Welcome to Everyday Measurements

Welcome to Everyday Measurements, the newest blog at Test & Measurement World.  My thanks to the editors of T&M World for giving me the opportunity and platform to discuss the latest trends in test and measurement and how they affect us in both our professional and personal lives.

About me

For about the last 10 years I have worked at National Instruments as a product manager and have been lucky to have had the opportunity to work with engineers and scientists around the world, helping them solve their tough engineering challenges.  As a product manager, I began my career at NI managing our instrument control software.  During this time, I spent much of my time working with companies like Tektronix, Agilent and LeCroy to ensure that engineers and scientists could easily and efficiently connect to and control their instrumentation from the PC.  Also during this time, I started getting active in instrumentation standards bodies and became the marketing chairman for the IVI foundation.  For those of you not familiar with the IVI foundation, it is an open, multivendor consortium with goal of promoting specifications for programming test instruments that simplify interchangeability and improve performance.

Four years ago I switched from software to PXI instrumentation. I am currently a board member of the PXI Systems Alliance as well as its marketing co-chairman.  During this time we have seen dozens of new companies join the PXISA and amazing growth of the PXI standard as engineers look for new software defined ways to achieving their testing needs.

What to expect from this blog

Along with discussing the latest trends in test, and measurement, I hope to focus on how T&M affects us in our everyday lives.  For example, your average mobile phone has a dozen different sensors and in some cases changing our daily routines.  This can be seen by us using the accelerometer to track the number of steps we take or using the GPS to check in to the local coffee shop on foursquare.  I hope to use this blog to explore and discuss how these changes are affecting us and what we may see in the future.

I will be hanging around in the the comments of my posts.  Feel free to drop me a note and let me know if there are any topics of interest to you.