Jason Liu's Personal Website

I was informed this morning that UMC^®, the electronics foundry which had supposedly volunteered to provide free computer chip fabrication for the research lab at the University of Minnesota ECE Department of which I am a part, has bumped us off the May 2006 fabrication shuttle. In all likelihood, they gave up our spot to either a paying customer or a more renowned university. Either way, this doesn't reflect well on UMC's dependability, and leaves a rather bitter taste in the mouths of everyone in my research group, including my advisor's.

The reason for this is that they gave us no advance warning, and in many ways were virtually stringing us along until suddenly we're told, "Oh, uh, sorry, but we had to bump you off the May shuttle." Indeed, it may be true that UMC has no real reason why they shouldn't bump off an academic research chip or two (for which they were providing a free service) to make room for a paying customer's chip, other than perhaps maintaining good PR. However, I refuse to believe that no one at UMC knew that they wouldn't be able to fit us onto the shuttle until have a week after the deadline for submitting the final design (which was May 6th). If they had told us ahead of time that their shuttle was just simply overbooked and there was no way that they could fabricate our chip in this month's shuttle run, I probably could have spent nearly all of last week doing something productive, like, say, studying for my final exams, instead of busting my ass with the rest of the people in my research group trying to get the design finished in time for what would turn out to be a spurious deadline.

In any event, I'm too pissed off about the whole thing right now to get into any more details. (Maybe I'll elaborate more about this whole epic saga at some later date when my emotions have calmed down a bit, and I can stop myself from writing everything as these huge, run-on sentences.) Plus, this is on top of the fact that both of my final exams were today, and I came away from both of them with this sinking feeling that I didn't do very well in either of them. All of this just makes me want to crawl under a rock somewhere into the fetal position and shut out the rest of the world....