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The picture attachment problem in our forum has FINALLY been solved, thanks
to several forum members who volunteered and helped out, after my call for
HELP on Aug 17! It was a real
learning experience for me about SQL database tables, phpMyAdmin, our phpBB
forum software and programming in general. It all reminded me of my past,
the 1980s when I got into programming for fun and then studied computer
science.
But since 1995, I've been focusing on building, webmastering and marketing
websites, specialising in Internet publishing and e-marketing consulting
these days for a number of clients. So I'm pretty rusty at all this
technical stuff, wasting dozens of hours trying to analyse and fix this
tricky and stubborn problem. I couldn't have done it without help.
Dozens of emails over a 1-month period... many heart-felt and sincere thanks
go to Cedris, Perksie and especially Jenny who managed to
repair the corrupted database table and re-upload it into the forum. Jenny
has just been named a Laudable Lamma Luminary for services far above
and beyond the call of duty to the Lamma forum community!
No data has been lost and the forum is back to normal now. So you're welcome
to attach your wildlife photos and stuff for sale again in our still
all-free, non- commercial
forum!
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Debbie Lindsay
-
Publisher of Lamma Calendar 2011: |
|
 I
will be publishing the calendar for a second year.
This year, I'd like to open it up and
offer the Lamma community the chance to publish their photos in it.
10 photos will be chosen for the calendar.
For the fee of $50 per photo (which will be
donated to Child Welfare Scheme), anyone can enter, and you can send
in as many photos as you like for the competition.
Please
click here to find out how to enter.
The popular
'Lamma faces' page will also be published as the December
page again this year. The fee is HK$30 for each face and all
proceeds will be donated to the Child Welfare Scheme. Space
will be limited this year, so get your photos in early.
Click here to find out
more.
To find out more about the Child
Welfare Scheme, please visit
www.cwshk.org.
Photo competition –
Calendar pages
To Enter
Please copy your photos on a disk, and
put in an envelope containing your full contact details and
$50 per
photo ($100 for 3)
entry fee. A donation box will be placed at the following
outlets:
o Diesel's Bar
and Cath's Bar
Photo Specs
Photos must be submitted by
5th October 2010 and must be:
- Lamma themed (see
categories below)
- Landscape
- Minimum of 280mm x 215mm
- Minimum 300 dpi
- Maximum 5MB
Categories
The publisher will be looking for
subjects that fit into the following categories:
Seascape/Landscape, On the beach, Up
in the hills, Flora/Fauna, Lamma life, Architecture, Food & Drink,
Local culture/events, Only on Lamma!, People
(note that close up face shots will not be used without
written permission from the owner), Lamma Miscellaneous.
Please Note
By submitting photos to this
competition, entrants are agreeing to give permission to the
Publisher to publish their photograph and name in the Lamma Calendar
2011.
The Publisher reserves the right to
make the final decision on which photos will be published in the
calendar.
Copyright of all photos submitted
remains with the photographers.
The Publisher will not use or
distribute the photographs for anything other than the Lamma
Calendar 2011.
Lamma Faces Page
To have your photo in this year's
collage page, please submit your photos to
Debbie_lindsay@hotmail.com by the
5th October 2010. Please title your email
cws_calendar_YOURNAME and send only one photo per email.
Please state your payment method in the
email text.
Alternatively, if you're not that
technically minded, I will be carrying my camera around again this
year and will be arranging a couple of dates/times I will be around
in the village to take photos. Watch this space!
 Photo Specs
- 1 face shot
- Minimum 300 dpi
- Maximum 1MB
Payment Methods
-
Transfer the money
($30
per face,
$100 for 4) to CWS directly.
HSBC acc no 083 465724 001.
-
Send a cheque made out to 'Child
Welfare Scheme' and either drop it in one of the donation boxes,
or send directly to CWS at Rm 303, St George's Bldg, 2 Ice House
St, Central.
-
Put your cash/cheque donation in an
envelope with your name and contact details on it, and drop off
at one of the donation boxes in the village:
o Diesel's
Bar and Cath's Bar
Please don't forget to mark your
payment method clearly in the email when you send your photo!
Please Note
By submitting their photos for the
collage, entrants are agreeing to give permission to the publisher
to publish their photograph in the Lamma Calendar 2011.
