We're almost in the middle of the adventure / trail / road running season and there are loads of great events round Hong Kong that don't require as much commitment as the Hong Kong Marathon, which happened last weekend. (Personally, I dislike the HK marathon. I find the course uninspiring and dull, but kudos if you do run it - a marathon's a long way!)

If you're looking to escape the city for a few hours, run some trails, maybe scramble some river gulleys, then  the Action Asia Sprint Series is a great place to start. If you're looking to try your hand at something more challenging then Action Asia are doing a 3 day race in Vietnam in June (entry fee $3,900) which looks like it could be a lot of fun (they're planning another one in Laos later in the year as well).

Closer to home and more immediately is the final race in the Hong Kong King Of the Hills series in Tai Po this weekend March 7th. There are two distances: 15KM and 36KM. Course and entry details here.

If you recenly completed the Greenpower 50KM and thought that was a little short, you can crank it up a notch with the AVOHK Round The Island Time Trial. There are two categories - True Grit which is 65KM and Whimps which is a relay. I leave it to you to decide which one you are.

And failing that - if you're looking for some serious endurance then here are 3 that should fit the bill:

1. Oxfam Trailwalker - 100KM and a Hong Kong classic. If you manage to get a place on this massively oversubscribed race, you'll have the pleasure of training through some of the most hideous months in Hong Kong.

2. Raleigh Wilson Trail  - this is normally just 78KM, but a friend of mine pointed out that they have a category called Tornado. This is where you do the Wilson trail out AND back - so 156KM and you have a 32 hour time limit. Incidentally, this is probably one of the few, if not the only 100 mile race in the region (ok...it's 96.9 miles) which would probably help you to qualify if you were aiming for the Badwater 135. (If you know of any other 100 milers in Asia let me know).

3. RacingThePlanet - not a Hong Kong race but an HK company. RacingThePlanet specialise in rough-country racing. 7 day / 6 stage, 250km races through some of the toughest places on the planet, Atacama Desert, Gobi Desert, Sahara, Antactica etc. I can highly recommend these -  going as a volunteer or a competitor (I've run three of them and hope to go to the Sahara this year and my wife, Aimée, has volunteered on 3). The Atacama desert race kicks off this Sunday - you can follow it online here.

I shall leave you with a nice take-away - a PDF that lists all these races, plus lots more for most of South East Asia. I don't know who put it together originally - or I'd give them credit - but here it is:

Asia OutDoor Event Calender 2010 (PDF: 88.4kb)

Happy running and hope to see you out on the trails.

1. Piracy doesn't kill music...it kills profit. No profit means no money to invest in new talent, promote bands etc. But...the way profit was created before is not under threat from piracy, although it appears that way...it's because the whole delivery mechanism changed from physical media to the transfer of bits. From packaging albums to downloading singles.  What's dissolving profit is the Web. (It's the same process that the newspaper industry is facing).

2. The counter-balance is that while the Web is destroying the old way of doing business, it also provides staggering new possibilities. Anyone can reach anyone. The ability to reach a wide audience for a much lower cost. Does that mean that it's easy? No. Does that mean you still don't need funding? No. Does that mean that artists shouldn't be paid for their work? No. But it does mean that new thinking, new distribution, new profit models need to be built, tested and refined.

3. The problem with the music industry is that instead of innovating, it's trying to litigate its way out of the inevitable. It has reacted instead of responded and this more than anything is the problem.

I live in Hong Kong. I cannot buy music online easily. Why not? The technology is there. It's just a credit card charge and a download away on something like iTunes. But iTunes isn't available here and I can't buy from the US or UK stores unless I have a credit card billing address in those countries. What if I wanted to buy an album?

I could order the CD from Amazon; have it packed in a box; have it put on a truck; delivered to an airport; put on a plane; put on another truck or two; and delivered to my door. But the music industry have decided through their distribution policies that I can't do a 30 second download of the same music and pay for this. Does this sound like good business to you? No, not everyone faces this same issue, but it's a demonstration of how myopic the industry still is.

I don't download music illegally, but this disingenuous bollocks that somehow the music industry is a victim here should be taken with a large handful of salt. They were caught napping and now they're paying for it.

Stop blaming piracy and focus on creating something of value that people are willing pay for. Get creative. It's your best weapon.

Download Firefox and become instantly cooler...

Don't um and ah. Just do it. Here's the link. If you're someone who needs a reason...I spend more time online than you and know what I'm talking about.

Install it and then we can get busy making your online experience full of sunbeams and happiness.

