Category: Meetings

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AAPM 2018 Day 1

It was a a pretty good first day at the AAPM annual meeting.  The Nashville Music City Center is a nice convention center.  It’s large, has lots of rooms both big and small, nicely decorated and being downtown it’s in the middle of everything.  It’s like a small McCormick Place.

Started off the morning sitting in on a couple of task group meetings, mostly just to see what the status was. One of them is pretty close to publishing their report, and another was still working on the report.

A nice thing to see was lots of postings on the job board.  Lots of open positions, especially in diagnostic imaging.

The first lightning talk session (called SNAP orals) I went to was a Rad/Fluoro session where I learned about groups working on triple layer detectors for multi-energy radiographic imaging, and photon counting detectors for fluoroscopy.

The second session was on multi-energy CT.  Multi-energy imaging (outside of nuclear medicine) seems pretty hot these days.  Most of it is being done in CT, but based on what I saw in the previous session, it’s being applied to other modalities too.  It’s definitely an area that I need to learn more about.

A good chunk of the last part of the afternoon was spent wandering around the exhibit area.  Checked in on Radcal and RTI to see what the latest was with their test equipment.  Came across a company called Atirix who have a pretty nifty looking QC management program that might be just what I’m looking for.  Got a nice demo of the product at their booth, and it seems interesting enough that I’ll try to get the people at work interested in it, especially the mammography techs.

It appeared that for the afternoon break in the exhibit hall, there was beer for sale, which I failed to notice until after the break was over.  I was probably busy talking with people about products.

Wrapped the day up with a very enjoyable social put on by the Southeast AAPM chapter.  With so many faces at the meeting, it was a good chance to find some familiar faces at the meeting.

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Carowinds from the air

On the way to the AAPM 2018 Annual Meeting in Nashville, my flight’s landing approach into Charlotte went by Carowinds and gave me this interesting view of the park.

Carowinds from the air
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Another successful BarcampCHS

Yesterday’s BarcampCHS 4 was a pretty successful event. Almost 300 attendees and about 50 sessions on a pretty broad range of topics. I didn’t get too many pictures from Barcamp this year. Had my little Sony camera, but I kept forgetting I had it so all I got were a few pictures from the session pitching. Registration took a while and there was some initial confusion. That ended up pushing the schedule back an hour, but despite that it sounded like everybody who attended had a good time.

I offered up three sessions (trimmed down from the original 4). Because of that I didn’t make it to any of the other sessions I wanted to see. I did make it to an Intro to Arduino session which was pretty cool. I think that might be my next fun thing to get into. Next year I’ll probably just do one or two sessions.

My CT Scanners: How do they work had more people show up than I was expecting. Unfortunately I had forgotten to put my presentation on Google Drive, so I had no slides to present. I ended up having to ramble on and give my presentation mostly from memory and without much in the way of visual aids. I did get a few questions though and there were some people that seemed pretty interested.

The next session was my History of Computers Museum. The original idea was to have people bring some of their old/ancient hardware and have kind of a show and tell, and reminisce about the “old days”. Clay McCauley brought a bunch of his old gear, including an old and still functioning Apple ][+ (boy did that bring back memories). I had forgotten the stuff I was planning to bring though, but another person brought some old portables he had, like a Sinclair ZX80 and a couple of old Radio Shack portables. Google Guy (Eric Wages) was there, which made things a little intimidating. It turned out to be a pretty good session. Without a lot of advance publication and notice, it’s an idea that probably doesn’t work all that well for a Barcamp session though. Eric asked if there was anything like a Computer History Museum in the area. AFAIK there isn’t one, but it seems like it might be an interesting thing to put together.

My How to Become a Ham Radio Operator was the most attended of my sessions, with about 15 people or so. My presentation took about 30 minutes, which left about 30 minutes for a general “HamCamp” type discussion. Fortunately there were 4 other amateur radio operators that I knew who helped answer questions. Turned into a pretty good discussion and it seemed like the other people got quite a bit out of it. Hopefully some of them will be prompted to take the test and become licensed.

I was also told that I got mentioned in the Linked In session (“that guy in the robe”). I’m getting famous I think 🙂

Overall, another great BarcampCHS event and from what people have been saying on the social medias, more Barcamp converts for next year.

Me in the photo booth run by Jason Layne

barcamp charleston 2012

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Southeast Linuxfest 2012 in the bag

Another successful Southeast Linuxfest wrapped up yesterday. Came back with a little over 450 photos to go through which dropped to around 410 after a quick first pass.

Saw a fair number of people go through the conference and a bunch of familiar faces. This year ended up pretty database heavy as far as topics went and I managed to catch a fair number of good talks. Learned a few things about MySQL DBA, much of which I will probably never need, but there were some handy little nuggets to learn.

SELF stretched over three full days this year in a new venue which I think worked out pretty well. Aside from Time-Warner Cable not being able to provide the Internet service as originally promised, the rest of the meeting seemed to go pretty smoothly. Instead, this was where the Internets came from.

SELF 2012 Internet source

I spent most of it wandering around taking photos (in an “official” capacity this time), sitting in sessions and manning video cameras. Seemed like a pretty sizable crowd this year, with some early estimates putting numbers at around 500 people or so. Pretty respectable I think.

The Charlotte DrupalCamp put on by CharDUG went off pretty well with a good turnout. With three tracks, there was a little bit for everybody.

Already looking forward to next year’s SELF, June 7-9 at the same location.

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Southeast Linuxfest: T-2 days

Two days left until another Southeast Linuxfest!

There’s a lot of stuff packed into this year’s SELF and it should be a fun time.

I’ll be hitting the road for Charlotte tomorrow to help with getting things set up. This year I’ve been given the Official Photographer duties so my new Speedlite will get its first real workout.

There is also an official SELF ham radio frequency, 147.555, and the 6600 Net on 145.190 at 9PM Saturday. I have no idea what the 6600 Net is, but with my new call sign I’m hoping to find out.

There will also be ham radio licensing tests given at SELF this year, on Saturday I think. I’m planning on trying for Extra again, but I’m not sure I’ll be much more prepared for it this time than I was last Saturday. There’s still much reading left to do. Well, I still have 3 days left.