The second day (23rd October)

[nyankoframe]

I woke up around 7:00 am after a relatively quiet and restful sleep, although I found it hard to sleep at first because there was a light on in my room and I didn't find out where it was or how to turn it off until after I woke up. :P

I changed and went down to the hotel kitchen for a buffet breakfast that featured cereal with cold milk, fried bacon and other things that I wouldn't normally have for breakfast. After all, it was free (or rather, I didn't have to pay for it myself). :P

After that, since there was some time and I didn't feel like cooping myself up in the room the whole morning reading books, I decided to take a walk and see a bit more of Hong Kong than just Kimberley Road. Before that, I first took some pictures of the skyline from my window.


Kowloon skyline on a Monday morning
Another angle

I walked down Kimberley Road towards Kowloon Park, which was the nearest tourist attraction and possibly the only one that was free.

Walking down Kimberley Road

At the entrance to Kowloon Park

Map of Kowloon Park

The first part of the park that I visited was its Garden Maze, in which I got "lost", and at the same time saw quite a few people exercising and performing their morning tai-qi routines (although I didn't take photos of them because I don't think they would have appreciated it):

Entrance to the maze

nyanko gets lost in the maze

After that, I went to the Chinese Garden where I took a picture of the fountain and pavilion in the middle of the lake. It was very peaceful and if I would have spent a longer time there if I could.

Chinese Garden

Unfortunately, I didn't have that luxury, so I had to move on quickly to the Bird Lake where I spent some time to make up for bypassing some of the other attractions.

Flamingos
Two swans
A swan followed by two ducklings

The next part of my visit was the Tree Walk, which was a path lined with various kinds of rare trees, including the Stiff Bottle-Brush tree from Australia.

Entrance to the Tree Walk
Information board for the Stiff Bottle-Brush tree
The Stiff Bottle-Brush Tree

I walked past the Hong Kong Heritage Discovery Centre, but it was unfortunately closed.

Entrance of the HKHDC
A banner advertising the Cartographic Survey of Historic Buildings Exhibition (6 June 2006 - 3 December 2006)

Finally, to conclude things, I went to the Colour Garden, which was a garden of concentric paths with colourful flowers planted throughout. It was beautiful and I hope that these photographs that I took bear justice.

Part of the Colour Garden

On the way back, I saw this street sign and decided to capture it for posterity in the hope that other people (particularly those who hang out in the RKoL IRC channel) would get the joke:

Here's looking at you, Cairn!


After that, I spent some time reading some of the textbooks I'd packed in my suitcase and preparing for the interview. I even had time to take a silly picture of myself. :P

Looking silly here

I ate a quick lunch and dashed down to the hotel where the interviews were to take place. I think it's credit to my walking speed and sense of direction that I got there without getting late or being lost. ^_^;; The interviews were each about 45 minutes to an hour long, and I had 5 of them, with some breaks in between for refreshments and restroom breaks.

To answer testing4l's comment, trees were not mentioned at all during any of the interviews. :P Most of the time, the constraints on the problems were set at O(n) in terms of space or time, and since adding n nodes to a tree is O(n log₂ n) in the worst case, they weren't really suitable data structures. That also means the reading and refreshers I did about 2-3 trees, 2-3-4 trees, red-black trees and AVL trees was largely irrelevant. It was still good to have read about them though, so that at least I could show I knew what I was talking about. By and large, most of the problems posed related to arrays and pointers in C, and I found myself using hashtables frequently to tackle the problems.

The first two interviews were probably not my best, since I was still warming up and getting used to the environment, and these were more focused on hard-core low-level programming (for example, implementing a string-reversal function without using the C runtime). My third interview was a non-technical interview with my HR recruiter, and it was a welcome break from the coding. I believe this interview set the tone for the final two interviews, both of which took place and involved more high-level code writing, including a pseudo-code function for the last interview.

I finished around 7 pm together with another candidate, and both of us decided to walk to the harbour to take a look at the night skyline of Hong Kong before we left. The first picture didn't come out very well (perhaps because the camera's exposure was set wrongly or because it was just mis-behaving), but it was a picture of the lights across the harbour.

Coloured streaks of light~

The second picture was one the other interview candidate took of me. I probably looked really tired in this one, but after 5 hours of interviews, what else would you expect? :P

Tired nyanko~

The results of the interview will be made known to me via e-mail on the 4th of November (a Saturday). I hope, and I'm quietly confident, that I'll get an offer. In case I don't, though, I'm going to work locally for some time during my one-year waiting period and then apply again.

The night ended pretty uneventfully. I went back to the hotel for dinner, and after that fell asleep like a log. :P

There isn't as much to write about the third day, so that post will (rest assured) be a lot shorter than this one.