The water sport afforded a festive combination of foaming beer, floating bathers and flexing boaters.

Lai See called up management to find out what made them decide to veto the annual blast of merriment.

In a word: Outsiders.

That contest had brought non-DBers into the very bosom of the community.

'This annual event started off as a local community event to enhance community relations among Discovery Bay residents since 1991,' K.H. Lai, DB's community relations manager said.

But in recent years, more and more strangers had infiltrated.

Soon the plaza was cluttered with people who weren't pregnant and didn't work on aeroplanes.

You can almost feel the shudder rippling through management at the thought.

'In the light of this, we are planning to redesign the event this year to better adapt to the needs and interests of our residents,' Mr Lai said.

We naturally assumed this meant pram races and golf cart derbies.

But no. Instead, the Dragon Boat Festival 'will be revamped to give it a fresh and new look, such as a party-like fun day on the beach instead of the traditional dragon boat racing. As such, we hope that more residents will be attracted to celebrate the festival.'

What a great idea - the Dragon Boat Festival, only without the dragon boats.

Still, at least the DB management team got to stick its oar in.

Silicon slide: With Yahoo! profits plunging and the Nasdaq exploring its lower reaches, Silicon Valley has taken on a whole new identity.

A reader alerted us to it.

He tells us that the place has been renamed.

These days, people are calling it Silly Con Valley.

Paper techs: Lai See just heard from a tech firm participating in a paper chase.

The event's referee is Levitt and Bailey. They're the Cyber-Port's quantity surveyor, so project tenders have to go through them.

These days, companies are vying for the digital management system contract. To help them along the road to success, L&B produced a 30-page guideline-type document.

That may sound long, but those pages are chock full of useful information. Like the policy on the employment of IIs.

Something has to be done to staunch the flow of digital management system designers sneaking across our borders under cover of night.

Anyway, multiple copies of the tome have gone out to each of the hundred-odd firms vying for the job.

That seems like an awful lot of paper. And recipients have been encouraged to join in the tree-culling fest.

When the L&B people needed more information from one would-be Cyber worker, they demanded 'hard' copies.

But the firm-in-question responded by asking for an electronic version of that guide thingy. We're told he wanted to forward a copy to colleagues in London and didn't want to waste time and money on conventional post. No dice.

'They gave us a lengthy explanation basically saying it would take too much time to prepare,' he said. So the firm had to forget the Net and send it the old-fashioned way.

Which is a tad odd, what with this being the Cyber-Port and all.

Perhaps there was a tree down somewhere on the information superhighway.

Graphic: whee14gbz