Heads-up!  Since I've received over 800 responses to my Verification
Census survey, I'm stopping taking in any more today.  Now I get to spend
the next few days in a grumpy disposition pouring over these responses to
count them all up.

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Funny story: as a professional courtesy, I contacted all the major (and some
of the minor) EDA vendors effected by this Census to tell them the news.

One EDA vendor (who shall remain unnamed) very seriously offered:

    "I can offer secretarial assistance of my admin assistant.  I was
     anyway thinking of offering you this help as I really appreciate
     the amount of work you have at your hands."

The idea would be that I would forward all the Census responses to them and
they'd report what the final tally was for each question.  (And, no, this
wasn't a joke -- a second employee from that same EDA company emailed me as
a follow up on their offer to "help" with the count.)

Needless to say, I burst out laughing.

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Second funny story: I also got a phone call from one of those paid research
companies (who shall also remain unnamed) and he, too, offered his office
staff "to tally/analyze your data" with the idea that "we" could then sell
the results in expensive $5,000 to $10,000 reports which people would have
to pay to see.

I told him this would violate the spirit of the ESNUG/DeepChip community and
that I've never once ever asked anyone a survey question whose final results
I didn't share with everyone.  The whole core value I have for ESNUG/DeepChip
is that it's a public town square where *everyone* gets to openly share their
real life EDA and chip design experiences.  It's like LINUX or GNU software
or Craigslist; it'd be a crime for me to even think of privatizing it.

Then he asked if we could just share our data because he was tired of renting
100,000 email addresses (collectively from EE Times & the other pubs) to only
get a paltry 100 to 200 responses to his own surveys.

I told him "sorry" this again would violate the spirit of the ESNUG/DeepChip
community and that I've never ever forwarded people's responses to anyone.
The majority of these engineers have expressly asked to "Make Me Anon" (it's
always Question 0 in all of my surveys) and there's no way in Hell that I was
ever going to violate that trust.  It would be an exceptionally stupid thing
for me to do.  No, thank you.

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It's kind of funny the type of people who come out of the woodwork sometimes
whenever I do one of these censuses.  :)

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P.S. If you try to contact me over the next few days and I seem unresponsive
     or grumpy, please be patient with me.  I'm all by myself tallying all
     these damn responses.  We're talking 12 complex questions asked of 800
     EDA users -- that's 9,600 answers I have to count.  Alone.  Ugh.  :(