On the Move

Lot of things have changed in my life recently. (No worries, Mr Nicolaus is still giving me the time of my life 😉 ). So after originally starting my first job at TU Dresden, I will move on already: starting on October 1st I will work at the Leibniz University Hannover. Sad thing, Mr Nicolaus had to return to his university for studies, so we can’t meet every day. Makes me sad, too. But he can’t join me in moving, so we will have to make it anyway…

I am realy sad that I have to leave Dresden: I will leave friends, my love and one of the most beautiful cities I have ever seen behind. Although I am quite lucky to have friends in Hannover already, I am rather sad already. I never imagined my departure from Dresden would come so soon.

Besides , I really haven’t found a new place to live, yet. Finding the new position was kind of sudden – little more than a week from application to job offer! Lots of things to organize!

Thesis Defense

Friday, approximately 5 o’clock in the morning. I am awake. My stomach is crumpled up in some corner, rejects food. Anyway, Mr Nicolaus forces me to eat a little. Stomach is in a snit. I have a lot of time to kill. Lucky Mr Nicolaus, he has to work. So he dresses up and leaves for office.

I start running around in my appartment. Feed the budgies. Clean the communal arears in my house. It’s 8 o’clock and I still have 7 hours to go. I try surfing the world wide web. Can’t concentrate on what I read, it’s not as distracting as I hoped. Half past 9: I decide to get dressed and to put on make up. Start running around in my apartment again.

Half past 10: some vacuum cleaner salesman tries to talk me into buying a new and very expensive vacuum cleaner. I tell him, I don’t have the nerves to listen to him now. He takes a closer look and apologises. He clearly thought, I had to attend a funeral. What did he see? Me, clad in a long black skirt, black blouse and corsage, no make up yet, so I was really pale and had dark rings under my eyes. *gnihi* It was really hard not to laugh out loud after I closed the door.

Half past 11: I am done. Make up covers the most telling traces of nervousness and fatigue, I did my hair and pinned it to my head, so it would not do the Medusa during my presentation. Ample time to run around.

Half past 1 pm: Mr Nicolaus returns from work. He higs me and kisses me and tells me, everything will be aright. THANK YOU 😀

3 pm: I start my presentation. During the first few minutes some members of my chair at university come in – they are late and I am fucking nervous. Them being late does’t make it easier. I start to shiver and hold to the desk, because I am afraid of collapsing right after the beginning of my defense. My knies tremble, my hands shake throughout the presentation. Professor started with: “I have to ask: are you alright, do yopu think your health allows you to give this presentation?” – I shortly consider, I should have answered “no” – I had just nodded because I couldn’t speak… The questions afterwards aren’t too difficult, still I can’t answer them all because my mind is completely blocked by being nervous. I feel like crying and running away. I try to supress these impulses and my aswers become somewhat snappy. Try to supress anger, too. I hate this situation: I understand the words, but I can’t make any sense from them. I am totally devastated, when we are sent outside, so the examiners can discuss my grade.

Half past 3 pm: it’s over. My grades are great. I finally relax. Luckily, I stop trembling without collapsing right in fornt of the examiners. My back and my shoulders are completely tense. Mr Nicolaus promises massages. Still looking forward to those 😀

Monday: lots of people addressed me as “Dipl-Ing”. I am soooooo proud. I can’t wait to be handed my certificate. Studies are over, work begins in June. I am on holiday right now.

About Being Nervous

Tomorrow, 3 pm. Final step in getting my Diplom Ingenieur degree: presentation. Standing in front of my supervisor, my professor, the examiners, my future colleagues, friends, family. Telling about my thesis. In English. Everything about the thesis has been in English so far. My supervisor does not speak German. So I currently *think* in English when it comes to electronics. I am really afraid, I’ll mess up.

Today, now. My stomach feels like a crumpled bit of paper. Tries to hide somewhere. I don’t know if I am hungry or not. I am just fucking nervous. I cleaned my flat today, so it is ready for my relatives coming tomorrow. I don’t even know what time they will arrive. I still have to iron my clothes for tomorrow. Do I put on something more female or something more male? That is: corsage or tie? Both go really fine with my blouse and long skirt. I am wearing a studded dog’s collar quite regularly in every day life. I know it is most unappropriate  for the occation, but it has always given me a strange feeling of security. I’d like to wear it, but I really don’t think I should. After all, my attire will be “gothic” enough to make people wonder, if it is appropriate at all. People who know me know I can’t choose, don’t want to choose. Dressing up as a fashion victim with high aspirations for a career isn’t me.

I was unusually calm today. Felt like the calm before the storm. Right now, I think that’s exactly what it was.

I. am. fucking. nervous.and afraid. And I would prefer not to be alone tonight.

Presentation II

I am still sitting here, jostling pixels on my presentation slides. The slides are fine. Must be fine. I don’t know, what else to do. My stomach feels like it is crumpled in a small ball. I am fucking nervous.

Last night my thoat got sore. It hurts a little when swalloing. At the back, on the right side of my throat. I had an infection, which put me out of work for over a week earlier this year. I am afraid it might return. I have to hold a presentation next week. I am afraid I won’t be able to talk, afraid I will be in so much pain, that I cannot give my presentation.

I am really really fucking afraid.

I’d like to cry – anybody out there, who wants to hug me?

Presentation

Next week my last universtiy exam will take place – not the last one ever, but the final for my studies: I have to defend my thesis. And I am damn fucking nervous! I don’t feel like this is going to be “just a presentation” as my supervisor likes to say. He is really a great guy, he tries to comfort me and reassures me. I think seeing me panick in the two weeks before handing in my thesis must have been a little scary. And he only got the light version.