Custom Extensions

This is why you're going to love Firefox (or FF...if there's some geek in IT you need to impress); the ability to to make your browser do cool things for you.

There are currently...well, a lot of extensions for Firefox, but I've selected a few of the one's that I think you'll find most useful, so let's get cracking.

Xmarks - this synchronises your bookmarks and passwords across multiple computers. If you've got a work computer and a home computer and want your browser setup to be the same on both - get this installed. It also does a bunch of other stuff that I don't really care about...but just having this functionality is enough to make your life instantly better.

FaceMod - ever yearned for the ability to make known your negative feelings about something someone posted on Facebook? Now you can, by installing this extension. When you do, you'll see a new icon appear in your list of options and you'll be free to punish nonsense status updates from your friends:

Three things you need to know about this:

1. Only people who also have the extension installed will be able to see that you dislike something. It doesn't somehow magically alter Facebook's original interface - it's just some clever programming. It also means that if none of your friends have it - your displays of displeasure will be nothing more than a personal joke echoing through the emptiness of cyberspace. If you're my friend on FB though - I promise to dislike at least 83% of what you say.
   
   
2. This extension is classed as experimental - meaning it's technically a prototype and hasn't been fully tested. It has already been downloaded 150,000 times though, so make up your own mind.
3. It will add some more ads the right side interface of FB. Not really an issue, but just a heads up.

Morning Coffee - this one's great. If you check a number of sites daily / regularly and find yourself going through the same routine of opening new tabs and then finding your saved bookmarks - install this add-on.

It sits as an icon next to the address bar and once you have set it up, it automatically loads all the sites that you want to open into separate tabs.

But the best part is that you can customise different days of the week. If your browsing habits are different on Thursdays and weekends, for example - just add a different set of sites in the configuration panel. Then when you hit the coffee cup icon on that day, the correct set of sites will open up for you. Knock out!

Ad Blocker - no explanation needed really. Stops ads appearing on websites. In general, I have no issue with ads - people need to make a living...but certain sites load so many ads that they become slow to the point of unusable. Installing this speeds up performance.

Tab Mix Plus - gives you a metric ton of control over how your tabs behave. Highlights include:

- Undoing closed tabs
- Recovering tabs if your browser crashes
- Duplicating tabs
- Highlighting unread tabs (this is worth the install alone)

Very useful, if like me, you browse with mutliple tabs open (current count: 14)

Honourable Mentions

Download Status Bar - manages your downloads without the download window getting in the way of your browsing. Handy little add on to keep things flowing.

Greasemonkey - this is only if you're feeling a little more adventurous and I almost left it out as installing this might might damage your non-geek cred.

Greasemonkey is an extension that lets you load other scripts that control the way your browser works. For example - want a script that completely changes the Gmail interface; or lets you do multiple friend accepts in Facebook; or changes the way information is presented in Amazon?

You can install this extension and then head over to userscripts.org where they have thousands of scripts that change anything and everything to do with your browsing experience.

So that's it. Next time I'll show you how to put in search short-cuts into the the browser - which, for example, makes looking things up in Wikipedia a snap. And it's not the way you'd probably think to do it either.

Happy browsing.

Haven't installed Firefox yet? Stop being a bed-wetter and download it now.

• Hong Kong's 40 wealthiest tycoons are worth a combined US$135 billion. A 65% increase on last year.
• We're still in front of the mainland's top 40 who are worth US$107 billion
• Li Ka Shing leads the way with 15% of the combined total
• The richest 10% control 40% of Hong Kong's wealth

Full article here (paywall - subscription required).

If you love documentaries and free things then this site is for you. It's exactly what it says - a site where you can watch or download free documentaries - and their collection is pretty extensive.

(If you've never watched any Adam Curtis then you're in for a treat. - they have both The Power of Nightmares and The Century of Self.)

The picture quality varies - but then again did we mention they're free?

http://freedocumentaries.org/

But, according to two research papers by NYU and Yale, consumers actually ended up consuming more calories after the changes were made. So much for transparency. I can think of a number of reasons why this might fail, but two spring to mind:

1. If you're ordering a super-sized anything at a fast food restaurant, worring about calories probably ain't at the top of your list of things you're worrying about.

2. I'm sure your brain is probably going - "wow, if I order the slightly larger one, my cost per calorie just fell. Score!".

Great ad. Website, less so.

