Interview Question (your Sunday ruined part 2)

And these are a positive boon for those of us tired of trying to find European dots that have fallen on the floor:

I sometimes draw a schemetic by taping parts pictures to a sheet of D-size vellum and drawing in the rest. I photograph that and give it to one of my guys to enter into PADS Logic and eventually do a PCB layout.

In our new office/design center we don't have a real conference room, so we go on group hikes around the Bernal Cut or in Glen Canyon. That seems to really work, getting physical outdoors with the crew. I just wish that more trees had whiteboards.

That physical exercise and fresh air probably will give a bit of a brain boost to get the old grey cells firing at full efficiency. To turbocharge that effect, give the guys plenty of strong coffee and donuts before they go out. Works for me!

We'll supply any arguably legal stimulants.

Some people get ideas while they sleep and some get ideas while they walk. Some people don't get ideas.

And half a beer per hundred pounds of lean body mass, to hit the Ballmer peak. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I'm left-handed myself and have never had that particular problem, nor do I dream dream left-right reversed.

Left-handers typically don't have the standard distribution of language processing in the brain, and one of my wife colleagues who was interested in that wouldn't test left-handed subjects. Of course a few of the right-handers she did test did have the sort of random distribution of function that most left-handers have because if you don't really care which had you use, you are just as likely to end up using the right hand rather than the left.

We used to design on a sheet of frosty mylar with colored pencils to show the layers.

The real layout was done with stick-on black stuff on a stack of clear mylar, one padmaster and one sheet for each layer of traces. The mylars were ultimately stacked and processed to film, which we sent top the PCB houses and demanded back.

There was a guy in sillicon valley, Lorry Ray, who was a genius at making the film from our mylars.

Resoution was terrible. It was borderline possible to get two traces between the pads of a DIP package.

All that was horribly slow and expensive.

I still have a couple of mylar stacks around to show to the kids.

When I was younger, I could easily read and write backwards.

I see a lot of photos on the web, in news reports and such, that are obviously left-right flipped.

We'd have to drive to a beach (ocean or Bay or Gate are about equal distances) and that would be a nuisance with parking and such. And the graphic resolution of sand is mediocre.

No whiteboard forces more mental visualization. We can bail on the hike and go back to the office and whiteboard, max delay about 20 minutes.

Architectural and management concepts work in a hike, circuit design not so well.

Percolating ideas is an interesting process. There must be books on the subject. The physical situation seems to matter.

Nature is very good at "pleasing patterns" too. I sat next to a man on a long flight once, he had this huge collection of nature pictures, mostly trees and bushes, that he was browsing through...selecting patterns for wrought iron fencing to manufacture! Clever idea.

I use Clearprint too, the stuff with the fadeout blue grid. It's printed on the back, which is just right.

I got mine from a stationary store that was going out of business, and I'll probably have some to leave to my heirs. (Heathen designers' funerals often include grave goods consisting of Staedtler lead holders, electric erasers, and so on.) ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Thinking while hiking avoids the Eyeball Effect, the fact that most people change their behavior as a function of how many eyeballs are aimed at them. Actors and musicians and politicians have extreme eyeball sensitivity, get high from big audiences. Most autistic people have little or none.

Eyeball Effect distorts clear thinking. Hiking with people, you seldom see their eyeballs.

I've noticed that animals, cats and dogs and birds, are sensitive to eyeball effect too. It's probably a component of their threat evaluation.

Yes, but did you find it easy to slip into and much more difficult to come out of ? That is what I found was happening to me.

I tried an experiment with a friend's parrot: The cage had a few thick bars, so I moved until one of the bars obstructed the direct line of vision from the parrot's eye to mine. The parrot moved so that it could see my eyes again.

I moved again... The parrot moved again... I moved again... The parrot moved again...

I kept this up for some while, with the parrot becoming more and more agitated. I don't know whether it thought this was a fine game or whether it saw me as a dangerous threat.

But not al that choosy.

You haven't put up a cart wheel on a pole for the storks? Perhaps you could make one that doubled as a 'halo' aerial, which increased its bandwidth during the nesting season when the presence of the storks lowered the 'Q'.

Leave the lids of the containers open and see what happens. You may have to rescue some protesting cats but they might think twice about using that route in the future.

I see you also have a ricketty wooden garden shed. Mine is my main electronics workshop (being small, it is easy to heat in Winter). The bigger stuff, like the lathe, lives in a spare downstairs room.

The local bluejays will eat out of my hand, but the crows and ravens won't.

We have giant red-tailed hawks that hover around. The crows gang up on them and drive them away.

Given some Fritos on the deck, the jays will chase away the crows.

If you connected it to a really powerful transmitter, you could have roast stork at Easter.

Prop up a piece of wood or metal sheeting at a steep angle on the lids, so that cats slide off. If they get up behind it, they still won't be able to jump onto the roof. You might be woken by the sound of the sheeting hitting the ground after it has been pushed off the bins by a cat.

Very sensible, especially in Winter.

Hooray for Global Warming!

There is a waste pipe running diagonally just below my kitchen ventilator. Most years a pair of pigeons decide to perch on it do their mating rituals. It gets very noisy in the kitchen.