Nothing much happened today. I worked; I went home.
There is a possibility that we’ll have some long-term guests here in a couple of days. To some it may seem like an inconvenience, sharing a house with another family, but I think it will be fun, and it will certainly help them out.
Today is sort of opposite from yesterday. Even though I usually stay home on Wednesdays, I had to go to work today for an afternoon meeting with an old friend (whereas on Tuesdays, I’m usually at work, but stayed home yesterday). I did get a ton of layout work done at home right up to where I had to leave for the meeting.
I got to work in my yellow car just as my friend Todd rolled in. He hadn’t seen me in several years, but he recognized me from 20 yards away. The thing is, he didn’t know I was working for this company, so wasn’t expecting to see me, yet he still recognized me. He asked me if I worked in the building, and I told him that he was coming to see me! He said that he had looked for me at my former employer earlier today when he met with them, but couldn’t find me. He also didn’t recognize many of the people there.
The meeting went fine, and I think he will be able to help our company out in big ways. My boss and I went out for coffee after that to strategize about a potential process transfer. For the first time today, he mentioned that he’d like to get out of bipolar as a process and move exclusively to BiCMOS. I DO NOT want to get out of bipolar; the moment we do, I become far less useful to this company, at least in a layout capacity (fortunately, I can do many other things). Bipolar is also cheaper and works well in high power applications, which is why a lot of Power Management start-ups like us begin with bipolar. The more modern BiCMOS processes are more time-consuming to draw, they have 100x more rules, and the startup cost to manufacture is 10x more.
I was at home today because my house is being inspected as part of my refinance. The guy came early, measured stuff, took pictures, verified that I have a carbon monoxide alarm (now required by CA law), then left. It took 15 minutes.
It was my goal to work on my chip today, but I was asked to analyze some processes instead. It’s been on my “C” priority for a while, but I guess my boss needs the process profiles now to compare with our current process. This project took all day, and the outcome wasn’t positive. A chip in the new process would be either 3x or 4.3x larger by area. Wow, what a really conservative process. The kinds of geometries used led me to believe that these processes were for the military back in the ‘60s. They could easily cut the design rules in half and the chip would still work, so why don’t they? To me, it seemed like a wasted day, but we did learn that this new process is probably not for us.
I picked up Courtney from her track meet later than usual today, which also kept me from attending a final call committee meeting. I wasn’t too heartbroken. Courtney and I did two hours of Study Island instead (I hate Study Island!) and then we played Battleship while watching “one hit wonders” on VH1.
Yup, it’s been a whole week since my last blog. I wish I could have blogged more often, because so much exciting stuff happened, but because so much exciting stuff happened, I didn’t have enough time to blog!
Last week, we had two Chinese Foreign Exchange Students at our house. Who knew that they would be born shoppers and that they didn’t require any sleep! They wore out my family! On Monday, we played at an arcade. On Tuesday, we went to In-and-Out Burger then shopped at Walmart. On Wednesday, we spent the whole day in San Francisco (fleet week – we got to see big ships and aerobatic planes!), and then came back and shopped at Walmart again, and then shopped at the Great Mall of Milpitas until well after closing. On Thursday, we went to the Apple Store in Palo Alto (where our youth were treated to the once in a lifetime opportunity to mourn the loss of Steve Jobs), and then toured Stanford campus until dark, and then went to Chili’s! Friday was Homecoming at the High School so we went to a BBQ and then watched the football game. The kids packed all night that night, and some the next morning, and left at 7AM. My family would have liked to have crashed after that, but we had an all-day event at church.
I went to work today so I could rest.
Yeah, today is my dad’s 77th birthday. I’m so glad to still have him around. So is my mom and his congregation, I’ll bet.
Over the weekend, we inherited two Chinese foreign exchange student. Both are wonderful. My friends up the hill also got two, so we went up to their house for an authentic American BBQ. We also taught the kids how to play touch football.
Today, they are a bit droopy and jet-lagged after their first day of school (the kids are following around our teens). All four are asleep at my house right now. The plan was to go play mini-golf later on tonight, but it began raining today and it doesn’t seem to be letting up. Perhaps we will go to the Great Mall instead.
Today is the Fiscal end of the year for my family… at least for now (I’m going to move it to Jan 1 this year). It was ten years ago that I started investing (so sad that it took so long for me to do this!). Ten years ago, my wife and I were getting to the point where we were so financially stable, that we didn’t really have to track our finances at all. This was not always the case; for years we struggled: college (twice!), two kids, our first & second home purchases (sequential home purchases; we did not buy two homes), and some major travel expenses (my love of world travel) always seemed to keep us at net zero. Once I finished my Master’s, and no longer had that expense to deal with, we found ourselves actually making money. That’s when I decided it was time to get into the stock market.
