Busy, busy...

No doubt by my total absence of 'bloggage' recently you may have assumed that I've been somewhat busy, and you would have been spot on with that assumption too.
Work is a little crazy right now and it's beginning to get through to me, uncharacteristically rattling the normal calm and poise of yours truly.
With the announcement of more redundancies a few weeks back, I was somewhat buoyed by the possibility that my position appeared to be secured by the fact I was working on some urgent development chips for our Dutch cousins over in Nijmegen, their project team being happy to keep us employed, paid for through their office, to continue their work. The Dutch team we work with came over for a few days last week to meet the Southampton team and 'chat' with the engineers. This was viewed as a 'faces to names' exercise and to cement the team as one unit and confirm all the lines of communication. My 'chat' lasted 90 minutes and went pretty well I thought.
Imagine my dismay last Friday when we were all informed that Nijmegen have decided to pull the plug on the project in Southampton and take back the work to Nijmegen despite them not having the staff or the facilities to complete the work on schedule !! Crazy ??
It turns out that they were making scurrilous efforts to 'cherry pick' certain test engineers from here in Southampton to move over to Holland enabling them to continue the work over there.
So, we're all back in the pot for possible redundancy once again.
Southampton have got rid of so many staff over the last few years that it's difficult to single out any 'weaker' team members for the chop, so it's going to be a close decision, and to be honest, it is making me feel very vulnerable to say the least. I've been in this position far too many times before to think I'm in any way safe from the chop.
I hadn't realised it but the current situation had changed me, for the worse too, my wife politely informing me at the weekend that I'd been a really miserable git and incredibly grumpy recently and that I had appeared to have stopped talking altogether. Something I've not been aware of, I must say, although I admit to having been feeling a little distracted by all the political machinations here at work.
So... time to turn over a new leaf and employ that 'whatever will be, will be' type ethos... After all, it's only a job and I'll be sure to find something else, somewhere, if the worst does come to the worst.
Ciao for now.... (a slightly less screwed up BluePixel)

Word of the Day...

A friends daughter was assembling a Power Point presentation about the Romans to show to her class.
She asked her Mum to check it over with her.
One of the slides contained today's "Word Of The Day"....
So, any ideas what this is ???

Bo Ingaros

[Answer tomorrow]

Tulips

Once again i picked up some reduced flowers with the weekly shop. This morning they looked wonderful with the sun behind them.

Good Friday !!!

WOW, what a sight to be greeted with on arriving at work !!!
THREE dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts !!
Now THIS is THE best way to start a Friday !!!
A huge thank-you to Eric, one of our fellow engineers, who thought we all could do with cheering up...



Having been a huge fan of Dunkin' Donuts for years and years and years, their Boston Creme is in my opinion totally sublime, I was dragged kicking and screaming against my will into a Krispy Kreme shop three years ago whilst on holiday in the USA. And I have to admit that Krisp Kreme's ARE better than Dunkin' Donuts. My favourite being the humble glazed ring, which is just about perfect texture wise AND flavour wise too.

Brighton Pier

Saturday involved a trip to Brighton, one of my favourite cities.
Over the years it's been a sad sight seeing the old West Pier slowly falling into disrepair, before finally being battered into submission by winter storms and last years fire that finally took out the last hopes of any restoration.
It was a lovely day on Saturday, but what remains of the pier jutting out of the sea just looked so sad. It brings a lump to your throat.

Giving it up for lent !!!

Seeing as it's Shrove Tuesday today, and maybe for the first time ever, I'm actually going to be giving something up for Lent.
Today I'm giving up being slothful.

DEFINITION: Sloth is defined as spiritual and/or actual apathy or laziness, putting off what God asks you to do, or not doing it or anything at all.

And to spur me on to achieve this I've registered for the BUPA Great South Run with my brother. So I've now got a target to reach and I'm hoping that the fresh air and exercise will also help to distract me through the current redundancy talks here.

Now, where did I put those running shoes.... ????

Biscuits...

A guy here returned from a trip to our plant in Taiwan with bags of cookies for all !! A very welcome gesture. These are made by a company called Lins and as it says on the pack are hand made. There is a strange assortment, some even include sea-weed !!!
The packet I chose contained two very thin, very hard, square cookies, the corners and edges all neatly beveled.
The picture on the front shows just how to eat them !!!

Early Spring ???

With reports of Spring 'officially' starting early this year, I thought I'd add these pic's that I took on Saturday. I picked up a couple of bunches of budded Daff's while shopping on Friday evening.
When I came down to the kitchen on Saturday morning they had already started to bloom.



And by Saturday afternoon they were all pretty much out !!!



BLOOMING MARVELOUS !!!

Here we go again...

It must seem like a pretty regular blog subject here in the world of blue_pixel, but sadly once again the spectre of redundancy rears his ugly head here at NXP. I've been here at Philips/NXP just over five years now and four out of those five years has seen redundancies. A meeting last week revealed the need to 'let go' another 10% of the head count here, another 38 poor unfortunate souls to loose their jobs. Added to that all of the sub-contractors on site are to be terminated too, that's another 50 heads going. So, a grand total of 88 people.
All the job cuts will be done and dusted by the end of May apparently, which seems a long way off and it's a long, long time to wait not knowing who's for the chop.
With the job market in the semiconductor industry looking flat and sadly deplete and with the economy looking a little grim, it's going to be a tough time to loose your job.

Watch this space...

Pussy in a box (part II)

As documented earlier, our old ginger moggy Tybalt, loves curling up in his new cardboard box bed from Lidls. Just thought I'd add another picture of Tybalt enjoying it.
We tried to get a slightly bigger version of it at the weekend, as he has already broken one of the corners, but Lidls didn't have one.