I have been very fortunate to have been added to Alltop's engineering page (well, I asked and I received), as well as being listed at #16 on the top engineering blogs on EngineerJobs. My goal is to be in the top 5.

Thank you for your continued support as readers of this blog. I appreciate your time and attention to read what I put down here, and to make thoughtful comments on it.

Google Reader recently released a new feature which enables me to share some more of my thoughts with you.

I have never been a big fan of regurgitating other people's post and information on my own blog. I see this more as a place to try to share my own thoughts and ideas, or bring a bunch of info together to express a new opinion (I hope I manage to!). So far I have been pointing to blog posts that have stood out to me via the "Interesting article's I've recently read" section in the side bar.

The links in the side bar are the most recent items I have shared using Google Reader. Up until recently, it was only possible to share things that I received via feeds (see below if you don't know what a feed or RSS is). What the clever guys over at Reader have now done is to allow me to share anything, from anywhere and add my own note to that.

This is a new form of microblogging, but is far more interesting (to me, and hopefully to you) than the alternatives, such as twitter.

So now you can follow me and see my thoughts on interesting articles and information that I find. There are a couple of ways to do this.

1. Subscribe to my Google Shared Items feed. If you know how a feed reader works, you'll know exactly how to use that link to follow me. Otherwise, see the info about feeds and feedreaders below.
   
   There are one or two minor drawbacks with this, mainly that the original author's name does not come through correctly when I add a note.
   
   
2. If you already use Google Reader you can add me as a friend and my shared items will show up in your Reader. This is a slightly more complex process and requires you inviting me to chat with you via Gmail or Gtalk. You will need my Gmail address, which is duncan.drennan at the expected ubiquitous domain name.
   
   
3. [Update] As Francois quite correctly points out, you can also view my shared items as a webpage (which is linked to in the side bar).
   

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Here is some info for those of you who have never heard of a feed or RSS. On this site subscribing to the feed allows you to immediately receive the latest posts straight into your feedreader.

A feedreader fetches information from a whole bunch of different feeds (e.g. this blog, a news website, etc.) displays them for you.

The beauty of this is that

1. You can subscribe and unsubscribe extremely easily (just add or delete a feed from your feedreader).
2. Delivery is guaranteed. Because you fetch the feed (pull) unlike email which is sent to you (push) the feed cannot get lost due to a firewall which is trying to stop spammers. Feeds are spam free!
3. You never miss a post. This is particularly important if you keep up to date by coming to check back here regularly. You could miss something, or worse, stop coming back ;)

Once you start using feeds you will wonder how you survived without them. I use Google Reader as my feedreader, but there are plenty of others out there. Here is a really useful video which explains RSS and feeds a lot better than I can.

[Last updated: 2008/05/05]

Just a bit of background information on me....

I was born on 6 August 1979 and grew up in Port Elizabeth (South Africa). After school I went on to study electrical and electronic engineering at the University of Stellenbosch. I obtained my undergraduate degree Cum Laude and began my Masters degree directly after that.

My thesis was the design of a transverse flux machine - a high torque density machine (i.e. small, but with lots of va-va-voom). I studied under Prof. Maarten Kamper in the Electrical Machines Research group. After a year of full time postgraduate study I got married (to a very beautiful girl) and moved up to Pretoria. I continued working on my Masters degree until obtaining it in April 2005.

While in Pretoria I worked at Mecalc designing the front end of the MODACS system (low noise analogue design with a good dose of microcontrollers and FPGAs). I was there for just over three years until I decided to start Engineer Simplicity, so we moved to Cape Town and I have been running the company for over two years now.

Running my company has been an interesting, exciting and challenging experience. I have met and worked with some great people, and expanded both my skill and capacity to deliver exciting solutions. I have also slowly come to realise what is really important to me. As I blogged I found myself being drawn more and more strongly toward issues such as energy efficiency (which I have always been interested in) and waste management.

I discovered that what is important to me is to create products that help us move towards a cleaner and better world. So my focus is to find ways to create better products – products that make us happy and are sensitive to the world we live in.

I write about various things in this blog, from environmental issues through to engineering design. My goal is to explore these issues from an engineering perspective. Hopefully this inspires engineers to build a better cleaner world, and exposes people to new thoughts and ideas on how to create a better life right now.

I am glad to have you on this journey with me.

The first post

So here we are, the first blog post...well, really, here I am. My name is Duncan Drennan and this is my blog on business, design, electronics and a bit of politics. Right now I'm not sure what this is going to develop into, but I'm definitely looking forward to the journey. May it be as interesting for you as it is going to be for me.