amdavidson

Chinese Traffic

posted on 2008-04-18 - amd.im/Gzg3

Traffic laws are never obeyed here. my cabbie blew by a cop last night passing on the right the cut him off on the left to get in front of more traffic. There are people littering the streets, more people than I have ever seen in my life... It's like the Times Square shot when the kid is lost in New York and everyone is pushing him into crosswalks that he doesn't want to cross.

Until today, I have been amazed that there aren't constant collisions all over. I would venture a guess that I spend approximately 15% of my commute back and forth from the factory driving in the shoulder to pass cars that are driving slower than the flow of traffic.

However, on my commute to work today, our driver had an "incident". We were driving down a busy street on our way to getting to the highway for the 20 minute highway ride to work. We left a bit later today being that it is Sunday. We decided that if we don't get a weekend, we're going to sleep in and leave at 930... Well this decision led to commute during a time when a lot of people are on the road, or at least thats how it seemed.

As we drove down the street I saw that there were pedestrians crossing the street back and forth and back and forth, and eventually two of them got trapped on the dotted yellow line between a VW Santana, a bus, and our Passat... Well, the man was able to skinny up and squeeze between the cars. The pregnant woman with him was not so lucky, our driver clipped her with his mirror and ran over her heel with his tire. He then slowly crept his car for some distance looking out the back window as they yelled at him. Eventually, he stopped in the street and left the car and proceeded to yell at the pedestrians! After much yelling and a beggar approaching them with an empty bowl outstretched, the driver returned to the car and pulled out his wallet and handed the man what looked like 200RMB (~$30). What amused me is as soon as the car was stopped Matt told me that this would be resolved with money and to be sure that I did not acknowledge that I actually had any on me. He was right on.

Getting to Suzhou Part I

posted on 2008-04-14 - amd.im/CMA8

Well, it took me about 23 hours from Joy's door to the hotel.

It was tiring, but really not as bad as I was expecting.

I'll just go through it chronologically, for the sake of my memory.

I woke up, went through my normal business, getting ready for the 1030 AM pickup from the driver, and got a text from United saying that my flight was going to be delayed. The first nice thing about global services / business class. So I called my traveling companion Matt and we decided to push our pickup back to 12 to give ourselves more time at home and less time sitting in the airport.

So I tooled around the house a little bit more, and sorta got everything sorted out and was killing time in the back room when Tanya came in and said that my driver was waiting outside.

At this point I kinda panicked because I had set up my personal cell as my contact point for the limo company, and had already turned off my personal cell forgetting that they would likely cal me on it. So I rushed out the door and into the Lincoln, and did not find out until later that he was waiting until exactly 12 to knock on my door and I had just run out and into the car at 1155... That was nice of him to do I suppose, but him waiting and me feeling bad about him waiting caused me to rush and spend about 4 hours on the flight going over in my head all the things that I could have forgotten.

No matter though, I got to the airport fine and met up with Matt and got to skip the huge lines in economy by taking the business class line (second nice point about business class).

I went into a bookstore at this point to get something to read and bought a book I tried to read years ago when I was probably 12, but didnt understand it so I ended up giving up, but I figured I'd give it another shot. The book is Tom Robbins' Still Life with Woodpecker. Then I hopped in the security line, and unfortunately at SFO there aren't special lines for business class (although apparently there are in Shanghai for the way back).

When it came turn for me to head into the metal detector, I wandered through... BEEP BEEP BEEP... and I realized that I still had my stainless steel watch on, which is heavy enough that it had to be the problem and I stepped back and put it in a bin for XRay... then stepped through again BEEP BEEP BEEP... I had forgotten the iPhone in my pocket... Dangit!

So two failures at the metal detector led to me getting the whole once over by the TSA... my whole person was frisked and metal detected more than once, and each item in my camera bag and briefcase was swabbed with a cloth and then the cloth was analyzed for any errant chemicals that may have been on them. Oh well, so Matt went on ahead and wandered the shops while I caught up with him. We then headed to the Business Class lounge where I munched on the food that was there in lieu of buying myself a real lunch.

And then we got on the plane.

