Tag: Intel Corporation

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Kick Me Sign Get's Police Involved At Intel

From the KRQE story “Workplace prank no kicks for co-worker“

“This is definably a strange one,” Sgt. Nick Onken with Rio Rancho police said.

Onken said a man in his 40s filed a police report this week saying he had enough from his pranky co-workers at the plant in Rio Rancho.

“He stated that he is to the point with this tomfoolery that he doesn’t feel safe any longer in his work environment,” Onken said.

And the tomfoolery that pushed the man over the edge was a sign taped to his back that read “Kick me.”

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Intel Sends Scary Letter About Hydrogen Fluoride Emissions

From KOB.com “Rio Rancho residents concerned over Intel emissions“

Rio Rancho residents said they are worried about breathing toxic fumes after receiving a letter from Intel on Wednesday.

Thousands of residents found a monthly update from Intel in their mailbox, mentioning hydrogen fluoride emissions.

David and Aimee Thurlo said Intel has been a good neighbor, but the letter has them questioning their safety.

“The letter has absolutely no information on there. It is, to me, ambiguous,” Aimee Thurlo stated.

Good Job Intel. Send out a ambiguous letter about a chemical you have been emitting for years and freak every one out. No mention if it was also sent to residents of Corrales, who really hate Intel.

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Extracting Gas From Air

A article on azcentral.com titled “Air Products grows to keep up with Intel” explains how Air Products makes air products and ships them to the Intel site in Arizona. This is probably similar to how it’s done for Intel in Rio Rancho, NM.

The company removes all components of air except nitrogen, oxygen and argon. Then in those white, angular towers, it separates out those three gases with very low temperatures. Oxygen turns to liquid at minus 297.3 degrees Fahrenheit, and nitrogen turns to liquid at minus 320 degrees.

Then the liquid is boiled, producing pure gas.

“We use compression and expansion, like the air-conditioning unit on the outside of a house,” Jordan explained.

Nitrogen gas made in Chandler goes directly into the pipeline, a structure intended to last 100 years.

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Obama Visted Intel In Chandler, Az

U.S. President Obama Speaks at Intel's Fab 42

President Barack Obama to Arizona speaking at Intel’s Fab 42, a state of that art chip manufacturing plant under construction in Chandler, AZ on January 25, 2012. from Intel Photos on Flickr

AZCentral.com has three articles about President Obama visit to the Intel site in Chandler on Thursday.

Obama or Intel haven’t made any friends with the construction workers according to the article “Obama’s visit tests readiness at Intel“.

One necessary requirement for hosting the president was shutting down construction for a day on the Fab 42 site, which didn’t sit well with all of the project’s roughly 3,000 active workers.

Some complained that they would not be paid for the unscheduled day off.

Jones said the one-day hiatus would be handled the same as if a thunderstorm had rolled into town Wednesday. A make-up day will be scheduled, and crews will be paid to work that day, instead, Jones said.

Apparently the 6000 people that came to see Obama’s speech had to stand for hours and many got sick doing so according to the article “Thousands wait for hours to see Obama“.

He would not be the only one on whom the day took a toll. Some left in wheelchairs, some walked out on their own, but clearly even a perfect January day can be a bit overwhelming after standing in the sun for hours on end.

There was the expected political nonsense from people who didn’t vote for Obama in the article “Leaders: Obama had no role in Intel project“.

Weninger said he sees the president’s visit as a political move by Obama to take credit for the Intel project. “I respect the president and am happy he is coming to Chandler and highlighting Intel and our great business community,” he posted on his political Facebook page. “I’m just saying it’s not true if he insinuates that his policies led to this expansion. It didn’t. When you couple his press release with the visit a day after the State of the Union, it’s hard to come to a different conclusion.”

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Intel's Chandler Plant Has An Explosion

Reuters “Blast at Intel microchip plant injures 7“

The blast of undetermined origin occurred shortly after 2 p.m. local time at one of two large Intel campuses in Chandler, Arizona, just southeast of the state capital, said Chandler Fire Department Battalion Chief Brad Miller

AZCentral “Intel workers hurt as substance ignites at Chandler plant“

Seven Intel employees were injured Tuesday afternoon when a substance ignited in a chemical-storage room at the company’s Ocotillo campus, Chandler Fire Chief Jeff Clark said.

“It was not an explosion as much as an ignition of something; we do not know what,” Clark said.

Phoenix Business Journal “Intel plant explosion in Chandler injures 7“

Chandler Fire Department spokesman Brad Miller said the department responded to a call shortly after 2 p.m. about an explosion in a support room for the Fab 22 facility at 4500 S. Dobson Road in Chandler.

Miller said one victim was transported immediately to Maricopa Medical Center with severe burns. Three others were transported to Chandler Regional Hospital with less severe injuries. Three others were treated and released on site. None of the injuries are considered to be life-threatening.

Several hundred workers from Fab 22 and neighboring Fab 32 were evacuated after the explosion, but as of 3:30 p.m., firefighters had safely cleared the building. The Chandler Fire Department now is assessing if there is any continued risk in the cleanup process.

Production has stopped at Fabs 22 and 32, but continues at the nearby Fab 12.

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Intel's D1X In The Oregonian

The Oregonian has an article titled “Intel goes big to get small — an early look at its new Hillsboro research factory, D1X” which looks at the construction and impact of Intel’s new factory in Oregon. Even in Oregon Intel is a big employer.

