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Headed to the AAPM meeting

This weekend I’m headed to Pittsburgh for a week for the AAPM‘s Annual Meeting and Summer School. This will be my first AAPM meeting and I’m looking forward to catching up with some friends there.

I’ve never been to Pittsburgh so it should be interesting, although I don’t know that I’ll have much time to check out much of the place. Probably just the area within walking distance of my hotel and the convention center. Looking forward to checking out Carnegie Mellon too, where the Summer School is located.

Gotta make sure I remember to bring my camera.

Hopefully I’ll be able to find a TV station there that carries Tour de France coverage, otherwise I’m going to miss the last week of the race.

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We are squishy inside

There are times when my wife tells me far more anatomy than I really want to know. Like how the lungs of her cadaver are all squishy, and the sounds it makes when she squeezes them. She says it’s cool. Me, all I need to know is that there are hard bits protecting the soft squishy bits and that keep the squishy bits from collapsing into a pile of goo.

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Anatomy of a Nokia 6360

So now that my wife has a new Nokia 3200, I thought I’d disassemble the old phone and see if I could make it work reliably again. I figure cell phones can’t have that many parts inside, so it’s probably just a matter of tightening or reseating any connections between boards.
So let’s see what’s in this thing.
This is the Nokia 6360, albeit a rather beat up one.


Continue reading “Anatomy of a Nokia 6360”

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Let’s eat!

Alton Brown says it pretty well in his latest rant/blog after seeing Supersize Me!.

We are fat and sick and dying because we have handed a basic, fundamental and intimate function of life over to corporations. We choose to value our nourishment so little that we entrust it to strangers. We hand our lives over to big companies and then drag them to court when the deal goes bad. This is insanity.

Is MacDonalds food bad for you? What do you think? Does that mean you shouldn’t eat it? No, it just means you shouldn’t live on it or anything else made by someone you wouldn’t hug.

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It’s dead Jim

My wife’s cellphone has finally given up the ghost. If you squeeze and twist it just right, you can get it to start up, but then it dies again. I figure all the times she’s dropped it has knocked something loose inside the phone. So now I have to go find her another one. I was looking at the Motorola V400 because it’s a pretty nice looking phone, but it has no IR port. She uses the IR to beam stuff between her PDA and phone, so now I’m trying to decide if I should just replace the Nokia 6360 with another one or go with the 3200. The 3200 does a little more than the 6360, but it has a smaller battery which might not go over too well with the wife.
This is what Nokia puts on their cell phone battery pages:

Replacing a Battery?
A new Nokia phone may cost you less than a battery, after rebates, with a new wireless service plan.

I wonder if this is a sign of how much of a commodity cell phones have become, when your batteries last longer and cost more than your cell phone…