1800 words yesterday, 27,510 since January 1. Not nearly so productive today, at least so far.

I'm considering adding a photolog to this page. Maybe that will motivate me to do something with the piles of images I have sitting around.

1800 words in the last two days, 25,710 since January 1. Plugging along...

Joi Ito, a Japanese entrepreneur, has been posting lots of material about the root causes and possible solutions for Japan's economic malaise. Too much material to summarize here without wildly oversimplifying his arguments.

My search logs tell me that people are looking for "2002 IEDM" and "2003 outlook." Unfortunately, neither of those articles exist, due to converging deadlines and other conflicts over the last couple months. I hope to resume writing regular articles for these pages soon. Thank you for your patience.

Robot Wisdom found a good technical discussion of the Columbia breakup. Written for engineers, but accessible to non-experts. The best step-by-step analysis of what seems to have happened that I've seen so far.

Suppose I tell my Congressman that if he votes for a certain bill that helps my business, I'll give him a share of the profits that result. That's a kickback. It's illegal, and both I and the Congressman could go to jail. (Actually, campaign contributions sometimes walk perilously close to the line, but that's a topic for another day.)

Now, suppose I tell you that if your company buys my products, I'll let you buy stock in our upcoming IPO. That's also a kickback, but it isn't illegal. Business Week reports that during the IPO boom many company executives received so much stock from vendors that it seriously compromised their decision making, to the detriment of the companies paying their salaries.

(Link by way of TechDirt.)

Spent most of yesterday at the opening of Shipley's new Advanced Technology Center. The facility has one 193-nm stepper and resist track, with room for at least one more cell, plus room to double the existing cleanroom space, and enough land for another building the same size. Very nice facility.

They'll need it, too. The company is actively developing resist platforms for 248-nm and 193-nm exposures, with 157-nm and EUV beginning to ramp up as well. Researchers are already keeping the facility's SEM tools busy for three shifts a day.

3455 words in the last two days, 23,910 since January 1. Thanks mostly to my latest Semiconductor Magazine article, about which more later when I'm not running to a meeting.

3150 words since my last update, 20,455 since January 1. So I'm hovering at about 13,000 words behind my thousand-a-day goal, and running out of time to catch up. Onward!

Back in 2001, Motorola announced that they had grown GaAs on silicon, and were launching a new subsidiary to commercialize the technology. Now, in the face of declining GaAs prices and tough market conditions, the technology is quietly slipping back into research mode.

Hey! You at the computer! Get up and walk around for a little bit. It could save your life.

From President Bush's speech on Saturday:

In the skies today we saw destruction and tragedy. Yet farther than we can see there is comfort and hope. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, "Lift your eyes and look to the heavens. Who created all these? He who brings out the starry hosts one by one and calls them each by name. Because of His great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing."

The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth; yet we can pray that all are safely home.

There will be plenty of time to criticize NASA, and perhaps plenty of things to criticize them about. But first, there are seven families in mourning today. There are hundreds of ordinary people who'll spend the next few days and weeks sorting out charred bits of space shuttle from charred human remains in order to give those seven families something to bury. They'll have to plot exactly where and what each piece was, because that's the only way to figure out what actually happened. They probably won't be able to forget, though I'm sure they'll try, that this jawbone or that helmet used to belong to a friend and colleague.

So spare me your Monday morning quarterbacking, your "I told you so," your conspiracy theories. Even if you're inclined to dance on the graves of those astronauts, at least wait until they're buried first.

Update: Sheila just said pretty much the same thing, but much better.

Many thanks to everyone who visited and ordered from the site Bookstore last quarter. I hope you found the selection helpful.