Copyright of all photos submitted
remains with the photographers.
The publisher will not use or
distribute the photographs for anything other than the Lamma
Calendar 2011. |
Click above to enlarge, or learn more about last year's Lamma
Calendar 2010:
The Generous Spirit of Lamma Residents
This error message has confused many
visitors to this website in the last few days.
The entire website went down
occasionally, with both forum and Lamma-zine pages
unavailable. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.
After a lot of struggling with our US webhosting
tech support, resulting in almost no really helpful advice, I
figured it out myself in the end: a
spam attack from a single Mainland website on our
Chinese Discussions forum!
This attack overloaded our shared server when
our website was "using more than 250kb/s and/or 100
simultaneous connections at once." These spam attacks have
been happening occasionally for years on a smaller scale, but
I've closed all potential forum loopholes long ago. They
(almost) never succeed in spamming our forum anymore, due to our
daily, constant vigilance; plus I'm manually approving every
forum member registration. But the spammers keep on trying,
usually via quite stupid but extremely stubborn Spambot
programs.
This temporary server overloading triggered the
US webhost to shut down the entire site automatically, without
informing me at all what they did and why they did it. This
happened last Tue, this Mon and Tue mornings (that I'm aware
off); it took me one week to hear what had actually occurred.
 I've changed some the forum's PHP programs by
hand today (if ($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] == "220...) and
blocked the offending Mainland IP Address. After uploading the
new program...WOW, amazing success! Within minutes, I could
watch in real time all the spam connections simply dying away,
only leaving legitimate users.
We've finally got a peaceful, quiet forum, not
under constant attack anymore. What a big relief for this forum
administrator, aaahhhh! Well, at least till the next spam attack
originating from another website...
If you see any more 501 Not Extended error
codes, or any other website/forum problems, please email me
immediately at
info@lamma.com.hk. Thanks!
P.S. for more
technical details, plus updates on the still unsolved picture
attachments problem, or, even better, to offer YOUR advice
and help (still desperately seeking a phpBB expert!), see:
Announcement: Attachment problems!
Most blogs mentioning Lamma are fairly standard. Usually something like,
"We took the ferry, hiked the Family Trail, ate seafood, went home." But
occasionally you come across a gem of a story, or at least something very
unusual or plain weird. Let me highlight a few recent blog stories about
Lamma in the next few days. First and maybe best, a blog listing
10 Things to Do in Lamma.
The article opens with:
"more than just a sleepy fishing village and a weekend destination for
city dwellers, lamma island is the glastonbury of hong kong. there is
an unspoken allure to the island and as soon as you step foot on it,
you can immediately feel its essence.
if discovery bay is the sterile suburb, lamma is the creative vortex
of bric-a- bracs. it is a refuge for artists, spiritual healers, writers
seeking inspiration and the bohemian dwelling quarter."
 Yes,
the writer's Shift key doesn't seem to be working, or he's
inflicted with some mysterious phobia or dislike of uppercase
letters. But, amazingly, this was actually composed by an
inhabitant of our "friendly rival", the "so different from
Lamma!" enclave of Discovery Bay, smalltroubleinhk! He
told me so on
his blog, when I asked for permission to republish his
story and photos here: "Haha no I live in sterile land-
discovery bay. Please feel free. I love to promote HK…"
Will they ban him for calling his own home a
"sterile suburb"? Oh well, some of my friends living there
are saying the same thing...
Thanks, smalltroubleink, no trouble at
all! Instead of republishing the story, I'll simply link to it
from here, a lot less effort and trouble from my side, hehe!
10 Things to Do in Lamma
A few of you might remember this SCMP "The LoDown" lead story about
Chow Yun-Fat planting trees up in Tai Yuen Village on April 21?
Alex Lo asked me to use one my world-exclusive pictures, see above, even
promising to pay for it. This is most unusual for the SCMP; from over a
dozen of my pictures they've published over the years, they've only ever
agreed to pay me once before.
Well, it took only 3 months (!) and several follow-up emails to their
Accounts Dept., but I finally
got paid their standard rate of the amazing amount of... HK$500 for
this half-day photo shoot, see below!
