My first blogpage. Motivated by an http://eetimes.com article on engineers' careers.

I work at a local medical device company, doing embedded programming. [More
on my diverse career later.] I found out that the thermal printer was outsourced to India, and it was totally useless; one of my colleages had to redo it. That is somewhat reassuring. Of course, it could be the fault of the local "managers", for underspecifying what they wanted, and under-testing what they got. Anyway it cost time and money, presumably the reasons for outsourcing in the first place.

I'm an employee at the company, previously I did some consulting for a very big Japanese company. In fact, that company "outsourced" its software to the US division that I worked for, so in that case I benefitted. (The US division also outsourced some work to http://www.wipro.com!)
Basically the Japs can't write code, though they did a good job on the fine mechanical work inside
the high-end printers they made.

Before that I was unemployed for a year, I was discouraged when Reduction in Forced from
http://www.idt.com and started looking, had some savings, and a friend and former boss convinced me (or I convinced myself) to work (for paper shares that came to naught) for a hardware security company he started. See, I had taught myself Verilog http://www.verilog.com (a hardware description language that can be simulated as well as turned into netlists, then masks, then chips) and information security. For the year of living off savings, I used the http://www.icarus.com free simulator, since we didn't have $100,000 per seat for the http://www.synopsys.com gold standard.
And of course http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html which I've used since maybe 1984, when I was in college. My first internet post was in grad school, http://www.ics.uci.edu, in 1987, where I was interested in computer risks.

I drifted out of grad school, where I studied human and machine perception, articulated motion. I worked at http://www.csmc.edu for a few years, the commute from Irvine to Beverly Hills was hell, though the work was interesting, people smart, and I got to program a 4-CPU http://www.Sun.com machine with a whole 128 MByte of RAM! This was in the days of Sunview, before X-Windows, Motif, and all that, which I also programmed. I've been through a number of windowing systems; when I drifted out of grad school I got a job doing Windows NT programming, and learned Win32 programming. In fact, because I hosed my NT 3.51 or 4.0 system, including network driver, I recapitulated the history of Windows (from DOS to 3.11 etc) so I could get the system back up, in a week.

Anyway, I came to Calif to study perception, did some research but found I wasn't really a researcher, TA'd a number of classes, got the job as a research programmer for 3 years,
that grant ended, I got the Windows job. I was programming sheet-metal applications
at http://www.otc.com, which is pretty much a servant of http://www.amada.com, where I was sent for a while, which disgusted me with the drive, though it was less far than Beverly Hills. Also worked on graphical chat room programming, which was big once (hah), the company would take
anything and had Jap connections so we did this. I was also the network dude, since no one
else was, and the net was starting. This was 95-98, and I taught myself about TCP/IP; I had
used it (email, Mosaic, gopher, veronica, archie) when all that was happening (and you
couldn't sell anything, and girlie pix were verboten on the net) but had no previous interest
in how it worked. When I found how it worked, I found it was all postcards, no privacy, and so I got interested in encryption, http://www.PGP.com, technology & society, etc. That led to me studying how encryption worked (the magic of an algorithm that scrambled information), and I wrote up a paper on how Blowfish (see http://www.counterpane.com) could be done in hardware, since it seems to me that if you truly understand something, you need to code it or design it. That paper led to my job doing chip design at IDT, which (when the crypto chip project was cancelled) kept me on as a programmer supporting their other chips. This introduced me to embedded design, as I was working on a development board with a MIPs CPU that IDT was making. All this from my home office, me flying up to silly valley a week per month. I watched Sept 11 from my fabulous http://www.motel6.com room, wondering if I'd be able to fly back home. The collapsing towers reminded me of Sideshow Bob's hair from http://www.thesimpsons.com.

More on Sept 11 later. Basically, the US needs to not have forts in other countries. You'd think the Roman experience would have taught something. You'd also think someone would realize that Osama is basically Moses, bringing plagues until Pharoah George et al. let his people be free of colonial invaders. See the article in http://www.reason.com/hod/db082205.shtml and the coverage at http://www.antiwar.com.

After I was RIF'd from IDT (IDT sold to http://www.cisco.com which sold to worldcom/uunet/MCI whatever that once-bankrupt company is now called, when they burst the bubble I eventually got laid off) I floated for a year as I said, keeping sharp designing a chip that included not only 3DES but RSA. Finally I needed a job, it was clear the wannabe startup wasn't, I got a 2 month consulting
doing security programming (got to use www.linux.org for real, which turned out to be easy, since there were GUIs for the tools that I knew from a command-line, having learned SunOS and then http://www.FreeBSD.org. I had been worrie that Linux would be foreign, but the GUIs helped. Linux is ATT based, which sucks, but the concepts are the same.

During that 2 month stint, I saw what corporate inertia is about. Groups that don't talk to each other, that spend a lot of time writing specs then design docs before coding, etc. (Start coding early, to inform the specs & design, but plan to throw one away!) But at my current job I see the opposite, ie, a CMM www.sei.cmu.edu/cmm level of -1, suits making promises they've pulled from various orifices without consulting the people who build, specs changing up until
the FDA gets their hands on it, etc. More on that later. And on politics, raising my six year old son, Amerikan culture, and more. Stay tuned.