First Day at New Office

The big news is that last week AMD sold the handheld graphics division to Qualcomm. Most people don't know Qualcomm because they don't sell products to consumer they sell products to other companies. That said they are good at what they do. The past companies I've worked for were always having financial troubles. It's nice to work for a company like Qualcomm that makes billions of dollars every year and has truckloads of money in the bank. Even in these tough times they keep making a lot of money. They have two big sources of income. One is that they developed a new type of cell phone technology that other companies need to license from them. The second is they make microchips that they sell to cell phone makers. They've been buying AMD's graphics IP for years and now they just bought our whole team.

I've very excited about this new job. It's similar to what I've been doing, but now Qualcomm values our team. At AMD we were always that other team that wasn't very important. I think there is huge opportunity for growth on the Qualcomm graphics team.

From college I went to work for ATI. Then AMD bought ATI. While I was hopeful that the AMD buyout would be good, it was never as good as working for ATI. Now my team was bought by Qualcomm. I really believe this will be a big improvement for me in a way that AMD never was. Time will tell...

Here's a picture of my new cube. The office is an old mill that was built in the 1850's. It's got deadends, odd shaped rooms, and doors to nowhere all over the place.

Johnny Appleseed

Emily and I went to the birthplace of Johnny Appleseed this weekend in Leominster, MA. It was way better than Plymouth Rock. While in Leominster we also stopped by the grave of a man who was put in prison for one year because he was disturbing the peace with his beard (this was during a time when men were clean shaven), and we stopped by a magnetic hill.

Snow Monster

Is a rare photo of the fierce snow monster "Tookie" in her native habitat.

Skiing in Utah

I flew out to Salt Lake City last Wednesday through Sunday. Christy and Dan skied while Eric and I snowboarded. We skied/snowboarded at Snowbird, Solitude and Brighton.

The conditions were pretty good. They had lots of snow the week before we got there and then we got 10 more inches of fresh powder Thursday night! I had an awesome time.

You can see pictures from the trip here.

The only travel problem I had were on the way back when United lost my luggage for 3 days. This would have stunk big time on the way out, but since it was on the way back it didn't matter much.