Pure alcoholic for the workaholic...

Hell yeah...

I am not sure if I have shown you guys my desk at the office, but this is a recent panorama of it. You see it is very tidy because we just finish tidying the space up.

So my desk actually faces the beautiful Victoria Harbour of Hong Kong, but unfortunately blocked by different skyscrapers. Anyway, having some views is better than facing a blank wall and so I have nothing to complain. As you can see, my workspace is quite good, with a dual-Xeon monitor plus two monitors, I can handle my work with much ease (I mean when it comes to computer-intensive work, not me).

You can also see a lot of samples on the floor and on the left. These are things that we ask the suppliers to bring up when we want to see the real colors, textures and feel for different materials. On the floor we got tons of fabric samples, and they are so colorful that I think I will choose some for myself if I move to a new apartment, haha.

It is all fun here, as long as you love your job! Being an architect is not easy but when you see a building with what you design, like the lobbies and rooms and details, the sense of success is just huge and overwhelming

Everyone knows I am working on the hotel project at my office. It is fun, and it is even more fun when you can play with it!

I don't mean any war game or computer game, but when I was building the 3D model for the corridor interior design, I got this draft rendering and I was like, holy, this is the game! So after 10 minutes of "retouching", I got this and was finding some people to frag...

I placed some stationery in as you see. That is a roll of tracing paper while my boss, written at the top, was fragged by my colleague.

It is time, my friend, to get your hidden rage out!

Before you read this you are assumed to have basic knowledge about rendering. If not, you should read carefully before commenting.

Last month I was working on the hotel room design at the office. There were several options and the one I was working on was the standard room. Yes, when it says standard it means really typical and nothing special. It is just simple and like the other rooms you may have seen before.

After that, I took the 3D model I built for this option back home, and tried to re-render it on my own computer. I use finalRender [ link ] on 3DS Max while at the office I could only use the default scanline render engine. With finalRender I can do global illusmination very easily, and here I even pushed my techniques further.

This is the original image done at the office. The space looks okay but it is actually fake. With only that amount of light the room cannot be that bright. Also check the light on the wall, everything is actually unrealistic. Now this is the more realistic one:

This image is rendered with finalRender, and everything is based on global illumination. That means it should be this dark. Check all the lighting, as they are very realistic.

If you observe closely, you can see what I made with the light and glass materials. The left hanging lighting fixture is very realistic because I used SSS plastic material with finalRender, which can create very realistic plastic material. Its character is to scatter light inside the object. Another thing is the sand-blasted glass, which gives the effect of blurry refraction. I actually lowered the quality and so you can see some jitterness, but the effect is obvious. The light passing the glass pane was scattered to create the blurry effect.

Definitely a good exercise for me now it is time to add more details like books and magazines on the desk, and the slippers, stuff like that...

Btw, no retouching except 75% sharpened.

Tonight we went out to have a farewell party. It was all fun, even when I see them leaving the team back to school. They are incredible people, and I am sure that the team will lose something in the coming years. You have to know that some people are irreplaceable. When they are gone, they are.

It went all good and exciting, until something really disgusting happened. I didn't want to say it out but it certainly disappoints me and makes me rethink what people are really like behind the faces.

I lose trust in people. It is not the first time, but every time it hurts me so much.

Is that a farewell for me on something? I feel so confused, disappointed, furious and also strange.

I can't believe it.

There are many great inventions in this world, but some are just strange enough that people won't like. My company uese Websense to filter websites, and so when you are viewing some websites blacklisted or containing banned materials, it will stop loading the website and say that website is filtered out.

I see how it is invented, but it is not a good filter I have to say. How come when we are searching for something like building materials, it would filter a website and say it contains adult materials? How come it will filter a music website because there may contain MP3s? It really doesn't work in some way.

Maybe it is needed to prevent the employees from viewing certain materials, but I guess except porn and pirated stuff, the web is basically okay for viewing don't you think?After all, I believe that whether your team goes bad or not has nothing to do with the website contents, but with the mentality that your employees have when viewing the sites.

Thank God Angelworld hasn't been blacklisted yet.  

Oops we work too much. Yes we do.

Just read the newspaper, and a recent survey conducted by UBS shows that Hong Kong is at the third place when it comes to the longest working hour (per year), while it is on the 40th place for the highest salary. That means, we work long, but we are not paid enough. Or you can say, we are paid much, but we don't have enough holidays.

Overtime all the time
The survey ranks 71 countries (Hong Kong is not a country though) with their people's working hours, salary level and consumption ability. Following Seoul and Mexico City, Hong Kong people work 2,231 hours per year (ie, taking 6-day a week, it is 7.15 hr a day; for 5-day, it is 8.58 hr a day). Interestingly, that does not mean we earn a lot. Hong Kong people salary ranks at the 40th place only, 5th highest in Asia. Consumption ability ranks at the 27th place, 3rd in Asia.

