Class and Such

Well I'm tired and it is midnight and I've been having trouble getting up in the morning so seems like a good time to blog rather than sleep...

Taking a step back in time:

Susanna moved out a while ago. I would imagine that everyone reading this already knows so I won't go into further detail here.

My parents came out to visit. So them, my brother and I headed up to SB wine country and then up the central coast to Hurst Castle. Had a good time tasting/drinking some wine. The central coast was very cool looking - a bit different coast than further down here and bigger waves. Hurst Castle is awesome - I need to become an obscenely rich evil old man so I can build a castle of my own. Now of course if I don't ended up with quite as much money I can always just add in more eccentricity to be remembered just as well. I think the combination of wealth and eccentricity is kind of a root mean square thing for how well you will be remembered. If one is somewhat larger than the other then it will be the dominant factor - so if one is significantly larger than the other the key is to increase the smaller one and you can significantly improve how well you will be remembered. Like RMS is a good example of someone who is plenty crazy (notice poor people are crazy, rich people are eccentric) but would need quite a bit more money to be really remembered (and maybe if he had bothered to write an operating system - well, other than emacs). Hurst was a bit heavy on the money but had a good bit of eccentricity to go with it. Actually the organizational behavior textbook says that at work you want your perceived competence to equal your perceived eccentricity. If your eccentricity is too high compared to competence then people won't want to put up with you but if your perceived competence is high and perceived eccentricity is low then you are not adding as much creativity and innovation as you could and not challenging the status quo enough. Not that related to what I was saying but thought I'd throw it in there.

Speaking of class, I'm taking two classes at Pepperdine this trimester, organizational behavior and accounting. Accounting is pretty dry so far. If something goes on the left then the same amount has to go on the right - now you know about 90% of what I have learned in that class. One thing we learned about is how to handle accounting with preferred stock which is something I had never heard of - for those who haven't either - it's stock you buy which is actually more like a bond - there is a percentage associated with it which is what the company says it will pay you in dividends, but they are not actually obliged to pay the dividends - although in most cases they have to pay you the dividend before they can give dividends to common stock owners. Not that preferred stock is that interesting but I was surprised that I had never heard of it before. We have another week or two of financial accounting and then we move on to managerial accounting which is supposed to be less dry.

Organizational behavior is going well (well at least I think it is - we have not done anything that is graded yet). It involves a lot of talking to people and discussing stuff in groups. Sometimes it kind of reminds me of high school and middle school but I do think it is good for me since it has been a while since I had to speak in front of a group or think about how something might make someone feel. I'm kind of concerned about this class since most of the grading is based on writing. Also we are going to be fairly far into the class before we get any feedback about how we are doing.

Over the last weekend I went to the personal development workshop associated with the organizational behavior class. Mostly I think it was just a good chance to get to know the other people in the class who I'll probably be working with over the next two years - kind of like college orientation type stuff. Some of the activities were supposed to teach us about ourselves - the main thing I got out of that was comparing myself to people who are not MIT students or electrical engineers. I realized that I'm a serious nerd - not necessarily in a bad way - but at MIT while you are clearly a big nerd just by being there, you tend to not realize it as much since everyone is. Unfortunately MIT came up a few times and a few of the activities required some math ability so now others have built up a rather high expectation for my math ability which I am trying to tone down now (not that I cannot live up to it but it is nice to not have the pressure and I would rather not have it completely define me in their minds). Overall the weekend was fairly fun since it is a fun group of people. (Wow that last sentence was almost a Bush statement - we are going to have fun because we are fun havers).

At work I'm working on a test chip - this should not be a surprise since other than the summer after my junior year when I was actually fixing a product that was shipping, all I have done at Teradyne is work on test chips - not a bad thing since it means my work is more on the research side but I do find it kind of funny. But this one is definitely going to be used in a product chip - really - definitely - unlike the last two which were very likely going to be used in a product chip. This chip is another high speed digital (note that digital means the signals are square waves but since it is such high speeds and requires such accuracy that it is considered analog work) driver/receiver. I'm working on some timing stuff and the individual cells I have been working on are fairly interesting. I've also been learning about modeling jitter which is quite complex because it combines modeling noise (fairly difficult on its own) and combining it with timing. It also looks like I will be doing the integration for the chip which is kind of cool since in some (small) sense the person in charge of integration is in charge of the chip. (Integration as in putting together the cells at the top level - not as in adding up an infinite number of infinitely small segments).

Actually, speaking of test chips I was reading through EDN - a free magazine about EE - and National Semiconductor had an ad/article discussing differential amplifiers for driving analog to digital converters from DC to 500 MHz (and mentioned that demand for them will be increasing in the near future) - I thought that was kind of cool - if you do not know why I would find that cool I have a mater's thesis for you to read.