You see, high income and high net worth are highly correlated - a fancy statistical term meaning that people with high incomes are more likely to be wealthy. But this is not always the case. If you drive expensive cars, live in expensive property, take lots of expensive holidays and generally live a high consumption lifestyle - what's left over at the end of the month, might not add up to a great deal.

Wealth & Weight

I've always thought the formula for wealth is very similar to the formula for losing weight: getting wealthy is about spending less than you earn and losing weight is about burning more calories than you consume. Both are simple formulas but deceptively hard to carry off consistenly and require discipline and sacrifice. (For the pedants - yes there is more to building wealth than just spending less than you earn - but not much).

Hong Kong Millionaires

Hong Kong has around 37,000 millionaires, (down 61% in this economy) or roughly 0.53% of the adult population. Given that 2.9% of households earn a monthly income of over HK$100,000, shouldn't there be more?

Which leads to the question of how wealthy should you be and are you on track to joining the ranks of the rich?

How To Calculate How Wealthy You Should Be

The smarty-pants Ph.Ds who wrote The Millionaire next door came up with a formula for determining how well you're doing on the wealth accummulation front. Using the formula:

(your age x realised annual income) / 10 - any inheritance money = your expected net worth.

Let's look at an example using the median household income in Hong Kong which is HK$18,400.

Age: 30

Annual Salary: HK$220,800 (before tax)

Investment Income: HK$17,000

Inheritance Money: HK$0

= 30 X 237,800 = 7,134,000 / 10 - 0 = HK$713,400

Now you have a basis for understanding how wealthy you should be on a relative scale. Having a US$1,000,000 is great, but if you're 50 years old with an annual income of HK$3.6M and only HK$7.75M net worth when you should be closer to HK$18M - then, in the parlance of the book, you are an underaccumulator of wealth, a UAW.

How do I stack up? I perform below average for my age and income. Bummer. It's not drastically below, but it has forced me to review certain goals and milestones and we're making changes in our life to try and close the gap. Certainly, some of it is to do with current investment values, so I'm not particularly worried at this stage. I would, however, like to prevent myself from becoming a UAW, sail past AAW (Average Accumulator of Wealth) and soar into the PAW camp - Prodigous Accumulator of Wealth.

How do you stack up?

Use the formula above to figure out where you should be and if you need some help calculating your current net worth, you can use this handy calculator.

Check them out if you're wondering how this works:

Life Inurance

Life Insurance - How Much?

As an added bonus, check out his peice on Estate Planning.

This is in stark contrast to publicly traded companies like Three (Wikipedia) and PCCW (Wikipedia) who are horrible to deal with. I hate them!

Here are 3 things the Government have done to inspire these warm, fuzzy feelings.

Friendly Service

I have been applying for a work visa for an employee and the officer in charge of the case file was super. Very friendly; a pleasure to deal with on the phone and incredibly helpful at guiding us through the application process. We didn't have a huge amount of contact with her, but when we did, it was great.

Responsive

In my effort to reduce the amount of paper I receive, I thought I'd be a good citizen and sign up for eTax. This was thwarted by a technical error on their side (they didn't support my browser version)*.

I promptly emailed them, it was a Saturday, included a telephone number and recevied a call on Monday afternoon from their tech team apologising that I couldn't sign up and that my browser version would be supported in November. Brilliant!

Proactive

This is my favourite example. Last year I managed to pay my tax twice by mistake. I had set up a forward dated transaction in my online banking but had forgotten I had done this. I had another reminder set elsewhere to pay the tax bill and logged on and manually paid (if you were wondering how one does that).

When I realised my mistake about a week later, I gave the tax department a call. The voice at the other end informed me that they had spotted the mistake and had already issued a cheque for the excess and I should expect to receive it in the next day or two - which I did. Stunningly good!

I mean, it took Ikea 6 seconds to take my money and 6 weeks to refund it. A whole lot slower than our Government. I also imagine the same call to HR Revenue & Customs in the UK. I'm sure they would have been laughing down the phone for a week.

I'm sure that there are people who have had terrible experiences. So it goes, and I hope that you provide constructive feedback.

I have no motive writing this except that when you receive great service from any organisation...well, credit where credit is due. Great service is hard to get right and so far my experiences have been excellent. Long may it continue.

*Browser version was Firefox 3.5.3. They're currently only supporting version 3.1. From a technical standpoint there is no reason why this shouldn't be supported. I suspect it's a case of over-zealous standards enforcement. I was not going to try and argue it and was just pleased to see that it was on their radar to fix. Who needs to be in a rush to sign up to pay tax anyway?