My big, very, very BIG problem with exams is: I am horribly afraid of them. I am good, maybe very good at what I am doing, but still having exams looming on my agenda gives me the creeps. I cannot sleep. I cannot eat. My mood will oscillate between deep depressions and euphoria. I can fly into a rage for litterally nothing. I am hard to bear with for those around me. At least the rage thingy didn’t show that strong. Any bad news can make me go into deep despair with a whole lot of crying – and I did a whole lot of crying in those weeks before handing in.

Before all my exams I had during my studies, I would get completely panicked. I would only study and sleep and study more for days and sometimes weeks, and when trying to show my knowledge – I would just fail. I simply could not tell people all the information stored in my head. I looked at examples I calculated just a week ago – and I was not able to redo those calculations. I was not able to draw circuits from my mind correctly.

Now I am kind of afraid. I have to defend on Friday afternoon next week. I am already nervous. My parents are coming and are bringing at least one of my sisters, too. That does not really help me to calm down.

What, if I forget about all the things I want to tell? The things I should tell? What, if I have a black-out? It’s so fucking scary…

Thesis Update

My big day was April, the 28th: I handed in my thesis. 6 months of often hard work dcoumented on slightly more than 100 pages in total, nicely printed, with a burgundy hardcover binding and with a golden impression to the cover saying “Diplomarbeit”. I. am. so. proud.

Putting the final version together was really strenuous with last minute modelling and neverending changes to some sections. But honestly, I am no good at writing a motivation for the thesis, because my very personal motivation does not count. See, I am an engineer. I design a circuit, because “Yes, I can” do it, and because I love designing circuits, and because I have a big chance of designing a good circuit (at least I think so). But the motivation for the thesis has to be more from an economical point, like where can we use it and why should we use it instead of other approaches. Difficult, but I finally put something together.

Final step for my studies will be the presentation of my thesis next week. I am looking forward to it, although it also makes me nervous. But people here try there best in not letting me get too nervous. Another thing to look forward to: vacation! After my presentation I will be on vacation, visiting my relatives, have some nice time on somebody else’s sofa and just relax.

And from the beginning of June I will start working on my PhD thesis. Good thing, because I will stay at my university and did not have to write job applications 🙂 Lucky me!

Print to File

Printing documents from the Acrobat Reader can be a real pain in the rear end. My thesis has some pages at the beginning, which do not have page numbers and the Reader simply cannot handle printing those pages correctly.

But I noticed, you could print to file. Cool thing – and for free and without additional software. Nice guys over at Acrobat – at least I thought. Big BUT: the file is a page maker file. Guess what: Software to open this file is not for free – of course.

Thesis update: printing first preliminary version – still a looooooooooong way to go. Anyway, 70+ pages are 70+ pages. Could be worse.

Layout

So after finishing the circuit in a hurry for the presentation, I started layouting the circuit. My supervisor gave me a short introduction to the tool and some documents which give further information, and I think it works fine. I think, I might be rather slow because I put a lot of thought in every placement. But maybe this spares me another layout run. At least I hope so.

As my QVCO is constructed from serveral blocks on schematic level, I tried to do the layout for the blocks first and put them together for the final layout. But a QVCO requires so much consideration about symmetrie, that I just dropped the approach and layouted the whole device in one take. I have to consider symmetrie all the time, so I have to define spaces, which are not allowed for a single block and directions that are not allowed and I always have to keep in mind, to place devices as close as possible, as long wiring means high inductive parasitics… It is easier to remember all those restrictions when I move from one structure to the next and after deciding for one quarter add it to the others.

A great difficulty is the huge number of transmission line, which  I have in my circuit. Those lines serve as inductances and I do not have anything like an integrated inductor available – besides: it wouldn’t work at this high frequencies, anyway. Transmission line should not cross, need ground plane under it and sufficient distance to the neighbouring lines which makes it really a pain in the ass to place them. Currently my layout bears a strong resemblance to a harvestman: a small heap of devices in the middle of the circuit forming the body and long transmission lines forming the legs.
My supervisor already reviewd the layout in different stages of progress and said “As far as I know about layounting, this looks excellent!” He really made me feel very good about my work 😀 Thanks!

About my thesis in whole: I am still a bit behind… But I will try to write faster, once the post layout verification gives sufficient results.

Typo

I just wanted to make some notes about bondpads. So I started with the heading “Bondbads”… they actually didn’t have a chane to misbehave as there are none in my layout, yet. -.-

Meevening

After lots of work during the last two weeks and no weekends I had my presentation today – and have nothing left to work on. So I am gooing to celebrate a “Meevening”, which is an evening just for me.

First things first: today’s workshop was a half marathon of presentations, 21 in all. Most of them, from a language point of view, were outright torture for my feel for language. Don’t get me wrong, my English is certainly not the best one can find, so isn’t my pronounciation, but still there were lots of things which made me want to bang my head repeatedly against a wall. Most presentations had to be given in English, and most German lecturers simply mutilate this language when using it. Living in Japan for one year taught me to simply ignore regional accents – which I am quite good at with German speakers. But some mispronounciations still hurt – and it won’t get any better, if you have lots of those!

Anyway, my presentation went very well. I was really very nervous before it and during the presentation I had to keep movin because, if I stood still my legs would starft shivering. But there were only a few questions and remarks, so I am really content. This presentation also marks the point on which I start layouting, but that just happened by chance 😉

So tonight, I am celebating my Meevening with some movies – I have Wall-E, Corpse Bride and the Silence of the Lambs – and I think I’ll watch them in exactly this order 😀  I have wedges and sausages for dinner ( that’s just not meant to be a healthy meal) and of course potato crisps and pepsi coke as desert with the movies. Considering my movie selection – mybe I should try not to have animation and horror movies, but animated horror movies. Any ideas?