my path and a mere inch or two from my face posed the peddler's underlying question - "You Buy?"
It's free to walk around the streets of Wan Chai, but it's not easy. And not recommended. Unless you are there to go shopping, and looking for a bargain.
Much like an experience using many of the sites that are freely available on the internet these days. Rather unsophisticated, rather disrespectful.
Oh well. Our fault. We buy.