Aloha!
I finished my first week of work here at DNET and it was a really interesting week. I can safely say that I have not had two days at work where I did the same thing.
I had some downtime at work and I didn’t exactly want to sit around and browse the internet and I was a bit lazy to work on my personal programming projects. Since I am more then familiar with the Adobe creative suite I offered my Photoshop skills to them and within the hour I was working with Illustrator editing some of their technical documentation. Granted had little to no Illustrator experience before, but I lot of what I knew from Photoshop helped me out. My colleagues seemed to be pleased and I felt less useless :D.
Aside from the office work, on Thursday I had the opportunity to head to the Polytech University’s School of Hotel Tourism and Management to set up some tech. DNET entered a competition based upon building tech for “tomorrow’s guest room”. Several other companies also applied but DNET managed to win with their DN-7000 model that I talked about in my last post. So I spent some time during the week making sure I could install and debug it so that it worked when we had to install them in 3 model guestrooms.
There were several categories in the competition however I didn’t get time to see them all since we managed to install and demonstrate all our devices before everyone else came in. I saw some other people installing a VOIP operated system that worked with the display in the room to help the user use the hotel’s services while also being able to reserve tables and order online. The menu of the restaurant’s would show up on the TV while a map of the seating arrangements would also show up on screen.
Oh yeah the hotel even had self cleaning toilets! They had a button that would… clean your behind for you also. Haha. I was more amazed by this then a grown man should have been. There were a couple other buttons on it as well, but they all made to many sounds when I pressed them and I didn’t want the people outside to wonder what I was doing in there.
I was really impressed by Hong Kong’s use of technology. Especially in the science park! Every place I went to was working with the latest software updates (Android 4.2, Windows 8 and whatever version of iOS and OS). I am used to working for larger North American corporations who find it more cost effective to deploy older software that they still have licenses for while not updating to the latest version. I can understand why they do that: they have other systems that have been tested and depend on those pieces of software and the workforce is already trained with that version. IE: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I really don’t like that mentality though. In the Science park there is a lot of innovation and collaboration going on that is possible with never software versions that allow them to do some really futuristic stuff.
More on that part later!
Next time I’ll likely talk about the “google glass” augmented reality talk I went to on Friday. Oh and since July 1st is also Hong Kong SAR day, we get the day of work! But the global edge crew will be volunteering at LKF street in this Canada Day festival. There is so much going on and I am loving it!
LATER!
/rants 