Wife & I wore all black to protest 2011. Only positive thing: grandson Noah who turned 4 months yesterday. Did I mention he is the world's cutest baby?
Yes, 2011 was just miserable on all fronts: personal, family, professional, MOTM, you name it.
Let's talk a bit about MOTM 5U.
The format was always intended to be DIY first. However, I had no idea when I started how popular it would be. This may sound odd but the thing just snowballed on me.
I decided to get 'outside help' but no one locally was interested in through-hole insertion and my "low volumes". I tried to hire local tech-school graduates but 3 out of the 4
I hired quit < 10 days after they started (gee, it is sort of boring to count resistors into little plastic bags).
I was lucky to have Paul Haneberg offer vitrually free assistance, which came when I was out of work for 15 months (and non-working wife with 2 kids). But shortly thereafter Paul
suffered a massive stroke and I had to take it all back on. So in 2006 I decided to stop the full kits and go "MOTM 2.0". I then offered a 'last time buy', thinking ∗maybe∗ another 75
kit or so would be bought. Nope, it was 916. That is over $200,000 in ∗parts∗. Then, 2 unrelated by unforseen things happened back-to-back:
a) my wire provider, who did all the nice colored, tinned wire/coax closed down ∗without any warning at all∗ when I had very little left in stock
b) Vishay decided to move all my pc board pot production to France. This caused me to not receive a single pot shipment for 16 ∗MONTHS∗. Then they raised the price from $1.83 to $7.90 (wtf).
Well, after all this was resolved it was 2009. I still had piles of backlog, and piles of kits to ship. I was able to find a pot replacement vendor while roaming NAMM (BTI). I was able to locate a Taiwan company to make me wire for a $900 "batch fee" (I got a shitload of wire). But here came the "copper shortage" and prices started going up up and up. Tyco started charging $2.83 for a knob that in 1998 was 47 cents. But I stumbled along and got the backlog down somewhat. Then here came the end of 2010/2011.
1) I was fired from my nice, $130K/yr, work out of my house job because my 33 year old boss "just didn't understand engineers" (direct quote). I was replaced by a 40yr old BSET sales droid making $80K/yr.
2) I got a decent paying job at RIM designing the audio circuits of the new Blackberries. The job was ~35mi away through heavy traffic. I decided to move closer and the wife wanted a 'nicer house'.
3) so I packed up and moved to a new house that was only 11mi away. I made exactly ∗one∗ house payment. RIM laid off 2,000 people, and I was one of them.
4) We wait 2 months to see if the "old house" sells (we own it outright, thanks Maxim stock options). Nope, no sale! Wife decides to move BACK to original house.
5) Then baby Noah is born, daughter & boyfriend break up, daughter + Baby Noah are now moved back.
6) So, I pack all the stuff up AGAIN and move back. I am about 95% unpacked/located all the stuff.
In the "glory years" of MOTM (1999-2002) I shipped around 900 modules/year. This year I shipped 64. Yep.........64 (cough). I sucked at MOTM in 2011.
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2012 will be ∗very different∗ than the way things have been. I will start 'announcing stuff' after NAMM. Some people will rejoice and others will not be happy campers. But things cannot drag on and on and dribble out like they have been for the last 4 years or so. The death of JH put me into a 3 week funk and I still get depressed some days.
I want to thank everyone who has stuck by me all this time, almost 13 years now. Don't panic: MOTM is not 'going away'. It's just going to be ..........+++CARRIER LOST++++