Day 3 with ZTE

I came back to life a bit on Day 3. The technical discussions went pretty well and the food was much better. We started to get momentum on some key topics and it was good to see some alignment on the issues. Frankly - there's a ton of issues with these chips! This chip is going to be incredibly difficult to build! They want to tape-out this calendar year after delaying the start already by one month!

The meeting rooms changed every day at ZTE and on Day 3, they gave us the "UN room". It was huge and every seat had a microphone, which we actually had to use. The room was so big that it swallowed our sound. This was also the first day that I had internet during the meetings at ZTE - it was great to kind of stay on top of things when folks started discussing things in Chinese!

For lunch, we went to a pretty good place and Jack and I tried Sea Cucumbers. I was nervous that they would be disgusting, but they were pretty tasteless. I'm pretty sure I've had them in the past and they were horrible, but I wonder if that was the sauce. Anyway, we took video and Jack actually published it on Facebook. What a funny guy!!

View from restaurant - it was a pretty nice place.

I was able to take a great shot from the 5th floor of ZTE of the campus - it's a pretty nice place for sure! It's like a little city. They have shuttles to take everyone home and the shuttles leave at 5:30pm. The place is a ghost town after that! Not sure when they arrive in the morning, but it is before we arrive at 9:00am. They also take 2 hours for lunch everyday and many will even take naps during those 2 hours. Pretty funny to watch!

Jack and I did a toast to our 5-hour energy drinks. These little things were the key to staying awake during these long DKO meetings! I'm glad I only have to endure 4 days, but I'm worried that I should have stayed for the extra day!!

For dinner, I talked Kevin (the sales guy) into taking us out for "hot pot". I have always enjoyed hot pot and I'm pretty sure that Kevin took us to the best place I've ever been for hot pot. It was really good. They had a spicy pot and you can make your own dipping sauce. They also had a guy come in and do the "mask dance" thing that I saw in Singapore years ago. The guy that was dancing with noodles would come buy and add noodles to your pot and they tasted great. It was pretty cool!