I've recently become a fan of the animated video blog at Deadpan, Inc.. Here's one of my favorites.
(via BizarroBlog)
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Slap My Ass and Call Me Sally
My iPhone led me to the best meal I had in Chicago last week.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, my RSNA Survival Kit included an iPhone app called Urbanspoon. A random shake of the iPhone linked me to Heaven on Seven, a downtown restaurant specializing in Cajun cuisine.
Five other famished radiologists humored me and went there for dinner one night, mostly on the basis of my iPhone being really cool, and despite the hotel concierge's lukewarm comment:
As I mentioned in an earlier post, my RSNA Survival Kit included an iPhone app called Urbanspoon. A random shake of the iPhone linked me to Heaven on Seven, a downtown restaurant specializing in Cajun cuisine.
Five other famished radiologists humored me and went there for dinner one night, mostly on the basis of my iPhone being really cool, and despite the hotel concierge's lukewarm comment:
I haven't actually heard anything negative about the place...
This promise of heat was continued inside, where a whole wall of the restaurant is covered from floor to ceiling with hot sauce bottles. We thought this was pretty handy, just in case we somehow ran through all 15 bottles of hot sauce already sitting on our table.
As we sat down, we ran into an encouraging colleague from Atlanta. He loves the place enough to eat there every year, and would have given the food 5 thumbs up if he just had a few more opposable digits.
There were way too many tasty-sounding things on the menu for one meal. Being a displaced child of the South, I would love to have tried them all, but somehow forebore. None of us were hungry enough to go for "Jimmy's Big Ass Rib Special", but we were mightily tempted by tall, chilled Hurricanes and a sour cocktail called a "Mother Pucker".
I had a cup of jambalaya, followed by a plate of grilled shrimp and andouille sausage on rice with ravigote sauce. As my dad would have said, it was larruping.
A caveat on dining with multilinguals...
Our group of six didn't match the American monolingual stereotype. Among us we had native or fluent speakers of several languages, including English, Spanish, French French, French-Canadian French, and Nepalese, as well as a smattering of phrases in Russian, Hungarian and Ukrainian. During the evening, we shared many linguistic adventures from the workplace, including the following:
The more physicians at one table, the more likely it is that the conversation will swerve abruptly into medical matters. We were pretty well-behaved until the French radiologist at our table wondered if American andouille sausage was made from actual pig intestine, like the stuff he ate back home. This led to questions about which actual anatomic part of the pig intestine (duodenum? jejunum? ileum? colon?) was used for sausage. By the time this topic finally ran its course, the conversation had further devolved into speculations about whether certain intestinal diseases actually led to tastier sausage (I'll have the backwash ileitis, with a side of Crohn's...).
Non-physicians may be interested (or disgusted) to know just how many classic descriptions of anatomic pathology use food terms (bread-and-butter pericarditis, currant-jelly stools, coffee-ground emesis, salt-and-pepper skull, etc.). I and my fellow radiology residents once considered writing a paper on this very topic, and were able to name 50 examples just off the top of our heads. It's probably good advice to not shop for food or do an autopsy when you're really hungry.
A word on portion size...
Come to Heaven on Seven hungry but be prepared to share. The waitress brought one of my pals a piece of chocolate cake almost as big as his head. That and the key lime pie I ordered were pretty darned good, but way too much for the six of us to finish.
In the words of the Governator, I'll be back.
As we sat down, we ran into an encouraging colleague from Atlanta. He loves the place enough to eat there every year, and would have given the food 5 thumbs up if he just had a few more opposable digits.
There were way too many tasty-sounding things on the menu for one meal. Being a displaced child of the South, I would love to have tried them all, but somehow forebore. None of us were hungry enough to go for "Jimmy's Big Ass Rib Special", but we were mightily tempted by tall, chilled Hurricanes and a sour cocktail called a "Mother Pucker".
I had a cup of jambalaya, followed by a plate of grilled shrimp and andouille sausage on rice with ravigote sauce. As my dad would have said, it was larruping.
A caveat on dining with multilinguals...
Our group of six didn't match the American monolingual stereotype. Among us we had native or fluent speakers of several languages, including English, Spanish, French French, French-Canadian French, and Nepalese, as well as a smattering of phrases in Russian, Hungarian and Ukrainian. During the evening, we shared many linguistic adventures from the workplace, including the following:
- 1. The word "focus" gives native French speakers huge difficulties. Their every instinct, especially when tired or distracted, tells them to pronounce it as if saying "fornicate us".
2. The tilde can occasionally be critical in medical Spanish. The simple question, "¿Cuantos años tiene su hijo?" normally means "How old is your son?" However, if you want to see the whites of a mother's eyes, just drop the tilde and the question becomes "How many anuses does your son have?"
