I went to the Hong Kong iPhone tech talk today. I don’t think it violates the NDA to give my impressions of the event, but if it does I suppose the Apple lawyers can tell me.
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We went looking for Korean barbeque one evening and found this place. It is about a three block walk from the MTR station. The atmosphere is very nice, the meat high quality with a lot of different selections, and the price reasonable. At the end it was $115-130 HKD per person. Service was also quite good, and the set meals were quite enjoyable. We went for dinner, though they had some nice looking lunch specials.

I had a friend who said that it was quite different from the experience in Korea, where the set meal is less common. I can say it was also quite different from the all you can eat  (吃到飽) I had in Taiwan that was all self-service and you could choose any meat you wanted. However, it met my expectations of Korean barbeque as an American, providing an almost equivalent experience to the Korean barbeque I had in Houston.

I give it a thumbs up. So if you are in the mood for Korean BBQ near Causeway Bay, I recommend it.

Name: Korea Restaurant
Location: 58, Leighton Rd, G/F, Causeway Bay, H.K.
Phone: 25779893, 25779876

I read on MacRumors that Amazon had a DRM-free mp3 store. The first major issue (by comparison to iTMS) I saw was the added hassle of downloading the songs and then manually adding them to your iTunes. It turns out that they have a little downloader program that handles the downloading and importing automatically. It even handles the album art. The songs are in VBR 256kbps. That’s actually higher than I encode, normally, but the file sizes are still manageable. The prices are really good, too, the albums I looked at were all under $10. They even have a few free songs available for download.

Being someone who really cares about DRM, I’ve been very reluctant to use iTMS. Friends have populated their libraries with these non-portable songs, and I always opted not to. With Amazon, I have no excuse. I immediately bought an album. The process was completely streamlined and painless, including the use of one-touch ordering.

I give the mp3 store a thumbs-up. It is still rough around the edges compared to the Apple experience, but the DRM-free mp3s more than make up for it.

For those interested, I bought Thom Yorke’s The Eraser.

I’ve been in Taiwan for about four weeks now. After a bit of confusion getting to the apartment, I had no major issues. I’m here for just the summer, learning Chinese at ICLP at the National Taiwanese University (台大).

Classes didn’t start for two weeks, and I spent most of that time just bumming around and sleeping, recovering from finals period (I spent the previous semester on exchange at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology).