Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - May 11, 2011, 11:00 am
A couple of months ago, I received a thick packet in the mailbox. Inside was a questionnaire, asking me to participate in a scientific study. "Oh?", I wondered curiously. Having had a closer look at the purpose of the study, I dutifully complied, filling out the forms to the best of my ability and p...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - May 6, 2011, 9:40 am
If I cared about doing such things, it would be quite easy to assume the ID of Mr. Poker. It's not hard to find out his credit card numbers, expiry dates, passport number, birthday, his wife's birthday, etc. The reason is that Mr. Poker has a high speaking volume. Very high. So much so, when we're o...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - May 5, 2011, 2:55 pm
I learned two new managerial buzzwords recently. The first one is an adjective -- evergreen. It means refreshed, never old, never stale, never withered, always new, always green. For example, let's make sure we have an evergreen view of the Gantt chart that doesn't reflect reality. The second is a v...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - May 2, 2011, 11:27 pm
Our super duper director, the one whose bright idea is to require engineering to design a zero-bug prototype, has been hard at work implementing new ways of doing things this past year. New ways of documenting. New ways of presenting data. New checklists. New ways to track schedule. It's all part of...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Apr 28, 2011, 1:49 pm
Snapped this pic on vacation last year north of Toronto. Wonder if the fish and chips come with sweet and sour sauce.
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Apr 25, 2011, 1:47 pm
When designing anything, there's what you would like to design, and what you ended up implementing. The design intent may be elegant, beautiful, even sublime. But overlook one small issue and the whole thing can fall apart. During the last several months, I've been embroiled in issue which directly ...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Apr 17, 2011, 11:43 pm
This past week, the manager of the digital design group decided to give a good scolding to us analog guys. His frustration is due to the analog design changing on a regular basis, which sometimes require associated changes to the digital logic. He wonders why we analog guys can't do a bit of up-fron...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Apr 11, 2011, 3:35 pm
One of the new ways of doing things here at FluxCorp is to start tracking bugs we find in verification, no matter how large or small, so (a) the issue doesn't slip through the cracks, (b) management gets to see how hard we're working, and (c) the rate of bug finds is a loose indication of how robust...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Apr 5, 2011, 2:40 pm
Over at Engineer Blogs, I've put up a series of posts discussing the challenges of designing circuits in the nano-world. The posts so far are: A Matter of Scale: ElectromigrationA Matter of Scale: Well Proximity EffectA Matter of Scale: Moore is Dead, Long Live MooreLast week over at EB, we've also ...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Apr 1, 2011, 2:25 pm
Spend money? Save money? Here's a partial screen capture from CNN's website a little while back. And no, this isn't an April Fool's joke.
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Mar 31, 2011, 3:43 pm
It's federal election time in Canada - 5 glorious weeks of campaigning. Of the four parties currently represented in parliament, only two parties have a realistic chance of forming a government - the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party. I'm glad we now have electronic voting. Here's a screen ca...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Mar 28, 2011, 11:03 am
When my manager came to visit us in February, he had a chat with our new Ukrainian colleague, Mr. Borscht, who is not part of our design team. Later on, my manager said that Mr. Borscht, who is in his early 60s, appears to be very proud of the fact that he has a "young Canadian wife". This is true. ...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Mar 24, 2011, 10:32 am
The provincial engineering regulatory body in Ontario, PEO, proposed last year to drop a long-standing requirement for the licensing of professional engineers. The requirement was that all PEs be either Canadian citizens or landed immigrants. The purpose of this change is to allow internationally tr...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Mar 18, 2011, 11:23 pm
This month, I passed my sixth year mark at FluxCorp. This has been the most productive six years of my engineering career. In the previous three jobs that I've had, I've created numerous IC products. None were a success. But in the time that I've been here, I've been involved in two major product re...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Mar 11, 2011, 12:06 am
Two years ago, I happened upon a blog titled Positive Influence (unfortunately, the blog is now stale). The author is Jerry Pounds, a veteran management consultant. In my short interactions with Jerry, he was kind enough to send me his unpublished book called Praise for Profit: How Rewards and Incen...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Mar 8, 2011, 7:20 am
Fortune came out with its list of top 100 companies to work for in the US. FluxCorp didn't make the list, but I'm not complaining. Between the free food, decent gym, and generous pension plan (for high tech) for a small satellite office of 15 people, I'm quite happy. However, it does make me wonder ...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Mar 5, 2011, 9:08 pm
Exactly a month ago, I contemplated the possibility of leaving FluxCorp in a post titled The End?. I was feeling restless. With my goal of landing a cushy ex-pat job seemingly impossible in this economy, I was willing to consider a change just for the sake of change. The recruiter was just another g...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Feb 28, 2011, 11:18 am
