Work has been hectic these days. First of all, my immediate boss is out for a month because of the arrival of his new baby, a 9 lbs big boy (4kg). I was way tinier at 2.7kg:) As a consequence of my boss's absence, I am reporting directly to my boss's boss who is a director, it's like losing a layer of protection. This director is particularly good at micro-management that he seems to know every little stuff that I am working on. Worse he sometimes just stops by my cubicle and ask for progress. I felt the pressure right away. As if that's not enough, our notorious VP recently called for an emergency meeting and yelled at us because the chip is not up to speed. Target speed is 1 GHz but we are pretty much stuck at 800Mhz. Once the VP is angry, the director gets panic and then the engineers suffers. To push for timing, instead of top-down synthesis, they decided to try out bottom-up approach, which means every block owner has to clean up individual block timing. Man, the last time i touched DC timing/synthesis was way back in junior/senior year, and it was probably trivial. Regardless of my inexperience in this area, the director set a pretty high expectation on work getting done quickly.

Working on something that you are not familiar with is pretty stressful. I felt dumb to ask simple question. Guess I am still pretty much a noob engineer. After all, 2-year plus of industry experience is still considered very very young. On a brighter side, having a chance to work on new stuff is definitely a learning opportunity. Hopefully by the end of this effort I will be more comfortable with synthesis/placement.

Despite the stress at work I am in a relatively happy mood. It's pretty clear from the previous post that i have recently started a relationship. I might be overly impulsive in the pursue action but seriously I had been giving a lot of thought for the past 3 months. Long-distance relationship is never an ideal situation to begin with, and probably requires lots of effort to maintain this. But don't you worry because I am a hardworking guy:) I know it's not fair for you but hopefully we can navigate through this. I may have made promises here and there, so kindly remind me if i didn't keep to my words. Having said that, i think we are doing pretty good so far. Let's have faith!

Speaking of LDR, technology has certainly made it simpler and easier than before. Skype and MSN webcam/call work out pretty well. In fact the quality is better than international call. And i have just signed-up the invitation for Google Voice. Aaron Kwok didn't have to swipe his citibank visa at public telephone if there were these technologies: