July 2009 - Fellow

  • The American Dream!

    I'm flying back to the UK tomorrow after 7 months over here in the US. I thought it'd be cool to note down some of the highlights of my time - here are the top ten professional, and top ten social things that have made the international leg of...
  • We get 2%...

    At the start of my last week in California, I went up to the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in San Francisco for the day. This is the conference when all the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) vendors show of they new latest and greatest microchip...
  • Mergers & Acquisitions

    Last week Sun's shareholders agreed to sell the company to Oracle for $7.4billion. The transaction still needs to be approved by Oracle shareholders and meet Department of Justice approval but the party-line is that it should close by the "end...
  • Being Lean, Mean and Keen

    Hello Everybuddy, As we come to the close of our internships, I was reflecting on this phase and what I have learnt. When Mark Bamforth, our sponsor at Genzyme, initially provided us with our project briefs and mentioned about World Class Manufacturing...
  • What if you loved it so much..

    ...you wanted to stay..? That's the quandary I find myself in as I write this penultimate blog from here in the USA. Now that I'm contemplating returning home at the end of next week, I'm kind of thinking - I don't actually want to leave...
  • Days of Thunder

    Nascar is big in the USA. Big cars. Big tyres. Big sponsorship. It was dramatised by Tom Cruise in the film, where he, as is usually the case, starts from scratch, has some ups and downs and then wins everything in sight. In reality though this sport...
  • e-mail marketing

    I had lunch with a very interesting group of people the other day including the CEO of a software company. Their product is a platform with applications in many verticals, but until recently their e-mail marketing has al lbeen based on lists of 200,000...
  • Man on the moon

    40 years ago today, the Apollo 11 Command Module landed in the Pacific Ocean following the first manned voyage to the surface of the moon. It would be easy to repeat some of the clichéd rhetoric comparing the Apollo Project with contemporary energy...
  • Last Orders Please!

    With Britain officially in its first recession for 20 years, the media is reporting doom and gloom. Unemployment is at 1.9million and is predicted to rise to 3.4 million in two years time, house prices have dropped 15.9%, the FTSE is underperforming by...
  • Debugging the Enterprise

    The other day I was thinking back to a Computer Science exam I sat in the first year of my undergraduate degree. One of the questions required us to follow some instructions in a graphics language (postscript - which incidentally I was just reading a...
  • Gordon Brown at TED

    The TED conference brings together the world's leading thought leaders and gives technologists, scientists, designers, entrepreneurs and performers the stage to present areas of interest to them. The talks tend to be polished, interesting and inspiring...
  • Exciting times....

    It has been some time since I last wrote my blog and since we are nearing the end of our stay here in Boston I thought I had better get on and write something. In order to thank the sponsoring companies in Boston and to welcome the Boston Saltire interns...
  • Out with the Old(er), in with the New!

    As we fellows are making plans for our return home, a new group of much younger Scot’s (English & Irish) have descended upon Boston, and are making plans for their next 8 weeks here. Four have internships with Liberty Mutual, Allan, Cat, Nicole...
  • My Lunch: Sandwiches and Venture Capital

    This weekend I was on a trip to Monterey, and we wanted to buy some sandwiches for a picnic lunch. We stopped at a supermarket where they have a deli counter which makes sandwiches, and thus resolved our hunger issue. However, I always find ordering sandwiches...
  • Coming home...

    I have been promising a shorter post for some time, I'll give it a go this evening! Two weeks tomorrow, I step on an aeroplane to head back to Scotland. Having been away from home for nearly seven months now I think it's only natural that I'm...
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