Some argue with the fact that this survey is not fair enough because Hong Kong is just a city, not a country. Some also say that traveling time for work should also be considered in the study, because Hong Kong is not big and traveling time is very short compared to many US cities. However, let's face it, we work too hard. We are just spending too much time in the office.

Work to live, or live to work?
Working as an architect is nearly equal to working late at night to many people. This profession is about design, and is a mind-heavy job. Pathetically, people in this profession have the tendency to follow the "tradition" and think that working till 7, 8 or even 10 is normal. Damn it is just abnormal! Imagine you are getting off at 8, then you go home around 2030-2100. After dinner and shower, you can only settle down freely around 2230-2300. Since another day will be hectic too, you will need to sleep early. If so, you don't have even an hour to talk to your parents, play with your cat or even chat on the Internet with your friend!

One may think you don't need all these activities, but you are so wrong. If life is just wake up, work, get off work, sleep and wake up to work again, that's more like a robot. But we are human. We have a "life", not in the terms of survival but with a meaning to it. Unless, touch wood that all your family dies, all your pets die, all your friends die, and your room has only a bed, then you can live a life like a robot. Unfortunately (or fortunately), we are not like that.

I really hope people, especially the bosses, can think about this question. I am not asking for holidays or more money though. I want all of you to think about this. Hong Kong people have money in their mind all the time, and that IS a problem. Bosses may think that some people are just trying to lay back, but sorry, we already work out of the suggested time period. We work overtime. Sometimes we work during holidays. We don't want to consider death as the only way to rest. Please, amen. 

Some people must think I am insane. After posting up a sucking Xeon machine, now I am posting up a cool Xeon machine. Okay, the point is, this morning my office computer got upgraded (replaced actually) and the new computer is extremely cool...let me show you...

What do you expect from such a machine? A lot! I at once tried different programs and test the speed. Finally, this machine is faster than my own one at home! Actually, it is damn fast. Xeon chip is a dual-cored one, and we have two inside this computer. That means this is a quad-cored machine somehow!

It is equipped with a ATI FireGL V7350 with 1GRAM on it. That's crazy! 3DS runs very nicely with it and perhaps later I will try to run Quake 4 to see its ultimate performance! >

Yay! What more do I need now! Yes, sound card, because this computer hasn't installed the sound card yet. Anyway, I am sure I will put some harsh 3D work on this machine to render instead of going back home to do it!

To me, a Xeon machine should work pretty well. It should work fast. It should be stable.

And okay, it is stable, but my Xeon machine at work isn't fast at all. It is just damn slow. When you are rendering something and you want to browse the net, it takes more than 20 seconds to open the Internet Explorer, more than 30 seconds for Firefox. That's insane. It even takes 20 seconds to minimize all the windows (Win+M for hotkey) when it has done some heavy graphic work and rendering jobs. What the...

It actually makes me feel so good when I am back home to use my computer. Mine is just a P4 2.4GHz PC with 3GB RAM. Yes, twice more the RAM than this, but rendering work depends on CPUs right? But my computer can render even faster while browsing the net, updating my website on Dreamweaver and chatting with others on MSN and Miranda. C'mon!

And this is on Win 2000 server...arrr... O_O 

I think my computer is getting slow soon, but with this computer at work, I feel so good with my home computer. Lovely, then I don't need to get the dual-cored one that early till 2007 I guess, haha.

Wow, another week. It has been a tiring week, not because of the work I had, but because of the weather here. It is like raining then shining and raining, and with this cycle going on during the whole day and whole week. It is really annoying sometimes...

But anyway, it is a nice week with many chances for me to learn different things in the office. I was designing a temple thing and I was assigned to think about details and stuff. You know, brainstorming can be hurting if you keep doing that to yourself. Still, I got a little trip to the building called the Center. It was fun.

The Center is one of the tallest buildings in the area on the Hong Kong Island, and I got this chance to visit it with my colleagues. We went there to investigate the building's gondola system at the highest floor. The gondola is on a track and when it is functioning, it loads its arm outside the building and loads a cage or an automatic cleaning system to wash the building. This is what it is like.

However, what interested me most was actually the view! Since we were on the topmost floor, we could nearly see everything over Hong Kong! It wasn't a good day actually but I managed to get some really good panoramas for you to enjoy! First this is the view directly looking at the Kowloon side. You can see the tallest building here, IFC 2.

Then on the right side of the previous look, one could see the most dense part of Hong Kong, the Central area. You can see Bank of China and the HSBC tower too...

Finally on the left is the Shang Wan area. You can actually see the Disneyland in the very far side, somewhere on the sand on that far island...

Beautiful isn't it? I love my city