May 2014
Breaking news... The Unknown Editor has been nominated for "Best of Industry Award" by Microwaves and RF Magazine! The Award ceremony will be held at the International Microwave Symposium on June 4, at 4PM, by Microwaves and RF Magazine, at booth #1609. See you there!
By now, if you found this page, you might notice that Microwaves101 is vastly different from what it looked like, way back in May 2014.
We have partnered with the IEEE MTT-S to improve the content of Microwaves101. In the short term, you may notice a lot of issues with broken links, missing or moved content, and search tool problems. But we making the change prior to Microwave Week 2014 anyway to introduce the partnership to the community, and work the bugs out as fast as we can. Feel free to send comments, complaints, or suggestions, or pop by our booth at IMS (#651). By the way, if you bookmarked old pages, they should automatically redirect to content on the new site (let us know if you have any problems with that, this is an important feature of the upgrade).
Microwaves101 is now the adopted child of two very different parents. One parent is non-profit and finds the word "advertisement" distasteful; the other parent never really made a profit but sees this as a great opportunity to attract sponsors. This is a partnership agreement, not a takeover, Microwaves101 is still privately owned.
Thanks to Nick Kolias, Tim Lee, Terry Cisco and Dylan Williams for championing the idea with IEEE MTT-S. And special thanks (or perhaps complaints, in the short term) to Mark Slater at handmadeinteractive.com for the web development work.
What hasn't changed?
First, I want to point out that the old site is still accessible for now, as we work out bugs on the new site. Look for a link on the top of the page on the new site.
The new site is open to all and free of charge. You don't have to be an IEEE member, although we encourage you to consider signing up.
The mission of Microwaves101 is providing easy-to-understand content on fundamentals of microwave engineering, as always.
Although I have occasionally been forced out from under the paper bag, I will not be promoting my own name on this site any time soon, even as I assume the role of Editor-in-Chief. The sheer ridiculousness of having an Unknown Editor is not something I want to discard. The reason for anonymity was that my previous employer could not take a joke. My current employer would like nothing better than to sell stuff to my previous employer, so I will have to save the stories of my best career Dilbert-moments for when I no longer need a job.
Will we still have fun? Yes. Will I get to mix politic, religion, and obscure music from a progressive point of view when I feel like it? Seriously, who's your Daddy? But we will draw some boundaries between microwave content and my personal viewpoints. You can expect to see even more microwave history blended in to add perspective to all topics.
Microwaves101 will always be safe for viewing at work. There's only been two instances of "sh*t" on the original site, you can find them with the search tool. Make that three now!
Yes, we'll continue sending out Microwaves101 pocketknives to contributors who request one. And we'll continue the monthly newletter to keep you informed about what is happening on this corner of the world-wide web.
What's changed?
The MTT-S is going to provide excellent content, as well as subject matter experts to edit it. I'll no longer be the single point of editing, but I'll try to stay on top of what other people are doing. You can ask my present or previous employers, I am not known as a good manager of other peoples' time.
We'll have additional help answering emails, and hopefully be more prompt. I tend to let hard questions grow a little moldy before I answer them. That is part of the price of maintaining a Day Job. As always, feel free to ping us with microwave questions and we will try to field them, with some new volunteer help, with a new mailbox at questions@microwaves101.com. No, we still won't do your homework problems for you. But if you ever get a reply that starts with "that's a stupid question", forward it to ue@microwaves101.com and we'll make an attitude adjustment on our end.
One thing I dread is that the site is no longer fully contained on my local computer in case of disaster. For example, we were using some message board software that was so badly hacked by malicious scripts in 2013 that the service hosting it panicked and wiped out thousands of threads. I can see shutting it down for an upgrade, but did they really have to delete all that data? IEEE is more likely to care about the data, so I don't see this happening again.
Speaking of the message board, please try out the new one, linked from the new site (forget the old one, it's toast). I can't wait to see the message board community back in action!
We'll update the style of the content pages, to make them more usable. You can expect more references to support the information, and perhaps a few authors will want their names published. There are many pages of questionable content that MTT-S will clean up, so you can expect to see more focus on microwaves and less on punch-lines. However, the Riddle of MEMS and Microwave Career Killers will never die. One thing we have always been short on is good images, you can expect that MTT-S will be a major help here.
The new site is based on Joomla, while the old one used Cold Fusion. Cold Fusion has become a bit of an eight-track tape player, but it served us well for many years.
* Who Moved my Cheese? is a book that you might be familiar with if your company did a massive layoff. Having received a copy back in the 1990s, I didn't find it particularly useful. You can download WMMC for free here. Here's some advice for what to do when life gives you lemons: swap for a better chair and stapler from any empty office. And don't stand around and count the dead bodies, pick up your weapon and charge the enemy, comrade!
Some final advice from D-Day: there you go now, just leave everything to me....
Hope to see you at the IMS show, just tweet me @UnknownEditor if you are looking for me. You can catch me for sure at the AWR bowling party!
Steve