Hello there. Welcome to my home page, pictorial blog, resumé, links thing.
Currently I am living in London, working as a software engineer, playing PS3, listening to Invol2ver by Sasha, reading Different Seasons by Stephen King and supporting White Sox and The Arsenal.
The end of the month marked the beginning of a New Year, Chinese style. I travelled with my younger brother, an Ox himself, to experience the celebrations taking place in Singapore. We enjoyed a reunion dinner with family, several rounds of Lo Hei Yu Sheng to raise good luck, watched lion dances, as well as receiving a few Lai See on the way. Less customary were a trip to Sentosa, a ride on the Flyer and the unavoidable shopping.
Adding to the city's records of having the largest, the tallest, being the most expensive and other world beating feats, Dubai is officially the first foreign destination for a Tang family holiday. Without the restaurant that had occupied my parents for most of my life, it was time we made amends. Although Dubai was still being built all around us, we enjoyed perfect weather, sumptuous lodging, indulgent food, amazing sights and endless shopping.
Work was relentless as ever, so I escaped to Singapore for a few weeks. Although I had to bring some business with me, it was a relief to have a change of scenery. The work kept me busy, along with family and my bit of property investment. I must have enjoyed my time there, with my growing young cousins, the food and a trip to Kuala Lumpur, because the time flew by so quickly. Should I ever move there though, I'll probably need a new refuge.
Over the past four years at Shazam, I've programmed C++ tools, Java back-end systems and C# user-interfaces. Recently though, I've been more hands-off as the Mobile Team Lead, spending most of my time in meetings, writing documents, systems integration and partner support leading to an impressive family of mobile applications. Suddenly, I am now a Senior Technical Lead. However, I land another application to develop in record time.
I had opened my mouth again and got the short straw, but I was quite happy about it. A project to re-architect the infrastructure for the AT&T MusicID service had been progressing with minimal involvement from myself until deploy day. I was in San Francisco working with Gravity again, but this time I was the lone link man, making sure things go smoothly. I was stuck in front of a PC most of the time, but I still managed to enjoy watching the tide roll away.
For years I have commuted past the site of Wembley Stadium on the various rail lines that surround it. Watching the demolition of the old building until finally the twin towers disappeared to be eventually replaced by the core towers. The rest of the structure was then slowly padded on and the arch erected to various angles and occasionally lit up. Finally, I decided I should visit and the Race of Champions seemed a strange enough event to provide an excuse.
Having got to Singapore that was my hub and weekend refuge, my first stop was to Beijing. I was whisked straight from the airport to an office for a meeting. I did have some time to see the sights through the smog. The next week saw me visiting Taipei, where I stayed next to Tower 101 and visited some ODM companies. My holiday could then commence with a week in Hong Kong, a trip to Macao and then finally a week back in Singapore to recover.
Things were going very well in Latin America and to keep it up, the Shazam team had a trip to Miami. There were two days of meetings to discuss MotoID past, present and future. After the productive work we visited huge malls and had huge, but gourmet nonetheless, meals. A spare day in Florida allowed a day trip into the Everglades National Park where I met some alligators, snakes and mosquitoes.
Deadlines meant another trip to South Korea for some on-site troubleshooting. First stop was Gumi City that hosts the biggest inland industrial complex in Korea. After a couple of days, I returned to the now familiar Seoul for a short ride to Suwon City. At both sites I visited huge development campuses that are the workplace for thousands of Samsung employees. It was great to meet the people I had been e-mailing and to see their work in action.
Last summer a press release announced that Shazam was to be installed on handsets all over Latin America. It didn't take too long for the work to start piling up on my desk. Luckily we had a successful recruitment drive to save me collapsing with all the programming, e-mails, conference calls and project planning required. O identificador de música da Motorola.
I return to a much colder Seoul than the one I left a few years ago. This time, I was the developer visiting with a whole cross section of the Shazam team. To escape the weather, we spent most of our time in meeting rooms, both at the impressive Samsung offices and the five star Seoul Plaza Hotel Club Lounge. We left after a couple nights so that I could get to work.
Fatigue was setting in as winter was making itself felt. I had been busy with a stream of rush projects, most of them involving staring at little mobile phone screens. Luckily, I had booked myself a week away to the refuge of Singapore. I found my parents already holidaying there. Some more family from Hong Kong subsequently joined us. Although not conducive for a quiet relaxing time, it was a rare get-together. We got to eat out, see some sights and shop, especially at Funan.
Work bought me flights again, this time to the Far West. Together with a couple of colleagues, I was dispatched to work for a week in the city of San Francisco with our partner Gravity Mobile. We commuted by taxi to their office where J2ME was the focus of attention. After some coding, it was the city nightlife that was prescribed by my boss. We managed some sightseeing, shopping and met several past workmates who had defected to some web search company.
