it’s K-Rad y0!   Starting from scratch

During the fun Dot Com Pho lunch last weekend, the usual Dot Com Crew decided it would be a good idea to form our very own chapter of a scooter gang. This included myself, Stephen, John, Gary, and Mike.

We were worried about Mike falling off his scooter, considering that he was somehow able to crash the uncrashable Segway just a few weeks ago. As it turns out, our fears were warranted, as he bailed just a few minutes into the ride. Nobody was able to see it, but the effects of the crash could not be missed – jeans were torn, shoes were shredded, and Stephen got to put his new first aid kit to good use.

We had a great time that day, buzzing around Vancouver for a good 6 hours. After 6 hours of steady riding, we each had to pay about $6 in gas (at $1.42 per litre). Thanks Stephen for putting together this awesome video. I’m the one in the red shirt, in case you were wondering. Enjoy the video! (and my ridiculous helmet-hair!)

If you’re wondering why I haven’t posted since the day before my trip to Vancouver, it’s because, well… I’m in Vancouver! The weather has been fantastic for the most part; with the exception of the last few days or so, it’s been sunny every day. Because of this, I want to spend as little time indoors as possible. I’m happy to say that I have achieved this goal

Anyway, it looks like I arrived right on time. It appears that there has been a bit of a battle going on between John and… everyone else. You see, John is based in Richmond, while everyone else lives elsewhere (mostly Vancouver). The others thought it might be a better idea to have their weekly gathering at various places, including Vancouver, Surrey, etc. John wasn’t into this so he was pretty much having lunch without the usual ‘dot com guys’. You guys should know by now, John is not really into change. Don’t rock the boat! Right?

Anyway, since I was in town for this one dot com pho, I guess they were able to settle a truth. Thus, this lunch was named the Reunion Edition. Not only was John reuniting with the rest of the gang, but I was joining in too. Even though it was for the first time technically, it felt like a reunion. Plus, if you listen, you will see that I was actually one of the originators of a very early version of dot com pho – back then, it was called Midnight Golden.

Anyway, enjoy the wackiness

MGS4 has officially launched, and I mean launched. The game is believed to be the saviour of the Playstation 3 – the only really good game that is exclusive to the console. Reviews seem to agree with this, with most sites giving the game a score of 90% or better.

I haven’t played the game yet – I just have too many games I haven’t even beat yet. Once I beat Mario Galaxy, God of War, Devil May Cry 4, GTA IV, and Zelda: Twilight Princess, then I will pick up MGS4. Yeah right.

Anyway as a part of the huge launch blitz, Konami teamed up with Uniqlo (Japan’s version of The Gap) to promote 12 special MGS4-themed T-Shirts. The shirts are all designed by some of the top graphics designers around the world, and it shows. Instead of getting lame ‘official T-Shirts’ with maybe Snake’s head or a logo, the designs are pretty cool:

There are actually 2 versions of each design above

Since Uniqlo is hard to come by outside Japan and Hong Kong, I decided to sell these on Ebay. So far, the auctions have been well received – several sales went through while I was still adding the initial auctions!

If you’re interested, check out my auctions and pick one up for $20 + shipping.

And yes, I picked up one for myself. Picture of me modelling my MGS4 shirt after the jump!

Read the rest of this entry »

This article was another victim of The Great Crash of 2008. It has a lot of sites linking to it, so I am reposting it from a copy on Archive.org. Note that I don’t really write about tech related stuff on this blog anymore. For that, go to my main site hardCOREware.net.

As I mentioned in my How to Download HDTV post, downloadable HDTV programming comes in a variety of types. Because of this, building an HTPC (Home Theatre PC) can be a daunting task for the first time. I’ll try to make things as easy as possible, keeping quality in mind of course. The article below refers to using Windows XP as the OS. Some of the software doesn’t like Vista (although by now, it might have been updated).

