GDI purchased

This morning I added a few more shares in GDI (HK:270) to the portfolio.  The company is largely driven by its water business and has recently negotiated modestly higher increases in the revenue it will receive for supplying water to Hong Kong.  It wont be exciting, but should provide a steadily growing stream of dividends in the years ahead.

I paid HK$4.80 for the additional shares.

Off topic: Canon's lack of customer support

I have been happily using an original Canon EOS 5D as my camera of choice for about six years now. Six years of trouble free digital photography. Until now. Until I purchased a new laptop which came with Windows 7 at which point I discovered that the driver for the EOS 5D is not supported by Windows 7 and Canon has no intention of producing one.

This basically means that the automatic selecting and transfer feature which I have long accepted as a basic feature of using a digital camera no longer works. It also means that the ability to use the remote shooting feature through the laptop is gone as well. In practice I now have to use a card reader to select and transfer pictures from the camera's memory card to the laptop. It still works but is less efficient or convenient. There appears to be nothing I can do about remote shooting. (There were some highly technical work arounds but they were beyond my technical comfort level and appear to be even less convenient than using the card reader.)

It is very disappointing that Canon has no interest in supporting a camera that still enjoys widespread use and which I still hope to get several more years of wear and tear out of.

I've been drooling over the EOS 1D X as either a replacement for or an addition to the 5D but am now having second thoughts. It's a lot of money to invest in something which I expect to use for far longer than Canon apparently is willing to support that usage.

Off topic: a literary binge (2)

Carrying on from the October post on an out-of-character literary binge, since then, I've completed:

• Emma - Jane Austin. I found this mildly entertaining



• Walden - Henry David Thoreau. As much as I can appreciate the quest for simplicity in life, on the whole it came across as a snivelling, opinionated call for universal poverty and a rejection of human progress or dissenting opinion



• Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka. Entertaining



• Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad. Grim reading and a sad reflection on the time and place it was set in



• The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Long. Just long. But well worth the read. Unquestionably the highlight of this batch

(These are in addition to other reading material.)

With the exception of Walden, I enjoyed all of these books. I'm not sure what's next for the literary genre, possibly something a bit more contemporary.