Month: August 2016

Note to IBMers re: LzLabs employment.

August 22, 2016 Incoherent ramblings , ,

When contemplating the decision to leave IBM for LzLabs, I found it helpful to enumerate the pros and cons of that decision, which I shared in a Leaving IBM: A causal analysis blog post after I’d formally left IBM.

Who could have predicted that a blog post that wasn’t about programming arcana, physics or mathematics would have been my most popular ever.  There’s no accounting for the taste of the reader;)

In response to that blog post, I’ve been contacted by a few IBMers who were interested in potential LzLabs employment.

Please note that I left IBM with band 9 status, which means that there is a one year restriction (expiring ~May 2017) against me having any involvement with hiring, or recruitment of IBM employees.  An IBM lawyer was very careful to point that the band 9 contract I signed in 2006 has such a non-solicitation agreement.  I don’t think that anybody told the IBM lawyer that IBM appears to be trying really hard to throw away technical staff, but that does not change the fact that I am bound by such an agreement.

If you contacted me, and I was to respond, it could probably be argued that this would not count as solicitation.  However, I don’t feel inclined to pick a fight with IBM lawyers, who I imagine to have very sharp teeth and unlimited legal budgets.  So, if you are working for IBM, and asking about LzLabs employment, please don’t be offended that I did not reply.  I will try to remember to respond to you next spring, when the sharks are swimming elsewhere.

Geeking out: Oriented surface of volume element

August 20, 2016 math and physics play

Reading the intro chapters to my Griffiths electrodynamics, I ended up re-deriving the 1,2 and 3 parameter variations of Stokes Theorem (a quick derivation as previously done using Geometric Algebra [PDF], but without looking at my notes).  To understand how to map from the algebraic representation to a geometric one for the 3 parameter volume element, I built the following nice little model:IMG_20160820_231303757 IMG_20160820_231333998 IMG_20160820_231316618_HDR

This is like Fig 1.10 from the pdf notes linked above, but was a lot more fun to construct than the drawing.

Options for the remainder of my M.Eng

August 14, 2016 Incoherent ramblings , ,

I had a provisional plan for the remainder of my M.Eng earlier in the year. I knew that I’d likely have to adjust this based on what courses were actually made available at registration time in the years to come.

Without looking back on that plan, assuming what is available this year, will continue to be. I came up with the following new plan:

First choices

2016

2017

2018

Alternates

Thoughts

Last term I ended up dropping ‘Microwave Circuits’ in favour of ‘Scientific Computing for Physicists’, which I was taking concurrently.  The microwave circuits course was really about GHz domain electromagnetics, but it’s a material that I’d enjoy a lot more, and get a lot more out of, by reading the course text and doing problems, than attending the lectures (which were just taught from slides).

Because I’d dropped the uwaves course, I’m now down one ECE course.  I need 5/9’s of my M.Eng course selections to be from ECE to graduate.  This forces me to make additional course selections from ECE that I hadn’t initially planned for.  For example, I’d rather take the MIE CFD course or the PHY Quantum Optics course than the ECE Information Theory course, which I selected primarily because it helped satisfy the graduation requirements.