The 80s music at DAC was my idea. You're welcome.

If you attended the Monday Night Reception at DAC 2014, you were greeted with a blast of 80s pop music. If you then said to yourself, “I’d like to meet the genius behind that idea” - that would be me. A few weeks before DAC , our marketing manager came to me with the task of being the DJ for the Monday night reception. As soon as I heard “DJ” I envisioned turntables, cool headphones, disco lights and all the fame that follows. My dreams were dashed a few moments later when she explained that I would only have a PA and a laptop.

Undaunted, I resolved to be the best DJ in the history of DAC Monday Night Networking Receptions. The first challenge was finding music everyone would enjoy. I naturally settled on 80s pop as my genre. I had the brilliant idea of picking a few songs from each year and playing it as a progressive 80s timeline during the evening. I changed my mind when I realized that bright idea would require some serious manual research and work.

Did I give up? Of course not. I did what any good engineer would do - I found an easy (and smart) solution that did not require substantial extra effort - a bit like re-using verification ip’s instead of making them from scratch. This level of engineering genius is often mistakenly perceived as laziness, but I like to call it being smart. In fact I recently wrote a blog on the topic of working smart not hard.

Anyway, long story short, I went online and shopped for 80s mixes like any dope DJ would do. Fast forward a couple of weeks and the reception at DAC 2014, dubbed ‘Aldec’s 30^th Birthday Party’, had a great turnout. There were some technical difficulties but we made some calls, and things were good before the party started. While testing the sound system we also inadvertently made some people in DAC training sessions angry. So that was fun. All in all I’d say the event went well because I started the sound volume at 4 on the mixer we ended up at 9. We also made some folks really happy with prizes like a GoPro HERO3+ camera and a Samsung smart watch.

Back at the Aldec booth we had a steady stream of attendees for our first ever “DAC Chat” sessions which covered a wide range of topics from hardware emulation to UVM methodologies to VHDL verification using OSVVM. If you missed these at DAC, not to worry as we will be presenting our DAC Chat Sessions live online.

Thanks for letting me share about my recent fun experience as a DAC DJ, and no don’t worry, I won’t quit my day job.

For more on Aldec Solutions, or for access to a free evaluation download, we invite you to contact sales@aldec.com.