HDTV comes mainly as the following types of files:

1. .ts files, or Transport Stream files. These are ‘pure MPEG-2′ files, ripped bit-for-bit from HDTV content providers. These are the biggest files (a 1080i or 720p movie will be around 8-10 GB).
2. h.264 / MPEG-4 AVC files. The latest, greatest MPEG codec, which can’t seem to decide on a name. This is the same encoding technology used by Blu-Ray, but these are not direct Blu-Ray rips. These often come in the .MKV file format, which is simply an alternative to .AVI, but open-source and with more features. TV shows like CSI and Heroes often come in this format, and are usually 1.2 GB per 40 minute episode.
3. Xvid/DivX MPEG-4 files. These are becoming rare, as once you get up there in resolution and bit rate, the demands on the CPU are quite high. Still, they are out there. I have the full collection of BBC’s Planet Earth in 1080p XviD (since replaced by the Blu-Ray version when it was released). Playing these files yields the highest CPU usage (over 30% on a Core 2 Duo 6800). Each 60 minute episode is about 3 GB.

I am going to tell you what I think is the best way to play these file types. There are easier ways to do it, but when quality is your main concern, you don’t always want to take the easy way out

You will need several pieces of software to be able to play all of the above file types:

1. You’ll need a media player. Everything described here will work in Windows Media Player, but that’s not necessarily the best option. Quality wise, it will be the same though. For what it’s worth, I prefer to use The Core Media Player. Basically because it tells you exactly what DirectShow filters are being used, and that’s what helped me figure all of this out. It also easily allows you to change the aspect ratio of the video being played, but I have only come across this requirement once (to play the BBC shows). Other popular choices are Media Player Classic and Zoom Player. After switching to Vista, I have since started using The KMPlayer, and I really like it. It is sort of a combination of an all-in-one player (using the same libav codecs as the rest) and a DirectShow player. Very robust.
2. The right DirectShow filters and codecs. Windows won’t play a single HDTV show that I described above, unless you install the appropriate filters and codecs.
3. A media splitter. You will need a splitter so Windows knows what to do with .mkv files and .ts files. Some decoders have this function built in, most do not.

So here we go!

You need an Audio Decoder

AC3 Filter is something I am going to recommend to everyone. Although many decoders have built-in support for AC3, PCM, and DTS decoding, AC3 Filter does it all. You may wish to use different decoders, but this should always be installed as a backup.

Media Splitter to play .MKV files

To play .MKV and .ts files across any filter you choose, stick with the Haali Media Splitter. It also supports MP4 and AVI splitting, but I would recommend to just use it for MKV files. Depending on which MPEG-2 decoder you decide on, you may want to use it for .TS files as well.

How to play .TS files

As I mentioned, .ts files are quite simply pure MPEG-2 video files with AC3 audio. They are often downloaded as a hundred or so .ts files, so you will first need to merge them into one. For this, use HDTVtoMPEG2. Don’t go to this page to get the latest version; even though it shows up first on Google, it’s REALLY outdated.

To convert .ts to a single file, simply add all the .ts files you downloaded, set a “Max Size” to something huge, like 20000 MB, and hit “Process”. You can either convert it to an MPEG-2 carrier, or leave it as .TS. I prefer to leave it, just to keep things as original as possible.

Now that you have on single .ts or .mpg file, you will need an MPEG-2 decoder to play it. Windows does not come with an MPEG-2 decoder, so you will need to install one. Most MPEG-2 decoders are commercial software, but there is a free one out there, libmpeg2, which is built into FFDShow. I’ll be mentioning FFDShow quite a bit from now on.

A better choice, if you have a good video card, is to use the commercial decoder from the manufacturer. If you have an nvidia 7xxx or 6xxx series card, you will want to use their PureVideo DVD decoder. This will let you use your video card’s built-in hardware MPEG-2 acceleration. ATI has Avivo, but I haven’t quite figured it out yet.. I don’t think they actually have an MPEG-2 decoder, as there is nothing to download on their site. However they do talk about MPEG-2 (and even h.264) hardware acceleration, so perhaps I should look into it and do a writeup on that later on. Anyway, nvidia video cards are a superior solution for HDTV when you’re using RGB or DVI output.

