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Sanctioned discrimination

A thought that’s been rattling around in my head lately.

It seems to me that pretty much anybody who objects to gay people and gay marriage does so on the basis of religion. Whether the claim is that it erodes the institution of marriage, or that it’s immoral, or whatever the objection, there’s almost always some religious doctrine that it’s based on.

So where do all these laws against gay marriage fit in when you consider the principle of separation of church and state as written in the First Amendment?

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BIOS frustration

The motherboard in my computer (Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5) has some neat features for updating the BIOS, including being able to update it from a USB drive without having to boot into an OS (Q-Flash).

Q-Flash worked pretty well in the past, but it seems to be limited to BIOS images less than 1MB.

The most recent (beta) BIOS updates for this motherboard have been just over 1.2 MB. Q-Flash no like.

There’s another utility called @BIOS that lets you flash BIOS updates from within Windows, but it only works in Windows.

Made an initial attempt at booting up FreeDOS to use Gigabyte’s DOS based FLASHSPI.EXE utility, but FreeDOS complained about the CD driver not being loaded for some reason. Guess where I put the BIOS image and FLASHSPI for flashing.

So now I’m stuck. Haven’t done much more with FreeDOS yet. Probably could get it working if I banged at it hard enough.

It’s frustrating though that there’s this perfectly good built-in Q-Flash utility for flashing the BIOS, but it’s crippled by a size limitation.

Really? A motherboard that supports 24GB of RAM, USB/SATA ports up the wazoo, a 2.8GHz quad-core CPU and it can’t flash a BIOS larger than 1MB. What is this, the 1980s?

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Mining stacks of data

All of the interventional radiology (IR) labs at work are capable of spitting out a report that tells about the amount of radiation used in a procedure. Unfortunately, none of them are capable of sending that report to the PACS system with the exception of the newest units.
That means a valuable source of patient radiation dose information usually ends up archived away on optical disk somewhere. Good archiving, lousy search capabilities.

About a year ago we decided to start collecting the dose info so we could find out about the radiation doses patients were getting from IR procedures. The techs were educated on what information the dose reports provided, and we asked them to start printing out the dose summary sheets, which they’ve been doing for the past year.

Then things started getting in the way and while we were still collecting the dose sheets, no analysis of the data was getting done. Now I’ve got close to a year’s worth of data that I’m finally getting around to entering into a database. It’s a lot of typing and data entry.
It will be worth it in the end though I think. All of this dose information is a veritable gold mine and I think it will tell us a lot about what radiation doses in IR procedures are like and how the machines are utilized.

It’s going to take a while to get all the numbers in, but I’m chipping away at it a month at a time. 4 months down so far for one room.

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Lighting up the run

With winter coming, most of my runs are getting moved into the dark so I decided I needed to get some gear to help me be more visible. My runs are usually in pretty low traffic areas so after browsing the selection at a sporting goods store, I settled on a couple of these LED lights from Highgear.

Red and green clip-on lights for visibility while running/walking in the dark.
Red and green clip-on lights for visibility while running/walking in the dark.

They come in red, yellow and green. I chose red and green because they seemed the brightest in the store. They’re pretty lightweight (18g each) and have a good grippy clip that is somewhat reminiscent of a medieval torture device. I clip them to my sock and don’t even notice they’re on when I’m out running. When it gets cold enough, I’ll probably clip one to my Barcamp hat.

Three really bright LEDs can be set to light up in three different patterns with a click of the button in the middle. When I look behind as I’m running, I can see road being partly lit up by the light. Should be more than bright enough to attract the attention of anybody coming up behind me.

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Charleston Eats: Carolina Creole

Chicken and sausage gumbo

Chicken sausage gumbo in a styrofoam bowl topped with a slice of cornbread
Chicken sausage gumbo in a styrofoam bowl topped with a slice of cornbread

Encountered the new Carolina Creole food truck at today’s Blessing of the Vines out at Irvin House Vineyards today. The gumbo was pretty tasty. Good cornbread. If I had a little more cash on hand, I’d have gone for a few other things as well. I really wanted to try the gator bites.