This week was less extravagant than the last, nothing too exciting but I’ll do my best to make the blog post enjoyable to read as usual. Most of us went for our industry visits this week. The locations were Yuhang Design Library and Wahaha Industrial Park. I personally went for the latter but lettuce start with the Yuhang Design Library which was recounted vividly to me by friends who went.
Yuhang Design Library was apparently a really small place despite conventional preconceptions of a library. It houses a small café and more than a few shelves of books, though most in Chinese as expected. The host was rather generous though, letting us students sample the variety of cakes from the café including blueberry cakes, lemon cream cheese cakes and brownies. Pictures I’ve seen of yje place make it out to be a cozy place to hang out. It was a typical type of café furnishing, warm lighting the orangey kind coupled with wooden floors, walls and décor in general. Quaint place.
In stark contrast was the visit to Wahaha. First part was pretty mundane as they brought us through the company’s cultural centre where we walked a looped path all while the tour guide talked about the company’s history, breakthrough products and awards over the years. Not to appealing to students, but what stirred us was when we were brought to a waiting area with shelves lined with Wahaha products, and were told to sample the bottled drinks as we desired. Wahaha was pretty impressive in the fact that they produced a wide variety of drinks from cola to purified water to fruit juices to milk teas the list goes on. I recommend the honey lemon if you readers are willing to humour advice given to you by a random theme’s ALP blog post talking about industrial visit. It’s a decent drink though, no kidding. We went on to see the packing of bottled drinking in the factory pipeline. We weren’t allowed inside the factory operations area, but were merely walking down the pipeline observing behind glass windows. Typical mechanised process with large towering machinery as the bottles moved along to different stops along the pipeline to be washed, filled, sealed and whatever else bottles go though, Factory workers were there, not many, perhaps 5 per room, doing very specific jobs each like inspection to spot defects or boxing the bottles by hand. It reminded me of Alienation from HASS but not as depressing as texts make them out to be. Moving on, it was a decent experience.
There’s a trip to Yamaha next week for those who didn’t sign up for the previous two industry visits. Yamaha was more well-received as an industry visit, with all 30 slots being filled up by the first 2 minutes of choosing. Hot property.
With regards to out Theme project, we are currently trying to resolve the issue of not being about to extract the EM sensed data from the program. All we can see now is the visualisation of waveforms from different objects, but we want to extract it to be able to use it in our devices. We are close to resolving it though, nearly the whole team is trying to remedy this bottleneck because without it we have nothing. It’s heartening to see the whole team work together and offering help outside what they are used to or originally signed up for. Thought it would be good to finally get results as a journey without the destination is useless in my books. Hopefully we can get somewhere after this week else it’ll just me fanboy-ing over team spirit and whatnot without any actual progress. Yet, I’m optimistic.
Oh and with the conclusion of last week’s Origami Robot course, we moved on to the Direction I or II (roman numerals not one or eleven) depending on prior selection. Direction I is about stage plays, not too interested in acting or choreography, and didn’t ask much about it. Most of us are in Direction II which teaches more practical skills like Adobe programs. Or so we thought. The lesson this week was about storyboarding scenes of a household robot on paper, no computer required. It was pretty basic in my opinion. I was excited to learn the Adobe Suite from this course so it was pretty disappointing since it wasn’t as advertised. Perhaps moving forward we will touch Photoshop and Premier since poster and video making are the end deliverables. Looking forward to that, and will update soon! Again, I’m very optimistic.