Once you’ve installed either decoder, you can now play Transport Stream files. Just before writing this, I tested nvidia PureVideo against FFDShow’s libmpeg2. I watched the first minute or so of Transporter 2 in 1080i. FFDShow did not do a very good job at deinterlacing during horizontal movement, and it uses more CPU cycles than PureVideo, which is also multithreaded. Deinterlacing was perfect using a GeForce 7950 GT and PureVideo. Note that PureVideo comes with its own .ts splitter, so if you use it, you don’t need to enable .ts splitting with Haali. FFDShow comes with one, but it stuttered for me during playback. Using Haali fixed the problem. Both FFDShow and PureVideo come with AC3 decoders, so it is up to you whether you want to use AC3Filter (but again, I think it’s good to have as a backup).

How to play h.264/MPEG-4 AVC

We are going to be seeing more and more of this codec, so get used to it . You are going to need an h.264 decoder and a media splitter that supports .MKV files. By now, you should already have Haali Media Splitter installed, and AC3 Filter. So you have the splitter and audio handled, what about the video?

As far as I know, there is only one free h.264 decoder, and that’s libavcodec. Once again, it is built into FFDShow. However just like with MPEG-2 decoders, the free solution isn’t necessarily the best. I have been using CoreAVC, which is faster, more efficient, and multithreaded. I haven’t done direct video quality comparison however.

With Haali Media Spliter, AC3 Filter, and either of these codecs, you now have full MKV and h.264 support! Grats!

Xvid and DivX Files

This is the easiest part. Take your pick; DivX or Xvid. Or you can use FFDShow’s MPEG-4 decoding capabilities. Beginning to see a pattern here? FFDShow is truly the most-in-one solution. Paired with a media player that supports DirectShow (even Windows Media Player), you should have support for every codec. And best of all, it’s free. I prefer to stick to the original though, so I just use DivX. AC3 Filter will take care of the sound, which will usually come in AC3 format.

And there you have it. You now have what it takes to play HDTV content that you downloaded from one of the ways I described before. It may seem like I could have simply said “Just install FFDShow and everything will work”, that’s not quite the case. It’s a very robust solution, and it’s free, but it’s not necessarily the best. The splitter chokes on .ts files, and it didn’t deinterlace the 1080i movie I tested very well. But it’s free, so how much can you complain? I’m happy to have provided you with a free, most-in-one choice, and several commercial solutions that will give you better quality.

The All-in-One Solution

What if you want a single all-in-one solution? What if you have your preferred filters installed, and want to keep some things separate? For that, you have MPlayer with MPUI and VLC Media Player. Simply extract the archive to a directory, and you have a player that supports pretty much every format out there, all without messing around with filters and installation. Both VLC and MPUI use most of the free lib codecs that FFDShow uses, but it’s nice to have everything separate as a backup player. I have been using MPlayer/MPUI to play Canucks games that are encoded with h.264 and AAC audio (although I am probably going to use FFDShow for AAC playback from now on)

Note: The original version of this post was lost during The Big Crash of 2008. I am copying this from an archived version before it is lost forever. A lot of people find this post to be useful, so it will be staying around. I’ll have to take all new pictures though. Due to the diet, I haven’t been able to have one of these in months! It will taste nice I’m sure

If you’ve ever been to a Vietnamese restaurant, you’ve surely tried the ice coffee, or cà phê sữa đá. If you have, you either love it, or you hate it. Vietnamese style ice coffee is likely the boldest, thickest, strongest, sweetest coffee you’ll ever try. And I absolutely love it.

Here’s how you can make it at home. Follow these instructions, and your home-made Vietnamese ice coffee will be just as good, or better, than at authentic restaurants.