My team had moved to a brand new state-of-the-art stadium with tens-of-thousands more seats available, but it is still hard to find tickets. So, I snapped up the chance to visit the Emirates Stadium when the top South American national sides came to town. A feeling of awe arose when I first viewed the pitch surrounded by a near capacity crowd (TfL almost made us miss the kick off). Shouting "Brasil, Brasil" was strange, but the normal "Arsenal, Arsenal, Arsenal" also made an appearance.
Taking advantage of a migrating cousin, I visited the U.S. for my first time. First stop was Minneapolis, where I found my cousin after his competition. There we cycled and canoed Lake Calhoun. After some time in the Mall of America, we moved on to Chicago. Between our huge meals, we fulfilled our duty as tourists by visiting all the hot spots. I even got myself a new team after a ball game at U.S. Cellular Field.
With a month of leave, I decided to follow the Qantas routes to Sydney that conveniently (at least for me) "hop" around Asia. After a week in the hyper-city of Hong Kong and a quick trip into mainland China I ended up in Australia as a typical tourist in Sydney and the desert of Uluru. Singapore was next, where I unwound with family before reluctantly returning to London, but not before a quick trip into Malaysia.
Broadcast monitoring had been my main task for a year at Shazam. A pilot system that captures and recognises audio to create play lists was built and deployed to several clients, including NBC for the 2004 Olympic Games. It all suddenly stopped when talks began on a deal with BMI who subsequently bought out our IP and the broadcast monitoring business.
My last four months at the office have been spent working on a promotion for Coca-Cola. All that fine print squeezed onto the side of a can had to be implemented and integrated with the Shazam backend. Our development team had to be doubled in size to get this done. I worked mainly on getting SMS messages to fly around delivering CokeTags and ringtones.
After over a year of being the owner of a stale homepage, I did a bit of work to create this, my new masterpiece. Hoping that everyone now uses a modern browser and has enough bandwidth to download a bunch of images. I expect I shall be changing the design once in a while as well as adding content. Thanks for visiting, hope you like the site.
Shibuya crossing. Not long after returning from Korea, I was back in the Far East, but this time I had my younger brother and cousin in tow. They being students, it was Japan on the cheap. After a night in a Tokyo capsule hotel, we took the Shinkansen to Kyoto staying at the Utano Youth Hostel, then returned to Tokyo where we stayed at Yoyogi hostel. A hectic week trying to visit all the sites.
Seoul Tower, at night, from my Hyatt hotel window. With just over half a year under my belt at Shazam, I went on a business trip to South Korea to help our partner, AonMedia. It was an amazing experience, not speaking any Korean, I communicated mostly through drawings. Whilst there, I did some shopping, sightseeing (including Panmunjom), made some friends and converted EVRC to PCM.
Something that I wanted to do for a while is to learn Chinese. I can speak Cantonese, but it isn't too great, and I can't read or write. To fix this, I have started evening Mandarin classes at SOAS. Two hour classes once a week to get the concepts and pronunciation right, and then having to learn vocabulary for home work.
A company in London, that is not in the financial services industry. I found one and they liked me enough to give me a job. So, my first full time position is at Shazam Entertainment Ltd. as a C++ software engineer. I will be working with their music recognition systems in a small development team.
To fill in the time between graduation and finding a job, I built a site for Lanwades Business Park. This is another PHP/MySQL site and all the content is managed by the client through a web based content management system. The park plan graphic is a little bit of experimental scripting.
After four years of being an undergraduate, Imperial College let me go with a 2.1 honours degree. I can now call myself Mr. Richard Tang M.Eng (Hons) ACGI. Our degree certificates arrive through the post so we had a Commemoration Day in the Royal Albert Hall. I got to wear a gown and pose with one of those hats for a photo. Wonderful. Now all I needed was a job.
I had to turn a Celoxica RC200E development board into a Bluetooth video phone. Luckily my supervisor, Prof. Wayne Luk, let me take one home where I got the Xilinx FPGA to capture, sample, compress, pack, transmit, receive, unpack, decompress and display video all in less than a million equivalent gates. I enjoyed using Handel-C so much that I decided to do some summer work on the project as well.
I had to get something out of my system before I could start revising for my finals. I noticed that the newly elected student union exec fit just right into the Lord of the Rings poster. So, as a goodbye present I did some photoshopping. The new president Shrenik Patel plays Frodo, Oliver Pell is Gandalf and Mustafa Arif is Saruman. The fellowship didn't last long though because Aragorn, Jingwei Wang, failed his year.
I couldn't go out to Singapore without visiting Hong Kong as well. I spent a week with my family eating, visiting relatives, eating, sightseeing and eating. I also visited my ancestral home in my ancestral village for the first time. Disappointingly, it doesn't look too ancestral anymore because my grandma had the house rebuilt, in pink.
After working all summer, I decided to have a long overdue trip abroad. Singapore was the chosen destination where I stayed with my aunt, uncle and young cousins. I wondered around the island city state and took my cousins to the museums. I was also contemplating the fact that I was about to start my final year at university.
