Post-graduate

In the last weekend, I attended one biggest exam in a decade, the post-graduate entrance exam of USTC.

To assure that I can pass the exam, I attended a training course earlier this month, and put myself busy preparing the exams for weeks.

Everything went great.  For both the two phases of the exam (First one was pure a exam, including English, Mathematics, and Specialty course; Then was an interview held by Prefessors from USTC).

And now I believe that I can pass, only need to wait the result to be revealed at July.

Job

I, per myself, am a modest man, and I’m a man values honesty as a great virtue.

But it seems that I’m act too modest in some specific time. I just joined a new company last month, now surrounding by lots of unfamiliar faces. My previous title in my previous employer, UniSVR, was R&D manager of China mainland, in charge of both Shanghai & Beijing offices’ R&D teams, but that was once upon a time. Now I’m nobody but an ordinary SDE, and people here don’t know me, yet. There once I was given a chance to introduce myself. I said nothing about the titles and the track records I once retrieved or archived, because I didn’t think this could be any help. Now I start to think it was a big mistake, just like another big mistake I’v made earlier in a conference interview thru WebEx.

In that interview, I must say, for the record, I completely meet with the requirements of that position.

However, I failed to pass the interview. After reviewed the interview myself, there were two key points affected and led to the failure. Video codec & Streaming QoS, which I’m both experienced and capable of. But when I was asked about these skills or questions, I was too modest, I only said that I didn’t get myself involved into those skills because:

• Video codec

In fact, earlier when I was working on the WinCE/Windows Mobile client for 3GVAU project and UMA project, I once researched into x264(encoder) and ffmpeg(decoder) for over a year (not full time, because there are other proejct to work out), but only for porting purpose and bit rate control purpose. I’m not saying here that I’m an expert in H.264 codec algorithm topic. At least I knew and familiar with it, although it was a thing of 5 or 6 years ago.  When I was asked about video codec, I said nothing about these experiences, instead, I said I had not worked on the detail codec algorithms, what I master at are how to use the codecs, and parseing some header informations. For example, when we streaming videos, we need to parse H.264 SPS/PPS, MPEG-4 VOL/VOP info.

And I put an end of this question with a saying, There are things you didn’t get yourself involved into, but it doesn’t mean you are not capable of it. And more, I told them that I can do the video codec algorithm work if it is necessary.

• Streaming QoS

I was once researching on this topic for monthes to improve the streaming quality of UniArgus series of products, including but not limits to standard protocol like RTCP, private protocol of UniArgus. However these implementations did not work as so good as what we wished it to be,  when the networking bandwith is really suck, especially when you are using a smartphone to view a live video through 3G connections.

Besides, UniArgus series products are designed to stream limited sources of stream to hundreds or thousands of different clients, including clients connecting by LAN, by WIFI, by WAN, or by 3G. That means its impossible for the server to encode/transcode too much different streams with different profiles. For example, one stream in server, two clients. One client is in LAN, another is connecting thru 3G(which sucks).  If server can only produce a profile of stream, then we can  not take take into consideration of both of the clients’ QoS requirements like frame rate, bitrate adjustment. What we can do is only if one client encountered package loss issue, we can re-send the lossed packages or skip some usless video packages(like drop all the rest B/P frames untill next I frame).

However I never mentioned all these staffs, maybe it’s because the I was nervous, or just don’t want to say things I not 100% confident in its outcome if I was about to do this in the next minute…

A conclusion for this:

I failed that interview, not because I’m not qualified, but only because I did not show them what I capable of in the short time conversation, or what I expressed/showed to peoples was some things can not completely stand for my expierencs or backgrounds.

My one biggest problem is just that. I’m a modest man, I never like to talk big. Years of experenes in Project Schedule planning made me even more cautious in talking about some specific staffs. And in the past over ten years, I was always be the man who sit on the master side of interviews, I’d never been interviewed, so I do lack of skills in presenting myself.

Now, here I am, in Kedacom. Wish I can do better from now on.

Family

My father resigned from his job in the beginning of 2013. And earlier in the month, May 10, he left Shanghai for his new start in Hangzhou. Wish he perfect in his new position.

Catherine’s kindergarten education is about to over, and she recieved the letter of admission from the 1st junior school of DAHUA, after Lucy’s efforts through her boss.

Little uncle went to Hangzhou to have a surgical operation on his leg. It was a really big operation, after it was done, no one can stand the extremely pain, so Mom went Hangzhou to look after her little brother for two days. Now he’s already checked out, and back to Dongyang for later recuperation.  Wish he healthy, and will not be lame in his leg any more.