Friday, August 31, 2007
Transitions
As many of my friends know, I'm no longer in Kuala Lumpur. I've moved to Singapore, and then started work for a company based in Beijing. I'm presently serving as Principal Technologist for fonevillage.com; if you've got a Beijing mobile phone and you haven't signed up with us yet, why not? :-)
I'm in Beijing now for on-site getting-to-know-everybody and getting started off on the right foot. I'll be going back to Singapore in a week's time to work from there for about a month before coming back. We expect that this transitional period will be for about three months, after which, if all goes as envisioned, I'll be based in Beijing.
One of the most glaring differences between working in a Web start-up in Beijing as compared to just about any major city outside China is the level of Internet connectivity available. In Singapore, I enjoyed a 10 Mbps (megabit, or million bits, per second) connection, and at least one company has 100 Mbps on offer at reasonable prices (about US$60 a month at present). Even when I was living in Kuala Lumpur, where people routinely groused about the quality and speed of service, it is possible to get a 4 Mbps connection from home (for about the same price as 100 Mbps in Singapore).
No such high-speed, affordable connection appears to exist in Beijing; if anybody knows differently, please contact me. So I've gone from a casual to professional dependence on network connectivity matched with a reduction in connection speed from 10/100 Mbps down to 1 Mbps shared with more than a dozen devices. Nothing like a challenge.... but I'm glad to be here.
EDIT 1 Sept 2009: As many of my friends know, I couldn't make it through the day without you - including my very special fiend, the when-she-gets-around-to-it eyes of a hawk. Copy editors make the very best of fiends, Judy. Thank you.