Last post, I wrote about my then-impending annual ritual of humiliation, the performance review. Here's how the ritual works. Each fluxee is sequestered in a room, blinds drawn, facing his or her manager with a sheet of paper in front of them. On that sheet is their annual ranking on a 5-level scale...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Feb 23, 2011, 1:18 am
There's been a lot of instability with the jobs of overlords in northern Africa and the Middle East recently. However, the jobs of our American overlords at FluxCorp remain strong and stable. One visited us last week -- our director. Today, another one will be visiting our alien outpost -- our manag...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Feb 22, 2011, 4:12 pm
I originally had a big long post on women in engineering in what would have been part four of this series. But instead, I've retitled it Women, Engineering, and Perception and posted it on my favourite engineering blog (and it should be yours too). You can find previous postings on this series here:...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Feb 18, 2011, 11:09 pm
As I wrote two days ago, my directory came to visit us this past Wednesday. Bright and early yesterday morning, he and I had an hour long chat, 1-on-1. Besides the various queries I had on the future of our design team, our product roadmap, and corproate initiatives, I also made what I consider to b...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Feb 16, 2011, 2:24 pm
My American director (my manager's manager) is here today as part of his Satellite-Office-World-Tour. He heads off to India tomorrow. Yesterday, I wrote a post on our favourite engineering blog (EngineerBlogs.org), complaining again about the zero-bug prototype policy at FluxCorp. It's titled Protot...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Feb 15, 2011, 10:06 am
Three posts ago, I blamed Carrie Underwood for the departure of a popular local NHL hockey player, Mike Fisher. That was unfair and a knee jerk reaction on my part. Fisher himself said that he did not request to be traded from Ottawa to Nashville and I have no reason not to believe him. He and Under...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Feb 14, 2011, 3:05 pm
The proverbial shit has hit the proverbial fan lately at FluxCorp. The FlyingFlux that we delivered to one of our customers has a 0.3% defect rate. According to them, that's way too high. One of their own large customers has returned products to them. This makes it a very, very bad situation. Our cu...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Feb 13, 2011, 11:29 pm
Recently, the authors at Engineer Blogs, including yours truly, discussed how each of us ended up in the field of engineering. Some took a circuitous route, like Cherish and FrauTech. Chris Gammell was inspired by physics. Paul Clarke started as a baby engineer. As for me, I didn't even know what en...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Feb 10, 2011, 6:04 pm
One of the most popular hockey players in our local NHL team, the Ottawa Senators, is Mike Fisher. Last year, he married Carrie Underwood, who as a country signer, is based in Nashville. With the Senators playing poorly this year and wanting to rebuild by unloading some heavy salaries, Fisher was tr...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Feb 8, 2011, 1:43 am
Stephen Harper, our intrepid Prime Minister of this northern nation, dared to venture south into the land of tea parties with no tea to talk to their embattled Muslim radical-Christian socialist death-panel Kenyan president Barack Obama. The little sojourn took place at the White House and the major...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Feb 5, 2011, 1:44 am
I got a LinkedIn email recently, where a recruiter wanted to link to me in order to introduce me to a great opportunity. I normally delete these e-mails immediately, but I don't know what it was that morning. I accepted the invitation and subsequently, I found myself reading a job description from a...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Feb 4, 2011, 1:35 am
In 2009, FluxCorp instituted a mandatory vacation policy whereby employees were forced to take their entire annual leave on specific company-determined days. While such shenanigans are OK in the free-market world of the US, here in socialist Canuckistan, where labour laws are a little tighter, this ...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Feb 3, 2011, 2:08 am

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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Feb 2, 2011, 4:25 am
For the past two years, my online pictoral self has been a bar magnet with protruding flux lines. But with my new involvement with Engineer Blogs, I think the time is ripe to put a face to the hitherto faceless Fluxor. So here you go, the picture to the right is my new online persona. A face with co...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Feb 1, 2011, 9:59 am
Back when the Canadian government did away with our country's mandatory census and proclaimed that a voluntary census makes no difference to the quality of data, I lamented about the ignorance of our elected officials. In a subsequent post, I lamented further about the lack of numeracy in our genera...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Jan 28, 2011, 6:46 pm
There's been a baby fest recently at FluxCorp amongst my colleagues. Last month, I wrote about a new co-worker joining our midst. I surmised initially that he was Russian due to his name, but it turns out he's Ukranian. I haven't given him a moniker yet, so let's do that now and label him Mr. Borsch...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Jan 26, 2011, 3:03 pm
Tuesday nights are nights where I go and visit the swimming facility at one of the local universities. Last night, after the car had come to a stop in the parking lot, the headbeams lit up the car in front -- a Mercedes C240. Nice car, I thought. Then I looked closer at the license plate. The lice...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Jan 25, 2011, 1:15 am