Getting to Suzhou Part II

posted on 2008-04-14 - amd.im/UWf5

So then I got on the flight and immediately realized that business class is a whole new world... I'm not sure how I'm going to fly economy again...

The seats are large and comfortable, the stewardesses actually pay attention to you, they give you the whole can of soda. It was nice.

For my in flight meal(s), I had the smoked salmon for my appetizer, and the pork with some sort of mustard seed crust, and then chocolate cheesecake for desert. I still wouldn't call it gourmet, but it's about as well as I could have cooked any of it. Then towards the end of the flight I was served a pastrami/turkey/swiss cheese sandwich melt.

The inflight movies were kinda nice, but it was interesting how they ran them... all the movies started at the same time, and then they would just keep them running until the last movie finished, at which point they would all restart simultaneously... this was nice in that you could, in theory, figure out how long the longest movie was and then calculate when movie start times were, but I couldn't figure that out, and it wasn't listed in the "entertainment guide".

But I did manage to read ~150 pages in my book, watch 3 movies (Dewey Cox, National Treasure II, and August Rush, Dewey Cox was surprisingly good and the others were miserable).

All in all, the flight wasn't that bad... I read some emails that I had downloaded to my laptop, and not read yet... got some personal projects on the computer done... and the first 9 hours went by real fast. The last three and change were a little slow... but it was fine, I just read and tried to nap (unsuccessfully) and passed the time however I could.

At the airport we got through security and got our bags and got out to the pick up area quickly... but could not find the guy that was supposed to pick us up and bring us to the hotel. We wandered back and forth looking for someone holding a sign that had our name, or the vendor's name, or something... We called the vendor and our contact told us that the driver was in the airport. Well eventually after wandering around, Matt noticed "Catch..." on a rolled up piece of paper wadded in his fist, and held at his thigh. Matt yelled at the man, and introduced me to the "point back and forth" method of talking to people.

Basically, we don't talk to anyone... there's lots of pointing and gesturing... but it seems to work well enough in my first 18 or so hours here.

Well we got into a car with him, and went on a wild ride back and forth through traffic, passing on the right just as frequently as passing on the left... it was a phenomenally interesting drive, and is the standard... but there were surprisingly few close calls, everyone just expects it and deals with it.

We got to the hotel and checked in, that was easy and then went to my room, and crashed... I barely got my teeth brushed before hitting the bed.

But when I awoke, I did pay a bit of attention to the quality of the hotel, and it's nice... very asian styling, kinda pagoda-y. but the bathroom is all granite, there's an LCD TV recessed into the wall with some American channels, so that will be nice if there is some downtime in the evening.

And after that I went off to go to work at the vendor...

I'll update on how work actually is here after a couple of days because I am acclimating, but the last 4 or 5 days of work have had a great learning curve I'm finally starting to get up to speed with what happens here, and what my role is going to be in making it happen.

China Already?

posted on 2008-04-09 - amd.im/tngU

Well it's all happening really quick, I just learned today that in 7 days I'll be in China. The project I'm on has business over there, and so I have to go.

I had no idea that it was going to be so sudden, or this quickly into my employment two weeks ago, but two weeks ago, I had a lot of misperceptions about what life was going to be like at Apple.

Here goes my big adventure.

Day 1 at my new job

posted on 2008-04-01 - amd.im/V1Aa

I arrived a bit early, despite my the email that indicated that I should avoid doing so. It wasn't too early and the lobby had already been opened. This was nice because I was able to get into the line to get my badge picture taken early, when the line was much shorter. Before long there were 59 "Corporate Employees" that were here for orientation.

Because there were so many employees orientation was delayed a bit. When the dust had settled from the all the badge registration we sat down in the orientation auditorium, and we were greeted by "PC" from the Mac vs. PC commercials on a large projector screen. He did an amusing little bit about how we were making a bad decision by working here, and asked us all to leave. The rest of the orientation covered basic HR stuff, corporate history, security, and the like.

After orientation I met up with a guy from a related department who had lunch with me and showed me to my cube where I worked on all the administrative stuff for the rest of the day.

It wasn't a particularly exciting day material wise, but I was quite excited to be here, and am rapidly becoming enamored with the culture and peoples' outlooks here, everything is very positive and energetic.