G’day from a slightly chilly, smoggy Hong Kong. Seems I can’t escape technology news. Last Tuesday’s Taiwan earthquake cut six of the seven undersea cables that carry Hong Kong’s internet services.
It’s been a disaster for small business and operations like Crossroads, the NGO we are visiting, which relies on the Internet to communicate with the world. My brother in law, Mike, who runs something akin to a humanitarian eBay called Global Hand, was scratching his head in disbelief. It seems 90% of Hong Kong’s internet traffic travels via Taiwan, and now the city understands the problem with that kind of single point of failure-type exposure.
The South China Morning Post ran the internet story as its page 1 lead on Friday, and spilled to a whole page of coverage on different angles. Reminded me of the sort of coverage we give big issues at the Fin, except we don’t stop at just one page of coverage.. : )
Anyway, getting back to Mike - he was telling me how the only internet service that has worked in recent days was Google. He learnt about the Internet disruption by reading the headlines in Google News (he doesn’t have a TV). Google’s Hong Kong cache has come into its own, serving up content when access to US sites was impossible.
Today is the first day I’ve tried and been able to get on to US sites like Typepad with any degree of speed to write this blog. Gmail has worked the entire time, but not Yahoo! Mail. Interesting.
Meanwhile, here’s a shot of my daughter and I doing our worst impression at the Bruce Lee statue (in case you’re worried I’ve been doing little more than thinking about HK’s Internet woes….).

Hey folks. I’m on holidays. After a big year, I’m taking a three week break and I’m loving it already.
So what’s the Jones Family doing this Christmas/New Year season? Yours truly flexed his web-savvy fingers and found some relatively inexpensive flights to Hong Kong. We’re off to see my sister and bro-in-law who’ve been working as volunteers at Crossroads (think humanitarian eBay) for about 5 years -  we’re waaay overdue for a visit. My sister is talking about getting us involved in these life experiences she runs called "Slum Survivor" where you experience poverty first hand. That’s a change from the newspaper business, to say the least.

The tech side of the story (there always is) is that I managed to find the cheapest flights on webjet. The next step was to take that quote to the bricks-and-mortar Flight Centre which promptly undercut the price by $40. Yes, I do love the Internet. Sure, that’s not a massive saving, but they did spend a few hours with us in person checking alternatives and seating etc. so I reckon that’s value.

Enjoy the break if you’re getting one, and Happy Christmas.

We’re quite partial to the Wii here at filtered. We like the funny videos of Japanese seniors playing games. We’re even more amused that people are throwing the thing and breaking TVs. Maybe Nintendo should add a home contents insurance policy to its list of accessories?

Just in case you’re fooled by that picture of me on my blog, I don’t always act like a dude in a suit. Big Mick’s got the (kinda scary) evidence from last night’s STIRR party.

Anyway, congrats to all the guys behind the Dinner 2.0 party, particularly Tangler, Atlassian, TVP and Neo. Make no mistake, the Internet business is back in Sydney and it’s alive and well.

Update: Cam’s video of the night is gold. Make sure you keep watching to see Chris Saad give Mike Z. from TVP an elevator pitch in an elevator.

After a long search, I’m excited to annouce Joshua Gliddon will start at the AFR on Monday as our Deputy IT Editor.

He is joining us from The Bulletin, where he’s covered science and technology. Many of you will also have read his blog, and might have read the Web 2.0 yarn he wrote recently. Like a few of my colleagues, I’ve known Josh for many years and  we’re all looking forward to his arrival. I was just interviewed by Phil Sim at IT Journo (subs only), so expect that story soon.

But wait, there’s more! Josh’s appointment has created an opportunity for Julian Bajkowski, previously MIS deputy editor, to focus more of his energies on chasing down scoops for the paper and writing features for MIS Magazine, and other publications produced by Fairfax Business Media.

As we media types shivered our way through the Windows Vista launch in Sydney yesterday (very efficient air conditioning), an irony flashed through the mind.

This was Microsoft’s big corporate launch. It’s all about proving Vista, Office et al is a vital piece of technology infrastructure that directly impacts the corporate bottom line. Non-IT business leaders need to know this stuff. But amusingly enough, Microsoft didn’t really turn down the jargon-o-metre - although to their credit there was only one mention of Web services.

So with tongue firmly in cheek, here’s my Windows Vista Launch Top 10 Jargon List:

1. Productivity
2. Collaboration
3. Innovation
4. Flexibility
5. Agility
6. Speed
7. Seamless
8. Unified
9. Strategic
10. Governance

It’s a great day for the Fin. One of our reporters, Morgan Mellish, received the top award for business journalism at the 2006 Walkley Awards last night for his report on the Robert Gerard tax affair at the RBA. Congrats mate.

My colleague Neil Chenoweth won a gong for the best non-fiction book for "Packer’s Lunch - A Rollicking Tale of Swiss Bank Accounts and Money-making Aventures in the Roaring 90s."

AFR illustrator Karl Hilzinger won a Walkley for his image that illustrated one of Emma Connor’s yarns about DVD piracy (pic is in p4 of today’s paper).

But what’s making more noise today is of course the outburst by News Limited columnist Glenn Milne who jumped on the stage after Crikey’s controversial Stephen Mayne handed over Mellish’s gong. I’ve just found the YouTube clip (it took half a day to get on the site, which is a shade longer than I expected). I note that my managing editor Paul Bailey got caught up in the action as Milne was being shuffled off stage.

Any clues to how many beers/glasses of wine inspired the antics? SMH has the story here (which includes a short video report). The story includes a great rebuttal from Mayne:

"I have an announcement to make on behalf of Rupert Murdoch. That is the former Sunday Telegraph political correspondent, Glenn Milne."