What you need

The requirements to make Vietnamese ice coffee are somewhat specialized. You will need the following:

French ground coffee, fresh as possible. If possible, buy your own grinder, and you can buy a bag of roast whole coffee beans at the grocery store or coffee shop. If not, use their grinder, and buy in small quantities. Once ground, coffee only lasts about a week. Be sure to get the darkest roast possible. I prefer french roast and espresso roast. I still haven’t found a source of true Vietnamese coffee beans however.

When grinding the coffee, you want it to be finer than you’d use for typical drip-coffee, but not as fine as with an espresso machine (since you don’t have steam power to push the coffee through). Slow percolation is what makes this coffee so great.

Sweetened condensed milk. You must buy the “Longevity Brand” if at all possible. It’s the one with the old Chinese man on the label. I have tried other brands like Eagle, but they do not dilute as well, and don’t taste as good.

Some time after I wrote this article, Longevity have changed their formulation, at least here in Hong Kong. They are now a ‘filled’ condensed milk, meaning that it’s pretty much concentrated and has vegetable oil added to it. It sucks. Hong Kong’s Nestle now has a true condensed milk (and even a filled version, which is clearly labelled). Just check the ingredients and make sure they aren’t much more than MILK and some sugar.

Drip filter. This is of utmost importance. Without it, you will not be able to brew as dark as you need, and you won’t have PERFECT Vietnamese ice coffee. Look for it in Asian household stores. I have tried a french press, and results are not satisfactory. I have even tried using my Moka pot, which makes a pretty strong brew. It still doesn’t taste right.If you can’t find this type of filter, don’t even bother. Stick with restaurants. You may be able to buy a filter online (I found one here at Import Foods.com, but the shipping is more than the item itself, and they only ship to USA).

Tall glass, ice, near-boiling water

Step 1) Boil some water. Do this first, because you don’t want to brew with 100 degree water. By the time the water boils and cools off a bit, it should be the perfect temperature. Unless you’re really slow to do the following steps.

Step 2) Pour some of the sweetened condensed milk into the glass. Remember, you want to use Longevity Brand, with the old Chinese dude on the front. It should be thick and syrupy. This stuff keeps for a week or so in the refrigerator, but gets REALLY thick when it’s cold. I use a small pitcher to store it. It is really messy to pour from the can.

Step 3) Pour some of the finely ground coffee into the drip filter. As you can see, I actually didn’t grind this coffee nearly enough. This glass will NOT be perfect! I have been experimenting with various grind sizes and compression levels of the top filter (next step). I have found that a finer grind with moderate pressure yields the best result. The coffee grind level should be just at the point where the screw pushes through the grinds. You don’t want to use too much or too little. The filter is actually meant to be screwed together, but I prefer to use more coffee and let the next step do its work:

Step 4) Apply the top filter over the coffee. This is the important part; too much pressure, and the water won’t go through. Too little, and the water will flow right through the grinds, leaving you with weak coffee (similar in taste to using a french press, actually). You can start by pressing the top filter down, pouring in the water (next step), and see if the water is going fast enough. If it doesn’t start dripping within a few seconds, use a fork to loosen the top filter a bit.

Step 5) Pour in the water. You should simply pour the water in to reach the top of the filter. I find this to be the perfect amount.

Step 6) Let it drip! Depending on whether you used the right grind size, and proper amount of pressure when applying the top filter, this is where you’ll find out if you did everything right. It should take a moment before the coffee begins to drip through the bottom, and it should take several minutes for this entire step to complete. If the water pours right through, your grinds are too big, and/or there is not enough pressure on the top filter. Play around with this step, and adjust to taste.

Step 7) Once the water stops dripping, you’re ready to stir in the sweetened condensed milk. The coffee itself should be dark, dark, DARK black, and should foam a bit when you stir it. Once the milk is mixed in, add your ice cubes. This is another important step: Too few ice cubes, and your coffee will be warm! Too many, and it will be diluted. For a big glass like this, I use 8 or so cubes. Some people prefer to keep the ice in another glass, and pour from one to the other. This is potentially messy, and creates more dishes to clean. But it may allow for the coffee to cool quicker.

