Let me introduce myself...

Welcome to a new Mentor blog!

 I know what you’re thinking…I read one sentence; you better give me reason to read further pretty quick!  I’ll try to keep in interesting, but my subject matter is limited in this first installment, because I’m going to tell you about myself and why you might find my future musings worth reading.

 My name is Mark Forbes and I work in Corporate Marketing. There…I said it! I’m a marketer (actually, I like to think of myself as a marketeer…it sounds more like Mouseketeer, which would be much more fun). However, I have to confess that I am the geek of the department, so we should get along just fine. 

 I earned my BSEE degree from Bradley University back in the day when a five function calculator (with square root!), cost $79.95 but minimum wage, with which I was intimately familiar, was $2.90/hour.

 Out of college I designed weapons control systems for the F-16 fighter and then electricity meters.  I learned quickly that the sexiness of the end product had little to do with the excitement of the job. We were actually pioneering solid-state meters and I earned a patent for that work. Then, someone sat me down in front of customers and said “Talk.”  My life was forever changed.

 Shortly thereafter, someone found out I could write and even more change took place. The short story is that I moved from engineering to marketing, wrote three books and 100+ technical and business articles, sandwiched in time as a trade magazine editor, consulted for 14 years, and here I am. I also worked in MBA studies and raised two children.

 One of the best things about consulting was that I worked in quite a few industries, saw a lot of different processes and the way companies did things…both good and bad. That experience is one of my chief strengths, and I hope to contribute something to your life with some observations. Most of my career has been divided among the semiconductor industry, personal computing/workstations, and networking. I may hold a record for being involved with the most chips that taped out but never went to production.

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 I also have a few hobbies that will no doubt find their way into this thread, so I’ll warn you up front. Photography and fishing are my most active interests, with shooting and amateur radio competing for time as well. I even have a little amateur radio antenna company with a friend (for which I received my second patent).

 Before I end this little introduction, I should tell you who or what I am not as well. I am not technically competent with our PCB tools; I know what they do, not so much how they do it. We are fortunate to have a number of experts and competent technical bloggers that can help you there.  I’m also not a product architect, so I don’t have the big roadmap in front of me.  Rather, I operate more in the tactical and nearer term, so that’s what we’ll be talking about here. I’ll be covering the breadth of PCB product from PADS to Expedition and Xtreme, and the complete set of HyperLynx analysis tools.

 So, now that I’ve exhausted everything I’ve been thinking about for this blog, I will let go of you here and try to think of something else to say in a week or so. Be sure to come back soon.

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