Newley Purnell

Here’s a snip from an Andrew Jacobs story in today’s IHT:

In little more than 100 days, this city will open its arms to an unprecedented deluge of foreigners, many of whom will be pleasantly surprised by the dizzying array of designer boutiques, painfully hip martini bars and libertine pastimes not readily associated with an authoritarian, communist country.

But just as Beijing is promising to welcome 1.5 million visitors to the Olympic Games with newfound openness, public security officials are seeking to tighten controls over daily life, including new visa restrictions that are causing mounting anxiety among the 250,000 foreign citizens who have settled in the capital in recent years. The rules, which were introduced last week with no warning and little explanation, limit new visas to 30 days, making it difficult, if not impossible, for long-term residents to hold down jobs and maintain uncomplicated lives. The restrictions are also infuriating business leaders in Hong Kong who have become used to crossing the border with ease.

“I can’t begin to explain how serious this is going to be,” said Richard Vuylsteke, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong. “A barrier like this is going to have a real ripple effect on business.”

(Emphasis mine.)

If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger. — Frank Lloyd Wright

A gave me a supremely cool gadget for Christmas: The Asus Eee PC. I’ve been using this most compelling toy subnotebook productivity tool for over three months now.

Here are 10 things you need to know about the Asus Eee PC:

1. The Eee PC is small. Very small. The display is just seven inches wide. Here are some pics of the Eee next to my 12-inch PowerBook. I don’t use the Eee for my everyday work. It’s too small to use as a primary work computer, but it’s great for tinkering on the Web or using while on the road.

2. The machine is extremely lightweight. Mine weighs just two pounds. If I lived in a cool enough climate to wear a jacket, I could put the Eee in my jacket pocket. And take it places. Like to parties. And be a total dork.

3. Combine these two points with the fact that it has a solid-state, 4 gigabyte flash drive — meaning that it has no moving internal parts — and you’ve got yourself the perfect device for staying connected on the road. I’ve used my Eee throughout Thailand and on the road in Vietnam.

4. The Eee has some great built-in features:

– The 4 gig drive is big enough for documents, photos, and some music. With a 1 or 2 GB thumb drive, you’ll have all the space you need.
– It has a built-in Webcam and comes pre-loaded with Skype, so it makes a great portable videophone.
– The battery lasts three hours or so, and the charger (pictured below) is slightly larger than a mobile phone charger.
– It lacks, however, an internal optical drive, but I haven’t missed that.

5. The Eee PC won’t break the bank: the 4 gig version retails for about $400 in the US, though it costs a bit less here.

6. My Eee is black, but the device also comes in…pink. Here’s our friend’s S’s Eee. She bought it here in Bangkok when she was visiting from the US.

7. The machine, which Internerds the world over have been lusting over for quite some time, has got an interesting history and some serious geek cred. The Eee was developed by Asustek, a Taiwanese manufacturer that decided to get into the small, inexpensive laptop game after witnessing the attention lavished upon the One Laptop Per Child project.

8. The Eee is powered by Linux. To keep costs low, Asus developed the Eee to run on the open-source Linux operating system, instead of Windows. (If you think PCs are the true computers of the working man, then the Eee PC must be considered equally utilitarian.)

9. One drawback: the touchpad is a bit finicky, so it really pays to buy a mouse.

10. Oddly, the wireless connection doesn’t connect to a preferred network by default, so you should change it to connect to your home wifi signal on boot. Here’s how to make that tweak.

Other sites that contain more Eee-related info include EeeUser.com and EeeSite.net.

Thailand expert/foodie photog Austin Bush has this to say about Bangpo Seafood, located on the northern coast of Koh Samui:

Throwing around superlatives can be a scary thing, but I think I’m justified in this case. I’ve been to many, many restaurants in Thailand, and have eaten some pretty amazing food, but Bangpo Seafood particularly stands out in my mind. I knew something was special about it after my first visit over a year ago, and wrote quite a few good things about it, but have always been keen to go back and see if the restaurant was really was as good as I thought.

Well, after two recent visits, my initial impression was right, and I think Bangpo Seafood just might be my favourite restaurant in Thailand.

Now that’s saying something.

(Emphasis mine.) Image credit: Austin’s complete photoset.

Roger Cohen in the IHT:

HONG KONG: It’s the end of the era of the white man.

I know your head is spinning. The world can feel like one of those split-screen TVs with images of a suicide bombing in Baghdad flashing, and the latest awful market news coursing along the bottom, and an ad for some stool-loosening wonder drug squeezed into a corner.

The jumble makes no sense. It just goes on, like the mindless clacking of an ice dispenser.

On the globalized treadmill, you drop your eyes again from the screen (now showing ads for gourmet canine cuisine) to the New Yorker or Asahi Shimbun. And another bomb goes off.

There’s a lot of noise and not much signal. Everywhere there is flux and the reaction to it: the quest, sometimes violent, for national or religious identity. These alternate faces of globalization - fluidity and tribalism - define our frontier-dissolving world.

But in all the movement back and forth, basic things shift. The world exists in what Paul Saffo, a forecaster at Stanford University, calls “punctuated equilibrium.” Every now and again, an ice cap the size of Rhode Island breaks off.

The breaking sound right now is that of the end of the era of the white man…

Read the whole thing.