See how extremely cheap I am as a photographer! ;-)
You could definitely afford to hire me for your
next photo shoot, anywhere, anytime in Hong Kong!
Contact me!
Our 8-year-old forum is throwing a major tantrum! It doesn't allow forum
members to attach pictures to their messages anymore and can't even display
the old pictures anymore. Don't worry, the old pictures and messages are all safe and
backed up on several hard disks, all part of the regular, daily maintenance I perform for our
local community forum.
But to get the forum fixed I need help from somebody who knows how to
restore a SQL database table with phpMyAdmin, or something similar. If you're a bit
familiar with our phpBB forum Shareware, even better.
Contact me
urgently, please.
Here's the
last message from our webhosting co.'s tech support, for your info:
"The phpbb_attachments_desc table in your database is
corrupt and cannot be repaired.
A) I assume you take regular backups of your database as
we are not responsible for backing up your data, restore that
table from your backup.
B) Ask on the developers forum how you can recreate the
table in its original form using phpMyAdmin which is available
via Plesk.
After either A or B is complete your site will start
working again."
Congrats to Lammaites "Elemiz" & "Bitchie" for being featured amongst the
very best DJs in all of HK in
HK Magazine, July 22:
Catch their blog, remixes, upcoming shows (Sonic Step Sisters and others)
plus their famous Kongkast podcasts at
KongkreteBass.com.
One of the many advantages of having 8+ years of fully searchable Lamma-zine
stories (2,500+) is that I can occasionally republish former stories and
photos.
 This comes in especially handy for yearly recurring festivals, like the
traditional Yu Lan "Hungry Ghosts" Festival happening today at our
Tin Hau Temple and the Cargo Pier:
Aug 3, 2003: Photo Gallery: Yu Lan Festival
Aug 18, 2005: Beware of Hungry Ghosts!
Aug 1, 2006: Hungry Ghosts Roam the Island Again
 Wayne of Chateau Lamma has been offering free red wines today. Wine
tastings are still a very rare occasion on Lamma, even though many wine
lovers live here, myself included. Bringing a bottle to any party is almost
standard practice. But Main Street shops usually offer only a very limited
selection of bottles, all well below $100. They also offer no good advice,
like describing the taste and which wine will complement which foods.
 Chateau Lamma is a brand-new and cozy little place located in Tai Yuen,
just after the Yan Yan store, where Selling Point workshop was located
before their move. This is the only shop selling a wide selection of
standard and premium wines on Lamma, ranging from $40 to well over $1,000.
Check out the next free wine tasting on Sat afternoon, Aug 28, 4-6pm.
And no, this story is NOT an advertorial, just a little free promotion for a
new shop from an occasional customer who's been happy with what he's bought
so far, after very friendly and knowledgeable consulting by bilingual Wayne.
He's a former accountant in town who's followed his passion and moved to
Lamma just a few months back. Drop by during afternoons or evenings just for
a chat about making his dream a reality and his hobby into a business. We
Lammaites love people like that, let's welcome Wayne with open arms!
  
  
Photos by Rambo Lai from his
Photos and the Days photo blog.
For more of Rambo's amazing and unusual photos, see his
Lamma Life section.
Summer season is slow, cozy and leisurely on Lamma Island, even more so than
the rest of the year. Very few events are happening locally while so many
residents are vacationing overseas and our
Lamma Events Calendar
is pretty barren these weeks. So the few remaining events can get a lot of free
publicity on this website. All you need to do is ask, especially if you have
an unusual and eye- catching poster to show! For example this striking
poster below, for an (almost) regular, monthly community event in the
Waterfront Bar & Rest.:
But I've got a number of questions about this poster:
-
Is this the
famous Quizmeister Jason, veteran of so many former
quiz nights; or is it a contestant suffering a brain freeze
from a really tough quiz question or just getting really
big-headed after finding the correct answer?
-
It's a dinner
quiz, but looking at the expression on Jason's face below, I
wonder what or who's for dinner?
-
Curry Night
is happening there as well, like every Wednesday, and it
looks like yellowish Jason is a really serious curry lover?
-
Did he land on
our circular UFO Landing Pad, cleverly disguised as a
helipad?
-
What are the
prizes? Mars Attacks! DVDs? Jason lets you live if
you win?
