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I've been working on the courses that I'm taking over the summer at CAC. I'm trying to knock out the education credits that I need to teach here in Arizona. The courses aren't all that difficult (Behavior Management and Intro. to Education) and actually are quite interesting. They just take a little time for the reading and writing papers. I've got a couple of more chapters to go and hope to have it all finished over this weekend. Then it's back to playing with microcontrollers. I really miss the little guys.

I've been seeing a lot more discussion about FPGAs in the literature lately. It looks like they are coming to light as the versatile little buggers that they are. EDN magazine has an interesting little article in the July 7 edition on the image-processing applications of FPGAs. In Embedded Systems Programming magazine (July 2005) the editor has a nice piece about his experiences with FPGAs.

Good news! IEEE Spectrum magazine is reporting in the July 2005 issue that engineering salaries are slowly starting to rise again in the US and are really taking off overseas. Overseas, salaries for engineers are increasing by double digit percents. The drain that has occurred here in the US with engineering jobs seems to be heating up the job market in China and India. Hopefully, some type of near equity will be reached with US engineers and some of the jobs that have been sourced off-shore will start returning.

Computer magazine (July 2005) also has an article on embedded computing and discusses the need for computer science to revisit its foundations and prepare for the 21st century by creating practices that will meet current and projected needs. It will be necessary to reinvent computer science. There are issues of precision and reliability involving temporal issues. We have the basic tools that we need. We just need to start using them. Technology is ready for another leap. The time is just about right for another revolution such as occurred as transistors became ubiquitous.