Who are you and where did you come from?

Well, it should be painfully obvious from my page headers and the URL itself, Brian Einsweiler.

I was born and raised in a small town in northwestern Illinois, Galena (No, it's not near Chicago, thank you!).

Having survived the many varied wonders of the Galena public school system and a grueling job in food service at Emmy Lou's Cafe, I moved on to bigger and better things and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for four years.

While at UIUC I majored in Computer Engineering with an emphasis on system/processor architecture and embedded system design. I was one class away from a minor in Math, but honestly four years was enough there and I didn't want to stick around any extra just to finish some minors. During the summer after my sophomore year I studied technical Japanese and Japanese culture at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology in Kanazawa, Japan. After my Junior year I did a three month internship with IBM Microelectronics in North Carolina.

So where are you now?

Well, after witnessing a major meltdown in the technology industry my senior year in college, things were looking bleak in terms of job prospects right out of college. Sure enough, it was quite a struggle to find a job and celebrating graduation with nothing lined up beyond put kind of a damper on things. But, persistence pays off. After contacting countless companies and even having the occasional on-site interview or phone screen, I was made aware of an opening at LSI Logic in Colorado Springs by one of my friends from college, Paul Van Ryn. I ended up getting the job and started in December 2002, six excruciating months after I had graduated. But the wait turned out to be well worth it.

So, how do you like living in Colorado?

I can't imagine living anywhere else now! This place is just amazing. I can never get sick of my awesome view of Pikes Peak on the way to work, or seeing Cheyenne Mountain right outside the windows at my house. I love being within easy driving distance of amazing National Parks and some of the most beautiful National Forests and Wilderness Areas in the world!

What exactly do you do for your job?

My official title is "Systems Engineer." And, no, for the record I do not fix computers for a living! Systems Engineering in my division of the company (Storage Standard Products) is quite an interesting and varied thing. Our group has many duties, though first and foremost we are in charge of validation of new microchip designs. This includes working with hardware design teams, firmware development teams, software development teams, product marketing, and even customers. For example, typical development duties would include programming software to exercise the functions of the new chips and developing circuit boards to place the chips and other required devcies on. In addition, we will characterize the chips - looking at things such as power requirements, heat dissipation requirements, and verify that the chip meets all the industry specifications that it is required to support. But we don't stop there, we're also in charge of development collateral for customers. That means writing technical manuals and design-in guides, as well as system engineering notes. Also, we help customers with integration of the chips into their system designs and even provide demos at trade shows and to specific customers as needed.

So, this type of job certainly keeps a person busy, but the amazing variation in the duties we perform day to day keep the job constantly interesting. I guess you may be wondering at this point what exactly these chips my division produces are used for. They are standard storage controller microchips - SCSI, Serial Attached SCSI, Fibre Channel. If you're not familiar with those, I guess the easiest way to describe it is that storage devices such as hard disks are plugged into our controller microchips and they provide communication between the system and the attached storage devices. (Of course, it's way more complicated than my simple explanation here, but you get the idea, I hope...)

What do you do when you're not working?

Wow, thinking about this question has made me realize what a busy person I am lately! I love photography, as you can probabaly tell since it's a major theme of my website. In addition, I'm out in the mountains whenever the weather and my schedule allow. I can hike all day nonstop, alone, with people, whatever. It's great to just get out there and feel like you're in the middle of nowhere. When I want some more action, I get out the skates and play some ice hockey. I play about four times a week - whenever I get a chance (7:00AM before work on Friday, for example...) During the winter I also enjoy skiing a lot! I head to the slopes whenever I can get a chance. I love the back bowls at Vail on powder day. Occasionally you'll find me schlepping down a double black diamond - without even killing myself!

So, repeating my love for Colorado; it's great to live in a place where I can do all this stuff. I've gotten rid of cable and almost never watch TV any more, and you know what, it's the best thing ever. I feel like I'm not wasting my life for countless hours staring blankly at the stupid thing any more. When it's too late to play hockey or too crappy to go for a hike, you'll find me tinkering around with my computer or reading books (mostly about quantum physics and cosmology - yes, I'm a nerd and not afraid to admit it!), or, lately fixing the minor things that tend to happen to the 18 year old house I live in...

©2005 - Brian Einsweiler