Today's topic of discussion by yours truly over at Engineer Blogs is the Smith chart (inset), simultaneously loved by those working in RF and hated by everyone else. So if you're intrigued by plotting on a circle rather than a grid, then head over to the latest post titled S Stands for Smith. If you...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Jan 23, 2011, 10:03 pm
Upon leaving a restaurant tonight, I couldn't help but notice, as a baby surely notices a wet diaper, that my nostrils were starting to freeze as I traversed the few parking spaces necessary to reach my temporary moving shelter -- my car. Turning on the radio, the weatherman noted that it was curren...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Jan 18, 2011, 11:06 pm
In my recent posts, I took a job candidate (Mr. Flop) to task for his inability to answer some basic questions (e.g. his past designs; how transistors work), even though his résumé clearly implied this should be common knowledge to him. While Mr. Flop may not be the worst candidate I've ever inter...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Jan 16, 2011, 11:58 pm
Last week, I wrote about an interview with a disappointing candidate that was applying for a analog IC design position with FluxCorp. Although he wasn't able to answer many questions regarding his own past designs (or alleged designs), I still thought it necessary to give him a chance by moving to m...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Jan 13, 2011, 5:47 pm
In my last post, I promised that the next post (this one) would be about some of the basic questions about transistors that an unfortunate interview candidate vying for an analog IC design job wasn't able to answer. But I am preempting that post with this public service announcement. Engineers of th...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Jan 10, 2011, 1:59 pm
During the dot-com boom, there were a lot of rich people on paper. But when the bubble burst, these folks were back to their regular middle-class selves. Similarly, there are a lot of people I've interviewed over the years that look great on paper, but the bubble they've created for themselves almos...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Jan 7, 2011, 12:11 am
Cherish over at Faraday's Cage is where you put Schroedinger's Cat introduced me to a Hitler parody about academic peer reviews. The clip was interesting enough that afterwards, I went and watched the actual movie, called Downfall (2004). It's always nice to see Germans in WWII movies actually speak...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Jan 5, 2011, 12:48 am
Got an interesting piece of mail recently: It's certainly not everyday that one gets a letter from the FBI. Yes, I know my circuits are supposed to be bug-free, but bugs aren't a federal crime. Or is it? And I'm in Canada; aren't those guys out of their jurisdiction? And where's Agent Scully? Can s...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Jan 4, 2011, 7:23 am
Jobs, jobs, jobs. World leaders should be concentrating on job creation, as everyone appears to agree. FluxCorp has been hiring, but mostly in China and India. In North America, it's been a real small trickle. Still, we've added a few to our numbers. In my pre-Christmas post on A New Friend, we hire...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Jan 3, 2011, 11:16 pm
The World Junior (under 20) Championship in hockey is going on right now. Tonight, it was Canada vs. USA for the semi-final match. The picture above is a scene from that very match showing the Canadians celebrating after a goal, the American goalie out of focus in front, and a homogenous bloc of Can...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Jan 2, 2011, 10:44 pm
The Christmas break was nice. It was filled with food, family, and lots of socializing. My original plan was to take a trip to Niagara Falls, but canceled those plans at the last minute in order to relax at home. But holidays aren't meant for relaxation, even when I do stay at home. Instead, I compl...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Dec 26, 2010, 1:44 pm
Santa was pretty good to me. I got a HD camcorder. Small and light compared to my old analog video recorder which uses 8mm tape. And it is what I actually wanted for Christmas (I also got a high end vacuum cleaner, but it's not here yet). The downside to upgrading the camcorder is that it is going t...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Dec 25, 2010, 1:00 pm
Was Santa nice to you? Did you get your favourite high tech toy? Even if you ended up with a lump of coal, fret not; have a gander at the video, perhaps a little smile shall come upon your face.
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Dec 24, 2010, 2:08 am
Bing Crosby would approve, as it's a sure bet that Ottawa will be having a white Christmas this year. A reasonable amount of snow on the ground now with temperatures that won't be exceeding the freezing point any time soon. Family will be visiting from the US of A. I've purchased a turkey. All that'...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Dec 21, 2010, 4:12 am
Ever since the firing of the Psycho Colleague back in September, our analog circuit design team has been down a person. We've been asking for a replacement ever since and my director has been promising it to us ever since. So what happened last week? Well, there's now a new employee at FluxCorp Cana...
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Fluxor posted an article on Flying Flux - Dec 17, 2010, 11:07 pm
Nortel, the once proud Canadian telecom giant, has already divested itself of every single one of its business units as part of its bankruptcy process. Today, it has officially sold off one of the most splendid corporate campuses in town to the federal government. Built large enough to house more th...
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