And there you have it. The perfect glass of Vietnamese ice coffee, made at home! In summary, keep these important steps in mind:

1) You want to use FRESH coffee, ground at home if possible. Grind it fine, but not powdery fine. Use a strong roast; I like FRENCH ROAST since this would have been what was introduced to Vietnam by French colonists in the 1800’s, so their own roast may taste similar (I haven’t tried, so this is just my guess).

2) Don’t bother trying unless you can find the type of filter shown. Amazingly, I could not find one of these filters in Hong Kong, so I had to get someone to send me one – from a Chinese home appliance store in Richmond. I am 500 miles from Vietnam right now, but had to import a filter from Canada, 6400 miles away. I have tried a French Press, but it’s not strong enough. I haven’t tried using Espresso or a Moka pot, so I’m not sure how those will work out. Even a Moka pot, which makes very strong coffee will not work. There is something about the simplicity of using a combination of slowed percolation with the grinds under pressure that makes this coffee so great.

3) Longevity Brand A PURE MILK BASED sweetened condensed milk. Accept no substitutes. Make sure it’s not ‘filled’ with vegetable oil.

Let me tell you, it’s not easy to find a good (free) template for Wordpress. Some may look OK, but are poorly coded. Others might be well coded, with all the features, but look like crap.

The first ‘new look’ I used here looked okay, but I wasn’t that happy with it in the end. It took a lot of work to work the way I wanted, since it was a very basic template. Widgets were not supported, and it even had a lot of static links in the sidebar that needed to be used for the template to look proper. So I had links to a contact page (useless) the “home page” (useless – you can just click the header) and an “about page” which I may or may not ever use.

The new look is appropriately titled “Andrea” by Lucian E. Marin. With no graphics elements and a simple one-column layout, It fits in perfectly with my desire for an extremely clean look. It even supports modern features, like Gravatars, tags,etc. While it doesn’t have a top navbar I usually like to have, I can add that in later myself. I went back to the collection of Metroid sprites, and animated a Metroid for the logo of the blog. No, this isn’t really a Metroid blog, but I love Metroid and I’ve always had video game based headers.

Now I can get back to adding content. I have a couple trips to wite about – one to Sai Kung, a nice place to visit in Hong Kong, and our trip to Taiwan from a few weeks (month?) ago. I guess I can even do an update on my weght loss, although not too many people seemed to be interested in that (if you’re wondering, I am down to 182 lbs – I was 209 lbs not long ago).

I am also considering manually importing many of my old posts, since they are cached by archive.org. I had been considering this for a while, but could never get myself to do it. It’s going to be a tedious task, and I hate doing tedious things. I might just pull some of the more important things, like writings of my travel experience, etc. I’ll just look at the keyword history of the site and cherry-pick the ones that get Google searchers to this site

Well I just heard back from the data recovery company, and unfortunately this is what they had to say:

I regret to inform you that the data in your hard drive cannot be recovered. The disk inside the hard drive has been heavily scratched by the damaged lens.

So that’s it. K-Rad’s 5 year history is wiped for good. No more stories of my travels to all the whacky cities around the world, no more crazy food pictures, and worst of all, no more gallery. Andrea had spent an entire week uploading ALL our pictures to the gallery, and now they are gone. She’ll have to do it all over again if she wants… Plenty of other sites were lost as well, including both my sister’s work site and her personal blog which she spent a lot of time on. Tom and his sister lost their data as well. I think they have some backups somewhere though.

I still can’t believe a WD Raptor just completely died like that, all by itself. The head just scraping against the platters like that is NOT common, especially with a drive based on enterprise level SCSI components. Especially when it’s less than a year old!

Still though, I really should have set up RAID on the server. But again, I never intended to put anything really crucial on it. Oops.

So it looks like I’ll have to start this blog all over again from scratch. It should still be interesting though, there’s still a lot of life to live and share here!

Stay tuned, I’ll set this blog up close to what it looked like before, including links to all the sites I had before.

