Recent updates (photography, work and life)

So far I am quite happy with my progress, I have pretty much mastered the basic and really starting to get into the "art" side of things.

What I love the most is the sensation when you take the photo.
You begin to see the photo before you even begin taking it.
You use the lens that is needed.
You begin to wait for the light, wait for the moment and press that shutter button with the right settings.

It also makes you look at the world differently, you begin to look up and look down, get close and go far, search for the light, search for pattern, search for colours, search for contrast.

I am hoping to begin a project sometime soon, but haven't quite settled with a topic yet.
This should help me to learn how to plan for a photo I want to take.

The one area I really want to get is "style", I have been taking lots of photos of different kinds, but none really has a style.
It's hard to explain but it doesn't really feel like there is a "me' style in the photo.

I have successfully passed the first year of work and to be honest, it has been very satisfying.
I work in a trading company, mainly deals with PCB.

Originally my duty is just to contact the factories in China, negotiating cost and update information for our sales.
But in a small company like ours, I have to work pretty much in all departments other than accounting/financing and sales.
I am in charge of ISO9001 certificate auditing (biggggg paper work), updating internal documents, marketing and shipping department as well as other paper works and following up orders.
I have over ten thousand emails just after a year of work.

One of the most important thing you learn at work is that it really is not about what you do, but how you deal with problems.
This applies especially for a company like us, we don't really produce the products, we have little control on simple task such as getting a document from factory.
Factories may not listen to us, client may cheat on us, client may have unreasonable demands, factories may not accept.
Even if problem is solved, our manager may not like the way we solved it etc.

The fun thing is that it goes as detailed as intra-personal relationship to global economy issue.
For example, the EURO is falling like crazy recently, meaning that we have to mark up all our orders just so that we can retain our margin as before.
This of cause push pressure on sales because the client may not accept, they may say it will affect how many potential orders they were going to place on us.
As a buyer, we also need to start asking for cost down from them, surely the factory will not like it as well.
What's more, the boss would want an even higher margin because we were planning a growth originally last year.

Every day we face new challenges, it's surprising to see a company with over ten years experience still has so much to learn.

I am happy here, just hoping for a way better salary :D

Have to say, this is the one area I am most unhappy with.
The huge influx of Chinese tourists has been causing a lot of tension in Hong Kong, especially when they buy up daily products such as shampoo and make ups etc in a non-tourist area.
There is lots of tension among Hong Kongers as well after the occupy central, luckily it is getting better now.
The extremely incompetent of our governor is also not helping, even using N. Korea as an example of they have true universal suffrage because they follow the legal system.

Getting a flat in Hong Kong is also looking way too expensive to afford anytime soon, even renting in a terrible location would cost more than half my salary.
A lot of my childhood friends are planning to leave Hong Kong.
It's hard to describe to you what it feels like when more and more important parts of your life keep going away.

Another issue is my love life, my GF is in China and she doesn't want to come to live in HK.
While it is not a big problem for me, I don't mind working somewhere else and may be start a life elsewhere.
But she actually wants to stay in China near her parents and living in China is a BIG problem for me.

I have stayed in China for a while due to my work (I have to do factory auditing) and I can't stand the internet, censored and terribly slow access to some oversea websites.
Not to mention I just dislike the local Chinese news.
I guess for the US, it would be like everything you ever read will be in Fox-news style.
One example is: reverse engineering is GOOD for the chinese because they help chinese companies to catch up with the technology and so they won't lose sales to western technology!

We also rarely get a chance to meet up due to work commitments and we are talking less than ever before without any idea how to keep going.