Siu Lun

In my current role, I’m trying to do what seems like an impossible task. Changing the web development landscape in Hong Kong.

Being in a large multi-national company in Hong Kong, I’ve been empowered to help develop a world-class interactive agency. This means I have the projects that can show the world, all I need is to find and gather the right people, work with the right people, train the right people and overall raise the bar of web development in Hong Kong to a whole new level.

This might sound big, and well, to be frank, I do believe it is. In my environment now, it helps being around similarly ambitious people. The hard part of course, is to educate such people without being patronising, and it’s a lot about working with people while being courteous. I find it very challenging, especially with working with over 200 individual minds with their own quirks and traits.

Nevertheless, we try every step to push the limits, we’re pushing the limits in every level. It is a challenging road for all involved, but everytime we emerge with a project that’s better than the last. There comes a limit though that we’ll touch one day on the level of skills, and overall enthusiasm. I’m trying to find the right people, convert what we have. It’s a little like a missionary on a mission to convert the populace.

It’s a hard road, I’m learning as I’m going along, while bringing everybody else up to speed, but success will eventually come.

I was working on a proposal today, thinking about web 2.0, social networking, collaboration everything that’s coming out of the internet the past few years. It suddenly dawned upon me that all these efficiencies improvement, particularly on the internet, people connecting with other people.

It all seems very familiar.

My other half watches a lot of David Attenborough, with her born in the year of the tiger. It is ‘inevitable’ that I too had to watch what she watches as I’m a mere ox. What dawned upon me was episodic memories of David talking about ants. How ants work by touching their antennas using chemical signals, and all but the one that produces them, have to collaborate and work.

Putting that into the context of our world. The queen ant, would be our society. Whomever controls our society, controls the subjects below (to a degree), and we, as people who do not control the society, we collaborate, we network, we share. In order to better ourselves, better equip ourselves, forming ‘groups’ to become stronger, sharing information to make us wiser, smarter.

I have had this ugly image in my head as I thought to this point of a hive. A swarm of bees, ants, those weird creatures in those sci-fi movies.

I’m not complaining, for I’m in the benefit of such a system. What I’m afraid of I suppose, is our lost of ‘emotions’, ‘characteristics’ and we may even lose our unpredictability one day, when everyone knows what you are, how you think.

Of course, taking a look at the world now. There is no chance that would happen. Though I guess “Tech” people be warned, I think we’re the most likely bunch to convert first.

Old news now. But you can already try and get a running version of Google Chrome OS booting from your USB stick.

You should try it out. Admire, and plan for the eventuality that Google Chrome OS will power lots of low-end and borderline between mobile and laptop devices.

Go Go Go!

The USB booting Google OS image is brought to you by: Hexxeh