Export Development Canada (EDC) prepared a video featuring the company I work for; check it out (under 4 mins). No CGI, all real footage at a volcano where we actually have instruments deployed.

In related news, we're hiring; see our careers page. If you're interested, let me know, and I can forward your resume; as at many companies, there is a ( Read more... )

There are always lots of good TED talks, but here are two that have struck me particularly:

Simon Sinek on leadership. (12 minutes) This is what I strive for as a manager; I want to be part of an organization that supports me in it.

Guy Winch on emotional self-care. (17.5 minutes) Help yourselves; help each other. More people than we may know ( Read more... )

I encountered a New York Times Magazine article about the "Hollywood Model" of employment, in which an ad-hoc team of specialists is assembled for a project and then dispersed on completion; the article suggests that this will become a more dominant mode of employment in the future. It's an interesting article, but I'm not sure I agree with the ( Read more... )

Three of four new circuit board designs completed on time or close enough as makes no difference (no change to delivery date of assemblies), and the fourth well under way, despite late-breaking changes to the specifications for all of them. It's been a busy week for my little band of merry men.

I've spent the past hour at work going back through emails and closing off lingering issues. I so seldom get a chance to do this that I'm wondering what I'm forgetting about that I should be working on instead.

Tinfoil hats are so last year; check this out!

I just read an interesting book review of C. Wright Mills' White Collar: The American Middle Classes. The book was written over 60 years ago, but the article is fresh, and makes me keen to read the book. The article highlights some of the issues we white-collar folks contend with and how the Mills anticipated them; I can recommend reading at ( Read more... )

The Expert: a 7.5-minute comedy sketch depicting something which is excruciatingly familiar to most tech-employed folks. Neither soul_diaspora nor I could watch it all the way through on first viewing, so painful was it.

This week at work, we had some trouble finding the current version of a document: it had vanished from the server.

The document? SCHxxxxx Rev. 4.04.

(We recovered it eventually, from backups.)

I'm back on the R&D side (which is in the North building), having served a bit more time over in Manufacturing than planned. I did a detailed analysis of the process involved in building one of our products, and provided a report on it which will be used to develop a plan to restructure our Manufacturing floor ( Read more... )