Alien Quizmeister Jason replies:
"Ha Ha - very funny!! Thanks for the publicity. To answer your questions:
1. Yes that is me. -- 2. and 3. Kumar has the secret
recipe.
4. No, came in the swanky new ferry. -- 5. Come along and
see."
This cute poster above is just the last one in a series all created by Jason:
  
While we're talking about the very popular
The Waterfront - our frequent dinner place and a loyal Lamma-zine
advertiser - here are a few more photos of our recent candle light dinners
in this friendly, cheerful and relaxed place. Yes, I've STILL got this bad
habit of annoying Lamma-Por by taking pictures of the food as soon as it
arrives, delaying her from tucking in immediately.
But I'm not the only one,
as you can see below. Lamma-zine reader/contributor,
(food) photographer and
digital artist
Swapan Mukherjee
from Bombay is enjoying his huge plate of fish & chips while contemplating
seriously to become a Lammaite a few days ago. The Waterfront is also just a fantastic spot
for sunset- and people-watching:
  
 
Some of our personal favourites: Chicken Dijon and pork w/apple gravy
P.S. By the way, warm congratulations to
Kumar for having been promoted to Associate Director of
the Waterfront and Island Bar. Well-deserved and long-overdue, IMHO!
(First 2 photos by Cédric
Sam, other photos by L-G.
More Sea Superb photos by Cedric Sam)
Cédric Sam writes:
"Lamma Island has a new ferry ship! HKKF, the company that
runs the ferry service between Central and Lamma Island has a
new ship on this route. I don't know when it first sailed (it
could have been off rush hour), but I took it on both Thursday
and Friday mornings at 8:20AM from Yung Shue Wan pier.
"According to the ship's manufacturer Cheoy Lee Shipwards,
the Sea Superb (or 海永 / Hoi Yong / "Sea Forever" in Chinese) is
different from other catamarans operated by HKKF on the
Central-Yung Shue Wan route and also built by Cheoy Lee. It is
32m long instead of the 28m basic models, like I think the Sea
Superior and Sea Smooth are. The rear deck of the Superb is
indeed noticeably longer.
"Now I wonder what they will do when the second boat
arrives too. Is HKKF going to reassign the other boats to
different routes from Central, or are we going to see the
reappearance of a night ferry…"
Let's hope so, Cédric Sam, but do not hold your breath...
More pictures in
Cédric Sam's blog.
HKKF, as usual, did not reply to my request for comments
and more info; their rarely updated website doesn't even mention
the new ferry.
But there's some very good, detailed info on this new ferry
on the website of the company who built this ferry,
Cheoy Lee Shipyards.
A first in Lamma.com.hk's 8-year history, a most unusual photo of a
light show above our much-photographed Yung Shue Wan ferry pier.
Lightning on Aug 5 by Kevin, 7:56pm
(Nikon D300, 18mm, f/4.5, -0.7 EV, ISO 400, shutter speed 3
seconds.)
Kevin writes: "Thanks so much for your encouragement. I had to
wait until the rain stopped and the wind died down. Lightning strikes last
night were so frequent and bright. I took quite a number of photos with an
all-bright blue sky but without any lightning. This was completely shot by
coincidence. All my other photos had just a tiny fragment of the lightning.
All the photos were taken under the cement ceiling. I missed quite a few
great shots. All I heard were the "Wow!"s from the neighbours but I could
not even see them (too busy taking care of my camera)."
After seeing this story, I got one more amazing photo of the same lightning
storm, from JT in Pak Kok:
Click for more
Lamma Photos of the Day and
submit your own!
Yung Shue Wan has almost 20 restaurants offering "Western", Italian, Indian,
Thai, Turkish, Vegetarian and various Chinese cuisines. But no Swiss food!
So Lamma-Por and I had to venture to Kowloon-side for our yearly National
Day fix of Swiss dishes, to the Swiss Chalet in Tsim Sha Tsui East, one of
only two authentic Swiss restaurants in all of HK (Chesa in the Peninsula
Hotel is the other one). What an absolute delight these guys are
offering, at only $152 for a weekday lunch, everything below was included,
even a glass of wine. We'll definitely return to this cozy place in Tsim Sha
Tsui well before next Swiss National Day!
 
 
 
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