K-Rad is down… For now.

2 weeks ago, the hard drive in my server crashed. The server wasn’t recognizing the drive, so I couldn’t log in to troubleshoot.

A week later, Stephen was able to go down and retrieve the drive for me. He shipped it to me right away.

I plugged the drive in, to see if I could at least recover the data.

The drive sounds like it is severely damaged… As if the head of the drive is just scraping against the platters non-stop. The drive is completely screwed.

I am going to bring it into a data recovery service center tomorrow. Hopefully they can get the data back.

I have backups of many of the sites that were hosted on it, but not all of them. For instance, I did not keep a backup of this blog, which is going on 5 years old. If I can’t recover the data, everything is gone.

The same goes for the old Surreal-News forum. Nearly 10 years of community posts will be gone.

And many others, sites of friends and family.

The lesson is; KEEP A BACKUP. Actually a bigger lesson would be to SPRING FOR RAID in your server.

I never really intended to run many important sites from my server. I really should have set up RAID regardless.

Right now this is being hosted by my really old server, which is semi functional (email does not work). I will be moving the sites over to another server, until I go to Canada in June. When I get there, I will put new hard drives in my server (RAID of course).

Some time next week, I’ll find out of the data could be recovered. If so, it will cost up to (or perhaps over) $1000. But it should be worth it.

If not, K-Rad, and many other sites, will have to start from scratch.

For now, you can follow me on Twitter.

Wish me luck!

Originally posted on August 2, 2007

Well it’s 6am now, and I am up after about 6 hours of sleep. I guess this is an improvement over getting up at 5am like I did yesterday. But I am still severely lacking sleep; hopefully I eventually fall in line and catch up with some sleep.

While I was laying in bed trying to get back to sleep half an hour ago, I was thinking back to my first full day in Canada in almost 2 years. There were a few instances of what I can only call ‘reverse culture shock’. Everyday things that have changed in my life since moving to Hong Kong, that are noticable when I come back;

• Food is expensive! The first place we ate at was Happy Date for breakfast. This Hong Kong Cafe used to be one of our favourite spots for an early breakfast; you could get a western or HK style breakfast for like $4 CAD. That sure seemed cheap a couple years ago, but when you convert it to Hong Kong Dollars, you realize quickly how cheap it is to eat everyday food in Hong Kong. We very rarely spend over $50 HKD for breakfast, lunch, or dinner for the two of us. That includes tip (if any) and of course there is no tax. For breakfast at Happy Date, we had 2 breakfast sets, some fried noodles, and 2 drinks. The total came to around $18 CAD – That’s $133 HKD! We could have had 3 breakfasts for that pice!
• Tipping. In Hong Kong, you either get charged a standard 10% added to your restaurant bill, or you don’t pay a tip at all. Usually people just leave the small change like pennies and nickels, whether or not they paid a tip. Yesterday at Happy Date, we paid our ~$18 bill, and left a couple dimes behind, taking the loonie and some quarters. As we were leaving, the lady at the register said “you left some dimes!”. We just kept going. It wasn’t until later that day that we realized she was telling us that we ONLY left a few dimes instead of a standard 10% tip (she probably expected a full $20 bill and that’s it). OOPS!
• Mobile plans are fucken expensive here. I’m going to be in town for 3 or 4 weeks, so I need a phone. After checking out the two options for SIM cards (and both belong to the same corporation) I finally settled for the best deal; a pay-as-you-go Fido card. The airtime is $0.20 per minute, and $0.05 during evenings and weekends. However, to get that, you have to pay $35 for a SIM card (and the # only lasts 6 months) and that doesn’t even include the airtime! After tax and everything, I paid around $62 for 100 minutes of airtime. In Hong Kong, visitors can head to the nearest 7-11 and buy a SIM card for about $6.50 CAD. Airtime will be $0.012 CAD (that’s one point two pennies) per minute during peak hours, and $0.008 (not even one cent per minute) during evenings and weekends. No ridiculous connection fees (seriously, $35 for a fucking SIM card with a phone # that lasts 6 months?), no need to wait in line at a mobile store, or anything like that.
• The world is running in SLOW MOTION! We noticed that service is extremely slow here, compared to Hong Kong. People just seem to take their time; if you ask a waitress for something, she’ll respond to you right away, and acknowlege you, but damn she takes her time getting to it! I noticed this at all 3 restaurants I ate at yesterday. Servers kind of stand around, chatting to each other while serving customers. And 2 of these places were Chinese restaurants! By regular western standards, they are probably considered fast!
• People drive damn slow here. It’s quite nice actually
• I don’t know if it’s just me, but Canada seems to be turning into more of a fast-food nation than it was before… I haven’t watched a TV commercial in almost 2 years, but I caught some yesterday. Right now, both Wendy’s and Burger King are offering burgers that 2 years ago, you would have only seen in America; Wendy’s has THE BACONATOR – 1/2 a pound of meat, 2 slices of cheese, and SIX slices of bacon. Burger King now has an ULTIMATE DOUBLE WHOPPER as if a Double Whopper wasn’t enough. Double beef patties, double cheese, and DOUBLE BACON. Both of these burgers are in the 850-900 calorie range, with well over 50 grams of fat. Disgusting. A few years ago, the worst you would see was a Double Whopper or Double Big Mac. MacDonald’s probably has some atrocity of a burger as well, but I’m almost afraid to find out what’s in it. At least there are still no Jack in the Box locations in Canada, with their 1100 calorie burgers with 77 grams of fat.

