Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Dec 1, 2009, 9:10 pm
Do you send a thank you letter after a job interview? Do you think it matters? When I was being interviewed for my current position at FluxCorp, I made sure that after each round of interview, a than...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Nov 26, 2009, 8:19 am
Happy Thanksgiving to my American brethren and brethrenette, a well deserved two days off for all those hard working people -- us. Even though we had our Thanksgiving here in Canada a month and a half...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Nov 24, 2009, 12:45 pm
Difficulties working with the Psycho Colleague (PC) is not news to anyone who has come in contact with him. In fact, the architect of the Flying Flux couldn't sleep for a whole night upon learning...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Nov 18, 2009, 11:38 pm
The Psycho Colleague strikes again. This time, it was as a response to my request for him to do a bit of investigative simulation. A little while ago, I wrote about electromigration and its detrimenta...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Nov 13, 2009, 4:35 pm
This past Wednesday (Nov 11) was Veterans Day in the U.S. One of my colleagues mass e-mailed to a big swath of the company a patriotic poster depicting a saluting soldier in ceremonial uniform on one ...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Nov 11, 2009, 12:40 am
For those that haven't heard, Canada has a shortage of H1N1 flu vaccines. And in Ottawa, the H1N1 vaccine clinics are currently restricting the shots to those in the high risk groups. One of my co...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Nov 6, 2009, 10:12 am
The first snow of the season has arrived in Ottawa. It's wonderful; it's beautiful. The small nip of the cold air feels refreshing. That is, until I realized my car battery has died and due th...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Nov 3, 2009, 4:07 pm
Clear communication is vital in any workplace that requires teamwork, no more so than working across geographic and temporal separations such as we do here in our satellite office. We are coming up to...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Oct 29, 2009, 7:00 am
What would you wait in a long line for? To buy tickets to a sports event? To see your favourite celebrity? To get on a ride in Disney even though you're baking under the hot sun and the kids are c...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Oct 25, 2009, 11:15 pm
Men will always delight in a woman whose voice is lined with velvet. ~Brendan Francis During a team meeting last week, one of my colleagues received a telephone call on his other line. It was a woman...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Oct 20, 2009, 11:12 am
Despite government bailouts, corporate perks continue amongst those on corporate welfare. It's simply disgusting behaviour, unless of course, you're the one getting those perks. Here at FluxC...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Oct 19, 2009, 1:59 pm
Isn't it nice that the Nobel Prize in physics went to two guys that worked on semiconductor analog circuit design? Woohoo! The awarding of the Nobel Prize in peace often creates controversy, as wi...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Oct 13, 2009, 11:51 pm
You hire a contractor to re-model your kitchen and you show him your rough drawing. You want the contractor to take that and create a more polished drawing for your review before starting work. He doe...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Oct 9, 2009, 3:55 pm
The running joke at our office is the behaviour of our psycho colleague (PC) that has been plaguing our mental sanity ever since all of the analog team here in our satellite office joined FluxCorp. Th...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Oct 6, 2009, 10:29 pm
The sound of an awful leak. All that nanotechnology failure analysis of sawing microscopic wires, laying down nanometer wires, and probing nanometer features have finally produced the root cause of th...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Oct 1, 2009, 12:36 pm
In the classic Monty Python film (aren't they all classics anyway?) The Meaning of Life, Mr. Creosote, a impossibly obese man, walks into a French restaurant and eats so much that eventually, that...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Sep 25, 2009, 11:26 pm
Quick, what does observational astronomy and semiconductor failure analysis have in common? Both include the detection and analysis of visible light or non-visible electromagnetic radiation in order t...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Sep 20, 2009, 11:36 pm
Green, as in green energy of course. With all this stimulus money flying around, the government will pay for half of a home energy audit and additional grants should I move forward with improvements t...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Sep 16, 2009, 11:25 pm
2% yield. That was yesterday. Today, new parts were delivered from another batch of silicon wafers. Boom...100% yield. Woohoo, now yield is up to ~50% on average. Better, but yield has to be above 90%...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Sep 15, 2009, 1:02 pm
In a recent meeting on bug fixes for the next tapeout of the Flying Flux, the psycho colleague flailed and grand-standed, saying for him to make the changes, he will need one month just to familiarize...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Sep 11, 2009, 10:28 pm
An old high school friend, now a partner at a large accounting and business consulting firm, told me once that she sat through a really boring discussion at a hi-tech company where the presenter kept ...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Sep 8, 2009, 10:37 pm
The day after Labour Day, traditionally the first day of another school year for those lucky to be still young enough to be in school. As I look upon the faces of kids filled with a mixture of excitem...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Sep 2, 2009, 9:35 pm
My "Aha! Moment" that I was so smugly self-satisfied about when debugging my chip two weeks ago turned out to lead me to dead end after dead end. My efforts and the efforts of many fine colleagues has...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Aug 31, 2009, 10:10 am
The human body contains multitudes upon multitudes of feedback control systems. Touch a hot stove and the hand moves away. Feel cold and the jacket goes on. Rumbles the stomach and food enters the bod...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Aug 26, 2009, 9:12 am
Scenario 1, group e-mail chain: PC*: I observed a Flux anomaly in Module Rho-Epsilon-Pi(ρεπ): internal-sector(is), indicating insufficient flying power. Me: Yes, this was also observed by another...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Aug 24, 2009, 10:10 pm
If engineers do not get their MTTF under control, they will surely be hearing WTF from their customers. MTTF, or mean time to failure, is a statistical measure of when a device is expected to fail -- ...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Aug 20, 2009, 9:53 pm
Work, like relationships, goes through phases. An initial honeymoon phase where every day is still exciting and there's so much to learn about the each other. Then the stable period, where you'...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Aug 17, 2009, 7:28 pm
'Aha!' moments -- those seldom occuring events where intuition meets with intellect to create flash of relevation -- have been explained by some scientists as a surge of electrical activity in...
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