I have let rip at the world’s local bank on a few occasions over the years, and once again they have conspired to raise my blood pressure to blog posting point.

Regular readers may recall I gave up on HSBC and moved most of the Spike millions into the indifferent coffers of UOB Singapore. Final closure of my HSBC account is awaiting the move of my paltry government pension from HSBC to UOB. Until that happens, and a request to move it seems to have become lost in the system, I am maintaining a small balance at HSBC which is slightly increased every month when the pension arrives.

Yesterday, Olympus announced the new E-M5. After much internal deliberation and focus group discussion, the name of the new camera is the, wait for it, E-M5II. Catchy.

While the name maybe nothing special (I’d have gone with the Olympus Ninja; which is why I never worked in marketing), the camera does offer some solid upgrades from the old model. Stabilisation is even better than before; as is video and the overall camera hardware. Olympus didn’t make any noise about the sensor performance; but those who have tested it say that high ISO performance is improved.

Have not posted photos for a while, so here are the results from the last week. Five different film cameras, two of which were loaned to me, shooting at a variety of locations. Enjoy!

When we left our hero (me), he was struggling with the installation of a new NAS drive. If I was previously in a tunnel, there now appears to be some light at the end of it.

First of all, I managed to get the data off the old drive and onto the new one. The downloading was more onerous than the uploading. The final batch was 334gb and took more than 18 hours to copy onto a USB drive. The upload onto the new NAS with USB 3 took less than 2 hours. That’s progress.

And as she was returning today from two days away attending a funeral, I thought I would meet here wearing something that clearly proclaimed my love:

As a gentleman reaches middle age, and I am certainly heading in that direction, it may be that the colour of one’s hair changes from the original hue to something resembling grey, or even white. I have no problem with this because I hide it with a hat I think it would make me look more distinguished and educated; not that I am either of these in reality.

Sadly, my hair has stubbornly refused to change to a silvery grey. Instead, if I compare it to a colour chart, it is closest to “mucky vomit yellow grey”; not something to be sported on the pages of Thai Tatler. I am not alone with this problem and in Europe you can purchase a number of treatments that help make your grey hair go grey. But I have searched the shelves of many outlets in Thailand in search of one of these products, with no success. The problem is that Thai males rarely go grey. Either it is something genetic, or they regularly soak their hair in one of the many hair dyeing treatments which clog up the male hair product sections where I searched in vain for my grey hair miracle lotion.

I was describing this problem to The Son during his visit to Thailand, and within a week of his return to the UK I was advised of a parcel. It has now arrived.