“If you’re talking even a thousand jobs on one project, that will have a substantial impact on overall construction employment in the Portland area,” said David Cooke, an economist with the Oregon Employment Department. “The construction jobs are very important to the overall economic picture over the short term.”

Those workers will haul away up to a million yards of dirt as Intel excavates for D1X’s foundation and brings the site level with D1D, the fab next door.

Of that, 150,000 cubic yards are headed just up the road, to SolarWorld’s Hillsboro property. That company is contemplating a second factory someday and needs to elevate its property to ensure proper drainage.

The castoffs will raise 4 1/2 acres of SolarWorld’s site by 21 feet.

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Intel Advertisement "The Chase Film"

Sometimes Intel does a good job with an advertisement, The Chase Film is on of them. Intel’s marketing speak for the film:

To build excitement around the 2nd Generation Intel® Core™ i5 processor, Intel is launching an action-adventure video titled “The Chase.” The spot demonstrates the performance capabilities of the new processors by creating an action-movie style chase sequence that takes place through a wide variety of program windows on a computer desktop.

The highest rated comment:

If it happened on my computer she would probably end up in porno.

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Secret Intel Civilization Game

At Reddit, a link to a Civilization 5 trailer produced a comment from user criswell, who claims to have witness a huge Civiliziation (2?) game going on at a Intel cube “fort” in the 1990’s. Assuming this is true, I wouldn’t be surprised if something like this was happening in the 1990’s. Nowadays I wouldn’t think anyone could get away with it.

True Story: (I sure have a lot of these..)
In the late 1990s, I was working at an Intel software development division doing some really early embedded Linux stuff (this was before Intel had any sort of Linux/Open-Source presence, it was kind of trail-blazing for the time). Linux was still fairly new to big companies like Intel, so the entire division I was at (3 floors of cubicles, roughly 300 employees at this location) was 100% Windows based and the sysadmin crew managing us knew nothing about Linux at the time (they regarded all these new Linux people in a very negative light).
Well, this sysadmin crew was kind of crappy. They really didn’t do much to proactively protect their systems and network from threats. Typically at least once a week the entire building would shut down due to some new rampant virus or outbreak. When this would happen, the sysadmins would trundle out of their cubicle fort, grumbling and cross, and deal with whatever fire was going on at the time. They very much practiced “reactionary sysadmining”… which is a style of sysadmining that I’ve never liked… but I digress.
The sysadmin crew numbered ~6 people, and one day I wondered what they did the other 80% of their time.
As I said, they had this cubicle fort, which was located in the middle of the first floor of the building. “Fort” is a very accurate term for what this was. Whereas everyone else had their cubicles setup so that each person would have a mock office, the sysadmins had arranged their cubicles into kind of a club-house with only one way in. They also stacked their bookshelves along the inner-facing cubicle walls to make it virtually impossible for a person of average height to see into their fort. Finally, they had this system of mirrors set up so they could see who was approaching their fort without being seen themselves.
From some small reconnaissance, I discovered there was one external corner of their fort that was outside of their mirror system’s field of vision. Additionally, this corner had the lowest bookshelf in it. I’m a reasonably tall person at around 6 foot 4 inches, and standing on my tip-toes I could peek over this corner. So, one day, I took a look at what they were doing….
All 6 sysadmins sat in front of enormous monitors (bigger than anyone else had in the division we were at) playing a rather huge campaign of Civilization ?? (probably Civ 2, looking at the timeframe, but I could be wrong). They had battle plans scrawled across several whiteboards, and, I kid you not, a table in the middle of the fort with real-world maps marked up with all sorts of crazy strategic planning.
These guys were friggin’ hardcore, yo. Every time I’d walk by their cubicle for the next 6 months, I’d peek in and see them playing this game. I have no idea if it was all part of a single, grand campaign, or if they had a bunch of small campaigns they were playing.
Now, whenever anyone mentions the Civ series to me, I’ll always remember the little Napoleonic sysadmins at an Intel division in the 1990s.

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Green2V: Non Existence Solar Company To Build Big Ass Factory In Rio Rancho

http://www.krqe.com/video/videoplayer.swf?dppversion=7267

Governor Richardson was with Mayor Tom Swisstack of Rio Rancho today to announce that Green2V will build a million square-foot factory and headquarters in Rio Rancho. With Advent Solar and Schott AG building solar factories in Albuquerque, I wondered when one would build in Rio Rancho.

I have a number of concerns about this company, primarily that the company doesn’t seem to exist. As far as I can tell the privately owned Green2V doesn’t have any buildings or even a website and Wikipedia doesn’t have a page for them. The companies CEO, Bill Sheppard, is a former Intel New Mexico manager. Convenient since I suspect a large number of Green2V employees will come from the Intel New Mexico site. I don’t know where they are getting their money to build this company, what experience they have or what their business plan is.

The only thing I know is that their ambitious plan involves building in downtown Rio Rancho and that they want to start shipping in 2011. I hope this works out.

Update: Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting this is some sort of scam. I really want this to work out and I may even want to work for Green2V. I’m suggesting it’s a little early to get excited. It could turn out like Tesla, Lions Gate or Signet Solar, all established companies that planned to build in the Albuquerque area and didn’t for one reason or another.