Just got back from Macau and Hong Kong [see blog post from March ’11 for reflection on visiting the 'end of the world'] and I am relieved to report that, yes, madness still prevails.  A few things have changed.  The harbour is smaller.  The trip to Kowloon is now shorter by about quarter of a mile.  A nearby mountain has been excavated, re-compacted and the waterfront at Central turned into new skyscraper-friendly "land".  Reclaimed land.  From a mountain.  We were in Hong Kong to see the British and Irish Lions play, as a 'warm-up' ahead of their tour to Australia.  Now as ‘warm-ups’ go, this was a clearly a success as the temperature was 35 degrees at 8 PM, with 85% humidity thrown in to make it feel welcoming, and so unlike Europe you could not have made it up.  Neither could you have made up the provision of "at your seat beers" which magically appeared whenever your mind began formulating the concept of a beer as a vague need or want.  Instantly, cold beers appeared, were consumed and life became incrementally better.  As human endeavours go, this felt up there with the wheel, or the moon landings, or penicillin, or the world-wide web.  The Rugby-in-a-sauna experience was made all the more fun for the excellent company of Harper Reed and his wife Hiromi.  

Harper is on a two-month international speaking tour, bombarding audiences at pace with insight, wit and much hard-won tech savvy learning.  Harper was CTO for the Obama’s election campaign, spending 18 months helping raise several-hundred million campaign dollars and coordinating the online-energies of over a one-million volunteers to help save the world from some tea party crazies.  Harper is a one-off.  Search him on Google and you get an endearing lack of self-deprecation: “probably one of the coolest guys ever”. His own Twitter handle is equally succinct: “I am pretty awesome”.  See @harper, or check-out via his Blog at https://harperreed.com.  Better still, buy him a beer, book him to speak, or both.  Apparently the Hong Kong Stadium is only used for sport and not rock concerts as the local residents don’t like the noise.  In a City where horrendous traffic halts to a halt, where no-one seems to worry that an area the size of a small English town should be simultaneously home and workplace to 20 million people, we sat impressed by the residents’ heroic stance.  As Harper put it as we headed into the overwhelming throng of Lan Kwai Fong, “I like the fact that Hong Kong people give a s**t about noise pollution.”  

Hoping to bump into @harper again sometime soon.