Dearest friends, my humblest apologies for the hiatus in blogging. I have been negligent in my duties to keep you up to date on my life, even though I do speak with many of you online on a frequent basis. This will hopefully cease, and I will bore you more often with the mundane details of my thoughts in this crazy country.
In any case, much has changed in the almost two months since my last post. The last post was about how I interviewed with ASUS, and that they were thinking of offering a freelance position and my general thoughts on the situation. Well, as it turns out, their term for freelance is the US version of temp/contract to hire. Once that was cleared up, I accepted their contract offer and as of 10/15/2010, I rejoined the working class. I'll be a full time employee starting January 1st, 2011 if all goes well, but both my manager and I are confident that I'll do fine. I'm really liking the vote of confidence already, considering I've never really written on a professional level before. I believe it will be challenging, but at the same time quite fulfilling, as I love learning about new technologies and gadgets, and what better way to do that than being "forced" to learn about the product so I can write about it?
Most of my future posts will most likely be observations in working in a foreign company, as ASUS is headquarter in Taipei, and I'm right in the thick of it. So far, it's been busy learning about all the products I have to write about, but fortunately I already have a good base knowledge of the industry, and happen to know a good deal amount more than the Product Managers themselves. The only real thing I have to get adjusted to are the working hours. Officially, it's 9am-6pm, with about 1.5hrs for lunch, where you can also nap at your desk without being disturbed. However, most people work overtime, as is standard practice in Taiwan. Other than this past Friday when I had prior plans for a friend's going away dinner and left at 6:15pm, the earliest I had left was around 7:15pm, on average leaving around 8pm or so. Tack on the 45 minute commute I have to get home, and I get back around 9pm or so, relax for a bit, then head to bed. Wash, rinse, repeat. Once my schedule gets settled down a little more, I'll look around for a tutor to continue my Chinese language studies.
On a sadder note, Texas football is having a bit of rough patch lately. I've had some fair natured ribbing from UCLA fans, as there's a large alumni base here for UCLA, USC, Cal, etc., as they are all west coast schools, but thank god I haven't met too many from the Big 12. Losing to Iowa State AND Baylor, at home? Come on guys...At this rate, I'm not going to bother watching the games live like I have been.
There's so much more to write, but I'll leave it here for now, as I need to get some semblance of sleep before I go to work tomorrow.
