[V]andemar.org

After a long hiatus, I have some free time to post. Finally.

My life seems to be in turbo mode recently. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I’ve quickly become responsible for a large portion of the imager code in MEDL. It’s interesting, challenging, and enjoyable work, but time intensive. Everything is under heavy development, and the hardware and the OS are constantly changing. Both the team writing the Openmax components I’m interfacing with, as well as the camera application team who is using MEDL extensively, are located in Beijing, which further complicates things. Conference calls have to be done either early in the morning or late at night, and there is often a day long turnaround time between sending an email and getting a response. At the start of the month, I was integrating a large restructuring of the imager code base, composed of thousands upon thousands of lines of code, and the delay between sending an email and receiving a response combined with the terrible quality of the conference call system overseas made important discussions with the Beijing teams nearly impossible. On a Thursday I mentioned, half jokingly, to my boss that “It would be much easier to get my changes integrated if I could talk to the Beijing teams face to face.” The next Tuesday morning, I was on a flight to Beijing.

Beijing is an interesting city. It’s much more modern than I expected, and much more vibrant. It’s also growing at an incredible rate, probably too quickly for its own good. There are buildings going up everywhere, and for a three day period the smog was so bad it was difficult to see further than a few hundred meters. Still, the whole trip turned out to be quite fun and surprisingly productive. The Beijing engineers were exceptionally friendly to a crazy capitalist foreigner like me. The lunches and dinners were especially enjoyable. Despite their limited English, and my nonexistent Mandarin, we managed to have a great time. I’d love to post a detailed log of every day I spent in Beijing, but it’s the first day of my vacation, and I fly home to Boise tomorrow. Maybe I’ll post an update later. Without further ado, some pictures:

Walking towards Motorola:

Motorola Beijing, right next to HP:

Friendly locals visiting people in the “Happy Times” van:

I had a weekend free, and did some touristy things, like the forbidden city:

And of course, the great wall:

Now, off to make a pot of coffee, and get my life in order before leaving town again.

~ by Andrew on December 22, 2006.