Year of the Startup

I barely even opened up my layout today.  The morning started out with a potential investor presentation.  In the end, they offered great advice — truly great — but they will not invest with us.  The afternoon meeting was a chat about company direction.  It went well, but we have our work cut out for us.  Somewhere in the middle of the day, I got a frantic call from one of my contract jobs.  They needed some expert advice because the fab said that my layout couldn’t be manufactured as drawn.  As soon as I was able (after the afternoon meeting), I rushed over to the fab and talked with them.  They were right; the way they handle one of their layers didn’t allow for diffusion overlaps, and this design was full of them (per the original design).  The addition of a mask solved this (So why has such an ancient process such as this never run into this issue before?  What I did was a common industry practice!).  With that solved, I drove around the corner to the contract company and explained to the CEO what had happened.  He seemed moderately OK with this.  While in the building, one of my former (good) bosses showed up — he’s now contracting for the same company, but on a different project.  It was good to see him.  When I got home, I didn’t have much time to waste — we were throwing a 50th birthday party for a dear friend at tonight’s Lifegroup.  The party was a success and everybody left fat and happy.  I can hardly wait for tax day tomorrow!

I think I wrote yesterday’s blog at around 5PM.  I then worked on tax prep until 9PM.  This made for a very long and exhausting day.  Well, today will be the same.  It is now 5PM, I’ve worked since 7AM, and I’ll probably be doing tax prep until 9PM.

These 14 hour days will end… my tax appointment is on Saturday morning.

I did not get as much layout work done today because today became a vendor/personnel coordination day.  I was in full manager mode.  Some of it was stressful, some successful, some just took time.  Truth is, I enjoyed it.  I accomplished a lot, but little in the area of layout; completing only one cell to show for actual, physical work.  The down side of management is that, while it creates ultimate success (most of the time), it doesn’t create anything physical… except sometimes cash.  And when you think of it, cash is only a concept (numbers on a bit of paper) until you buy something physical with it.

Lots of work and a fair amount of stress at work today: I guess this means we’re near the end of our chip project!  I wound up getting home late; giving me five minutes to dump my stuff off, eat two pieces of lettuce and a banana, and then head off to church to teach a class.  The class was great, but I sure could have used a mini-break somewhere.  Tomorrow looks the same.

Wow, that weekend went fast.  My Sunday School class went great.  I’m not as far along on tax preparation as I’d like, so I’ll need to spend some time in the evenings taking care of that.

Today is a holiday for most (President’s Day), so my commute was fast and fun.  It’s too bad it was raining this morning.  It slowed things down, but just a tad.

Well, we started with one additional youth in the house, and wound up with three extra by Sunday.  Last night, bodies were strewn everywhere, as these kids pretty much slept where they collapsed after playing video games all day, or so it seems.  I stepped on two remote controls this morning while trying to walk around bodies and empty food containers.  I was not happy about this.  Hey, at least the kids quieted-down at 11:15 last night when I told them I was going to bed (I actually read until midnight, but they didn’t know that.  They’re good kids.).  I think I woke up one kid at 6:30 this morning while eating breakfast and packing my lunch.  He had the misfortune to be sleeping right by the kitchen.

On this day, nothing special happened.  This weekend, I have so many commitments that doing “work” will be an impossibility.  I have to prepare for another Sunday School lesson and prepare for next week’s tax appointment.  We also have a guest at our house through Tuesday.

Today, my car hit a wall of traffic — there was a five car pile-up that spread across two of the three lanes of highway 880.  I saw it on the news, but assumed it would be cleared up by the time I got there.  I was wrong.

I thought that this would be a nightmare for me, since the clutch on this car is extremely heavy and going slow is something this car doesn’t like to do.  I was wrong, it was actually OK.  Sure, the clutch remained hard, but I discovered that once in gear, this car can purr along at 5MPH with no difficulty and no stalling (thanks to the replacement of all those O2 parts).  It also doesn’t jerk around like my Honda — I don’t have to ride the clutch!

Work was full of interruptions; it’s no wonder that I get half as much done there.  I sure hope I can do more (uninterrupted) work tomorrow.

Today began as a layout marathon, interrupted only by a lunch with my old crew.  It was good to see Kevin.  I see John every day, since he works for me at the new place.  I ran out of work in the afternoon, just about the time one of my contract jobs called.  They needed about an hour of work — perfect!  In the evening, I did church stuff.

After a purely administrative day (very busy though), I spent a lot of time doing math homework with my daughter.  I then (finally!) started some layout in the evening.

My son is working on his senior schedule.  He mostly wants to take electives until going home at noon.  We changed that.  I don’t want him to have idle time.  I would much rather that he learned something or worked a job.  Now he has a nice, full schedule, but it’s still mostly electives.  (of course, my senior year, I DID leave at noon and I DID mostly have electives, but I also had a job to go to right after lunch in the car I had purchased myself).

I was able to finish off my two lesson plans by 1PM on Saturday.  Yeah!  This allowed me to rest a little and read.  Sunday’s first class went well, probably one of the best single classes I have ever taught; the afternoon class was moved to next week.  I was not heartbroken.  I watched golf (yes, golf!) and finished my book… and started another.  Since it was my daughter’s birthday, we went out, in this case to an all you can eat Chinese buffet.  It was good, not great, but it did include Sushi, which was better than the Chinese food.

I had to stay home today because of a mid-morning school thing for my daughter.  I got into my home office early, and simply blazed through the remainder of the cell layout that I had left from Friday.  The plan was to get the next (and final for me) cell for this chip by noon.  It never arrived.  I spent my day backing up my laptop and reading a management book.  I did make/receive a few important phone calls, so some coordination did happen, helping the company, just no layout.  I’ll do more coordinating/managing tomorrow, and hopefully some layout as well.

The evening was sort of slow.  It had been raining all day and no one felt like doing anything at home (and for once, we had no meetings to attend), so we read and watched TV.  I also put in a couple of hours planning our summer trip up the East Coast.