That’s pretty much it for now! If I run into something else, I’ll add it later.

Originally posted on September 15, 2007

Yes, I went to a NIN concert at 5:00am. Well, sort of. We just arrived home from Vancouver last night, and tonight was the NIN concert. Talk about bad travel planning – I didn’t take into account that September 12 lasted about 1 hour for us. Since we skipped a day by traveling this way, that meant that the concert was the very next “night”. After just a few hours of sleep when we arrived, we were still on Vancouver time, so the concert started at 5:00am for us.

Thankfully, as soon as the band hit the stage, we weren’t tired anymore. I am now though.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from a Nine Inch Nails concert in Hong Kong (amazingly, this was the first time they have visited this city). I have been to one other concert in Vancouver (from the With Teeth tour), and I constantly watch All That Could Have Been on DVD and Beside You In time on Blu-Ray. I pretty much know how Trent and crew are going to act on stage, but it’s the audience that is different here.

The venue was Hall 10 of the AsiaWorld Expo, right next to the airport. This is where all the “big” western bands perform – the last to perform there was Avril Lavigne in August. The next will be Linkin Park. However, unlike most huge exposition centres, only the floor in front of the stage was open to the crowd. To me, this meant one of two things; you were either going to be right in the thick of things, ending up with bruises and battle scars, or you’d end up waaaaaaay in the back, unable to see a thing. I was sort of right on the first account.

We had several ways to get to AsiaWorld – when we go to the airport, it’s usually with suitcases so we often just hire a taxi. It costs $200 HKD for the 40 minute trip, and is very convenient. Other options are to take the Airport Express – after about 30 minutes on the regular MTR, you pay $60 HKD for the remaining 20 minute ride on the Airport Express train. The ride back is 50% off, so $90 each for a round-trip. Finally, there are two buses at our disposal; E22 which costs just $18 HKD but takes over 1 hour 40 minutes to arrive. Or A22, which is a much shorter trip at 70 minutes, but costs $40 HKD ($20 HKD on the way back, so $60 each round trip). We took A22, since the price was reasonable, and the stops are right by where we live.

We arrived promptly at 8:00 pm, and considering that quite frankly one of the best rock bands of all time was in town, it seemed quite dead. There were TWO gates to hand in your tickets, and neither one had a line. We bypassed the $20 Coke machine (about 3X normal price) and grabbed a concert T-Shirt. $220 HKD for a shirt, but I always regretted not getting these in the past, so there you go. The tour dates on the back are specific to the Asian part of the tour, so not only is the shirt a memento for the concert, but for this part of my life in general.