I had studied the stock market for about 10 years up that point, and on paper, I was making money… a lot of money (again, on paper), so why not try it for real? I also chose 1 October as our family fiscal year because I usually concluded my travels by September, and began saving for Christmas in October. 1 Oct and 1Feb were also the low points of my annual bank cycle so why not make one of them a fiscal year. I chose 1 October. (I’m now moving to 1 Jan starting this year because, although a fiscal year is a good idea, it really messes me up with tax-time preparations; if I were on quarterly taxes, I could keep 1 October, but I expect to be on a regular paycheck sometime next year, Lord willing). Anyway, I made my first investment on 1 June, 2001, committed myself to putting 5% into the stock market every year, and I also maxed-out my 401K at 15%. Since I also gave a tithe to my church, my wife and I were now living on 70% of our gross income. It was painful, but manageable.
10 years later, our mix of stock and 401K percentages has changed (I got capped on 401K – a good problem! – and my wife’s 403b plan sucked so we killed it), but we still put away 20% for long-term investments. Now that I have no (paying) job, we’re contributing 0% in 2011, but I’m sure that will change. Actually, contributing zero in a down year is not a bad thing. I might start funding again at the bottom of the market!
So, how have we done for ten years? Well, not too bad. I can’t say that I’m a stellar stock picker, but I am beating the cost of living index (inflation) and the S & P 500. I’m not losing money; in fact I’m averaging 7% per year currently. Take away 2002, 2008 & 2011 (all horrific years) and my percentage goes way up. God is good!
Today is my son’s 16th birthday; since it falls on a Thursday (a busy day for the household), we’ll celebrate it tomorrow by going out to eat. I hope he isn’t too disappointed. Since he is a practical sort, he has already told us to direct all gift money to a single video game that comes out in November. I also bought him a fancy graphing calculator for his Calculus class, but he wouldn’t really consider that “present” material. He’ll be happier with the game. I did spend some quality time with him (blowing stuff up on a video game) before heading off to band practice.
Well, I’m already wishing it was the weekend. Fortunately, the day went quickly because I had a lot of work to do, and now I have decent tools to do it with. This makes me happy.
I also drove the yellow car today and my buddy John came into work mentioning that he spent a good five minutes simply looking at it in the parking garage. He decided that it was unfair that I had such a nice car. Our boss said that this time next year, we’ll all have Porsches if we want them. Wouldn’t that be great? I’m not holding my breath, but it does look like we’ll be profitable in the middle of next year and exceedingly profitable the year after that… on paper. A lot of things still have to go right for us to meet this expectation. For now, I’m the only one with the Porsche.
I got a lot of work done today, but I didn’t complete my list because I discovered a pretty big screw-up that our designer had done on one two! of our previous chip revisions. It is good that I found this because I’ll be sending out the most recent version in a few weeks, and I’d rather not have the same mistake in the new revision of the silicon. Still, it took me a lot of the day to fix the mistake, and I didn’t quite finish. I’ll finish tomorrow morning.
More good news, by fixing this chip, it is now “metal option” compatible with its sister chip, where before, it was not. If both chips go into production, we’ll save a bundle on mask costs thanks to my efforts today. That always makes for a good day!
The evening was spent going from classroom to classroom at my son’s school – it was back to school night! Jeffrey has fantastic teachers this year (thanks to Barbara’s inside connection with the teacher who does the schedules). I was really impressed with every teacher, especially his ceramics teacher (who is going to teach him how a real business works)! And because it matters to Jeffrey that he has good teachers, I expect that his GPA will skyrocket this year. It’s going to be a good year for him.
You know, not every day can be grand. It was a real solid day at work – I got a lot accomplished – yet, as with so many days, I didn’t accomplish all that I wanted to accomplish. Well, tomorrow is a new day, and it’s at home. I should be able to minimize distractions and crank out some chips.
As usual, we have a group of boys here on Tuesday. They come after school, presumably to do some homework before I get home (?), play video games for a while, eat, and then go youth group at church. Tonight, they will be going to Chipotles for free burritos. I don’t know how our youth group leader did it, but she managed to talk Chipotles into doing this. Since my son usually cooks on Tuesdays, my wife and I are wondering what we will have for dinner.
Well, what do you know… Chipotles gave us free burritos as well. They are so generous! Thank-you for this blessing Jesus!
I was sick the whole weekend; not the kind of sickness that keeps you in bed, but one that makes you tired and achy. Still, I was able to spend time with my family on Saturday (video games with my son, a movie date with my wife), and I made it through church and half an annual church picnic on Sunday, but then I crashed for the rest of the day.
All weekend I slept straight through my alarm. This morning, I almost did again, but I was able to drag myself to work. It turns out that two of my colleagues had the same sort of illness.
One of my workmates, Bob, is going on vacation today. Tomorrow, he’ll be in Europe, floating down the Danube for three weeks. I envy him.
Tonight, my wife and I attend a meeting on housing foreign exchange students. We weren’t planning on doing this, but the need is great. My son is not at all thrilled that a Chinese foreign exchange student will be following him around campus all next week, but he does sort of like the idea that he might be able to go to China in April as a result of a week’s worth of inconvenience.