From May to September, I commuted from north London to really south London where BBC R&D are situated at the top of a hill. I had a placement with their System Design Group where I was asked to write a DTV stream decoder and analyser. After learning MPEG-2 and DVB, I wrote a C++ application that processed streams in real time based on XML Schema descriptor files. I had to write a report for coursework.
The busy year for the City & Guilds College Union continued with the re-launch of the Internship Centre, a summer job finding service for my fellow students. My main role, apart from folding letters, was to get an updated version (of the site I wrote before) ready for launch number two. I picked a curvy design that people seemed to like, but the shade of green was looked upon dubiously.
I had been Lord Mayor's Show co-ordinator elect for a year and it was show time. I had built a small team and designed the entry for my student union. The weeks before the show were filled with phone calls, saw dust, paint and panic. On the day, everything went smoothly and the float (a big replica of our mascot called Spanner) stayed in one piece. More about the day here, or here or maybe here.
My first proper job. Only a summer placement, but my boss to be, Simon Hussey, made sure I had a nice grilling for an interview. My task was to build a digital home demonstration room called the Enterprise Zone. I had tasks from installing home automation equipment to analysing spreadsheets. I even helped set up Quake tournaments for my colleagues, to demonstrate the digital home of course.
I created this site for a family friend, Douglas Amerasekera, who is a radiology consultant. He was interested in web development and had built a site full of animations and Java applets. He asked me for a more professional look for the North Herts Radiology Group, so I built him a site with a few guidelines for maintaining the source code. I just hope he doesn't start to add swirly gifs and applets again!
The Chinese restaurant business is getting hot in the village of Hitchin, Hertfordshire. My parents have bugged me for a while to build them a web site for their restaurant. So, I relented and created a simple site for The Mandarin Gourmet. [The restaurant has now closed after 18 years of business - October 2006]
As an effort to learn programming in C++, I decided to write small programs for my PDA. I created a puzzle game, image viewer and a system task manager all under the banner of TangCode. I released only one of the applications as commercial software and managed to recoup the cost of my Casio Cassiopeia E-115 and the website.
An end of year group project. We had to design and build a light chasing robot using a Lego buggy, pair of motors, an Altera EPLD and anything else we could find. A lot of fun until we had to write up.
My long relationship with the City & Guilds College Union begins by being elected as webmaster. Very soon the first version of a portal for Imperial College students was launched. This was my first venture into LAMP development and it wasn't to be my last as I continued to work on the website through several spin offs and face lifts.
My undergraduate years were spent at Imperial College London reading Information Systems Engineering. My course made me both a computing student as well as an electrical engineering student. However, I soon found myself spending most of my time helping the City & Guilds College Union.
When I first heard about World Challenge in a school assembly, I knew that this would be an opportunity that I wouldn't miss. When it was announced that we could be going to Nepal, home of the Himalaya, I signed up. A year later I was killing myself trekking around Annapurna. I survived and built a website: Nepal Expedition 1998.
Entering the sixth form, I was asked to join a small group that would build a new web site for the school. With my HTML and JavaScript skills, I ended up coding most of the Watford Grammar School for Boys web site. The site as I left it is archived here. After I left, the site went stale and the URL disappeared. After a few strange redesigns, the current site isn't bad.
Having learnt how to build web sites, I was looking for something to put on the web. I was also due to start revising for my GCSE exams. This is how I ended up putting GCSE Revision notes online. With my exams over and only the online maths notes complete, I never really got back to the site. For those who keep asking me what maths grade I got, it was an A*.
I think every school does this. They get rid of students for a week by deploying them to local companies. I ended up at The Building Research Establishment in Garston. This web site probably only exists because of this work experience. I was assigned to Wayne Grant who taught me how to write HTML and publish web sites.
At the age of ten, I started commuting. The Metropolitan Line took me to Watford Grammar School for Boys everyday for the next seven years. I had a lot of fun at school, except maybe while walking to the New Field once a week, or learning German vocabulary, or reciting poetry. I enjoyed everything else, even the Maths tests.
My parents came to the UK from Hong Kong so I am classed by some circles as British Born Chinese. So, it is only right that the first time I left the UK was to visit my ancestral homeland. I loved the holiday over there, after all I was skipping a whole term of school (my school friends thought I had left). The picture is of Chinese New Year decorations on a harbour side office block.
That's me (front row, right) in my first year at school. Questions that occupied my mind during my time at Mount Stewart Infant and Junior schools include: Why did my teacher change every year? Why could I not play on the banks? Why is the swimming pool so cold? Do I have to eat my lunch? How can the girls play with a bit of elastic all day? Is it home time yet?
So, this is what I look like, at least it is what I looked like when I was half a year old. A history of me starts here, although it is a bit sparse until the mid-nineties. If I were to add some stuff about me in the eighties, it would probably include Matchbox cars, Lego, He-Man, Transformers and Billy Joel's Uptown Girl.