The opening band, THE LOVESONG was just starting their opening set. They are a hardcore/emo group local to Hong Kong. They were actually pretty decent at times; it’s clear that NIN brings in their own sound engineers to create a good-sounding concert even in big, empty rooms like this one. THE LOVESONG doesn’t have that luxury, so the lyrics were pretty much impossible to hear. Still, they had their moments, particularly when they got into the more melodic parts of their songs. You can check out some samples on their site.

The floor was pretty much empty; we walked right in, and without crowding anyone we were standing about 20 feet from the stage. If we REALLY wanted to, we could have been right up there (hey, HKers are used to some pushing and shoving, right? ).

After the set was over, it took NIN what seemed like an eternity to start their performance. I’m sure it was at least 30 minutes. By that time, there were one or two ‘rushes’ to the stage, but we held our ground. The entire time, we enjoyed a ‘pretty good’ spot on the floor, all things considered. We were sort of at the ‘back of the front’ – between the people who really wanted to get as close as possible, and those who didn’t mind hanging back to soak up the atmosphere.

The opening songs were all the fist-pumping anthems to set the mood – people were jumping and pumping fists like you’d expect. I was pretty much sandwiched in between two people, front and back, jumping together as people behind us smashed forward. But as soon as Trent settled into a slower song (for the life of me, I cannot recall the set list, sorry), that was put to an end. And it never started again. In fact, the crowd wasn’t nearly as rowdy as those I’ve seen at other NIN concerts. There were a few crowd-surfers, and I think one guy wanted to start a mosh (but no takers). Everyone in front of me was what I’d describe as ‘excited’ and ‘enthusiastic’ but not necessarily ‘rowdy’ or ‘totally out of control’. I’d look back once in a while, and the crowd behind me was pretty much ’subdued’ (like I said, I was stuck in between these two crowds, quite convenient actually). I never had a problem with being squished forward at all, which is quite refreshing actually.
At one point, I considered shoving my way to the front, Canadian style, to get things going again. But I didn’t really want to ditch Andrea on her own, nor did I want her to get smashed up. So I hung back, headbanging, fist-pumping, and jumping at the appropriate times .

As far as the performance goes, you can tell that they didn’t go ALL OUT, but rather played a nice performance. As performers, NIN is pretty much at the point where they are still going to be REALLY FUCKING GOOD even if they phone it in. Not that they did that tonight, but they were sort of in between that and going so hard that they’d pass out after walking off stage. I don’t blame them at all, considering the small crowd. Trent did seem gracious, and seemed to enjoy Hong Kong, this being his first visit there. The set list consisted of a surprizingly small amount of YEAR ZERO material, and a lot from the rest of NIN’s extensive catalog. The old standbys were there – March of the Pigs, Suck, Burn, Closer (they must be sick of this song by now.. I know I am), Hurt to close the show, etc. The highlights for me were an unexpected performance of Dead Souls, a cover of a Joy Division song that was featured on The Crow Soundtrack, and an amazing performance of Head Like a Hole.

I’m glad I was able to actually drag my lethargic ass out of my chair to check out this concert – after just 4 or 5 hours of sleep in the past 3 days, it was to the point where I think I would have gotten a refund if that option was available. I’ve now seen NIN up close, and I am greatly looking forward to the next opportunity, whenever that will arise.

I’ll close with a note to all concert goers – Please turn off your fucking cellphones and cameras during the show. If you want to take a picture of the band or something, go for it. Then put it away. Especially during the quiet, darker parts of the show, 2 or 3 dozen of these things would pop up, their LCD screens blinding everyone behind them and blocking the view. I don’t know what is the point of going to a concert if you’re just going to watch it on a tiny screen. You might as well check the clips on Youtube that other idiots already filmed.

Yup, time for bed.

Update: Videos of the performance here.