Paul's blog

Archive for the ‘Announcements’ Category

A Wonderful, Interesting, and above all Healthy New Year to all the readers of this blog.

I fully intend to make this year a GREAT year, and I’m NOT going to let me distract from that resolution by the dark, grim, gloomy day it is today.
And on that same note: the cold drizzle is not going to keep me from my traditional "Polar Bear Club" swim either, even though the pool is a MESS right now (The potted conifer, that doubled as Christmas tree this year, just fell in it).

As for New Year’s resolutions: Yes, I made a few. One involves the garage, most others are simply "nonya".
Except maybe the one about my blog: When it comes to blogs (and real life conversations for that matter) I have always been of the opinion that if you don’t have anything to say, well, then don’t!
Until now, that is. At least for my blog.
I intend to start using it more as an actual log book, mostly for myself, just to have a record of my activities, no matter how boring they are.
So expect to find WAY more postings here than in previous years, but don’t expect them to be more than a simple status update for a boring Tuesday afternoon.

As for 2010 …

Work

I’m still unemployed, but have some interesting part-time contract work for, hopefully, another two months.
I will step up my efforts to find full time employment, but at the same time I will be looking for additional contract work.
I’m still trying to figure out what I would prefer: find an interesting full time job, or remain a contract worker, working from home, with the option to make it a business, and grow it into a company with partners and employees. With the economy coming out of a recession, this may be an excellent time to start a company and have it ride the waves up to prosperity.

Pleasure

We’ll be in Vegas for a few days in the 2nd half of January, where Dawnell will try to persuade some slot machines to cover the cost of the trip and where we also will meet some good friends of ours.
We had some plans to spend our vacation traveling the Californian West Coast (well.. duh! California doesn’t HAVE an East Coast), from San Diego to San Francisco.
Just the other day we started to kick around the idea to go to Germany, where Dawnell would love to see the world-famous Oberammergau Passion play, a 10-yearly event. A tradition that started in 1634! It may be followed by a side trip to “The Fatherland” and visit my army of sisters.
I’m sure more plans will be made, before we make our final decision.

Non-resolutions

Things that I’d like to accomplish but haven’t turned into resolutions to avoid disappointment and self-loathing on 12/31/2010:

• Start (seriously and frequently) practicing and studying the piano
• Start (seriously and frequently) practicing and studying the guitar
• Immerse myself in Linux driver and kernel development
• Start writing apps for Droid phones
• There’s that one subject in math, that I never mastered and would love to master: master it!
• Start reading Feynman’s 3 part “Lectures on Physics” (well ,‘starting’ I already did! Many times!)
• Do the various things around the house that need to be done
• Start writing that best-seller, and have it turn into a blockbuster movie.
• Take more pictures for the “Picture of the Day” club. It’s not called: “Picture of the Week” club!

Health

• Well, here I CAN reveal some – but not all – resolutions:
• go to a fitness club and start working out, even it it’s only once a week, or 10 minutes at a time.
• two words: medication: discipline.

And with that …

ON to the pool!

As of June 1st, I am unemployed.

But not without work.

This morning I found THIS taped to the bedroom door:

(Click picture for larger version)

I was just informed about my previous employer’s (Conexant) sudden stock price hike.
Checked the news and read about the sale of their broadband access division to Ikanos.
Interesting!

Ikanos is headed by CEO Michael Gulett.
Who once was the president and COO of Virata Corporation!

Sounds like he’s buying back his own stuff, from before his disastrous ‘merge’ with Globespan, the company that then went on to buy Intersil’s (also a previous employer of mine) Wireless Division (Harris’s spun-off semiconductor division), and then later ‘merged’ *cough* with Conexant.
So now Conexant is selling the stuff back to the ex-Virata president’s company! Ha!

Dang, there’s a lot of hot potato-ing going on in the semiconductor industry, these days (years!).

I moved this blog to a new domain at a new hosting company.

Especially for that one reader who uses RSS to receive notification of my bi-yearly post: the new home address of my blog is claessen.com/blog, the RSS feed for posts is at claessen.com/blog/?feed=rss2 and for comments at claessen.com/blog/?feed=comments-rss2.

I also changed the layout, using a theme that is freely available from my new hosting company www.040hosting.eu (I only customized the header picture, which shows part of our lanai)