3. The phrase "go outside and let the ducks kick you" is an unspeakable profanity in Ukrainian.
The more physicians at one table, the more likely it is that the conversation will swerve abruptly into medical matters. We were pretty well-behaved until the French radiologist at our table wondered if American andouille sausage was made from actual pig intestine, like the stuff he ate back home. This led to questions about which actual anatomic part of the pig intestine (duodenum? jejunum? ileum? colon?) was used for sausage. By the time this topic finally ran its course, the conversation had further devolved into speculations about whether certain intestinal diseases actually led to tastier sausage (I'll have the backwash ileitis, with a side of Crohn's...).
Non-physicians may be interested (or disgusted) to know just how many classic descriptions of anatomic pathology use food terms (bread-and-butter pericarditis, currant-jelly stools, coffee-ground emesis, salt-and-pepper skull, etc.). I and my fellow radiology residents once considered writing a paper on this very topic, and were able to name 50 examples just off the top of our heads. It's probably good advice to not shop for food or do an autopsy when you're really hungry.
A word on portion size...
Come to Heaven on Seven hungry but be prepared to share. The waitress brought one of my pals a piece of chocolate cake almost as big as his head. That and the key lime pie I ordered were pretty darned good, but way too much for the six of us to finish.
In the words of the Governator, I'll be back.
A Crazy Guy Who Blogs About Radiology
Overheard from an old friend and colleague one evening at RSNA:
"...there's this crazy guy who blogs about radiology under a pseudonym."Gosh, I thought -- that sounds interesting.
So I asked, "Ummm, what pseudonym would that be?"
"He calls himself the Samurai Radiologist. I've been looking everywhere for a guy wearing video goggles at the meeting. He hasn't shown up at any of the places I've looked."I suppose that Lamont Cranston and the Scarlet Pimpernel agonized over revealing their secret identities to friends. However, I didn't, because I don't have as much at stake as they did.
My pseudonym is just a way of separating my more turgid prose as a university professor from some of the wacky-ass things I feel free to say in this blog. To its credit, the university I work for has much bigger fish to fry, and could probably care less what I say here.
So, with no flash of lightning, no thunderclap, and no swirling cloak, I unmasked myself. Something along the lines of, "Uh, dude -- I'm the Samurai Radiologist. I left the goggles in my hotel room". **
If you see someone looking vaguely pseudonymous at your next radiology meeting, introduce yourself -- it might be me. At worst, it may start an interesting conversation with some other worthy person.
** I did show him the goggles the next day, and he pronounced them very cool.
Friday, December 5, 2008
RSNA Survival Kit Update
MyVu Crystal video goggles
The MyVu Crystal video goggles I mentioned earlier were a big hit with the flight attendants on my trip home from RSNA. Neither of them had ever seen a set of these, even among the business geeks in first class. One attendant was intrigued enough that she stopped the whole beverage service to take the MyVu for a short spin. Her one-word review: "Awesome!".
The charge on the goggles was ample for 3 hours of video. My brain wore out long before the charge on its battery.
RichardSolo 1800
A significant downside to devices like this are that you have to remember to charge them before a flight. I got so engrossed chatting with pals at my meeting that I forgot to top off my iPhone and battery extender before heading for the airport.
Chicago's O'Hare airport may be a world leader in AED deployment, but it is a world loser in deployment of power outlets for travelers. I finally spotted a cloaked outlet next to a vacant boarding gate and grabbed a few more amp-hours of charge.
As I sat there charging 4 geeky devices, I had a sudden Doh! moment, when it occurred to me that I already possessed a battery extender far more puissant than the 1800. My fully-charged laptop has a huge lithium battery that could power my iPhone all the way to Japan. Even though the seats back in steerage never have enough room for me to use my laptop as a computer, there is always plenty of space to use it as an iPhone charger.
On the other hand, the WiFi at O'Hare was pretty zippy -- fast enough to grab another movie off iTunes before boarding.
Geek cred re-established, I had an otherwise uneventful flight home.
The MyVu Crystal video goggles I mentioned earlier were a big hit with the flight attendants on my trip home from RSNA. Neither of them had ever seen a set of these, even among the business geeks in first class. One attendant was intrigued enough that she stopped the whole beverage service to take the MyVu for a short spin. Her one-word review: "Awesome!".
The charge on the goggles was ample for 3 hours of video. My brain wore out long before the charge on its battery.
RichardSolo 1800
A significant downside to devices like this are that you have to remember to charge them before a flight. I got so engrossed chatting with pals at my meeting that I forgot to top off my iPhone and battery extender before heading for the airport.
Chicago's O'Hare airport may be a world leader in AED deployment, but it is a world loser in deployment of power outlets for travelers. I finally spotted a cloaked outlet next to a vacant boarding gate and grabbed a few more amp-hours of charge.
As I sat there charging 4 geeky devices, I had a sudden Doh! moment, when it occurred to me that I already possessed a battery extender far more puissant than the 1800. My fully-charged laptop has a huge lithium battery that could power my iPhone all the way to Japan. Even though the seats back in steerage never have enough room for me to use my laptop as a computer, there is always plenty of space to use it as an iPhone charger.On the other hand, the WiFi at O'Hare was pretty zippy -- fast enough to grab another movie off iTunes before boarding.
Geek cred re-established, I had an otherwise uneventful flight home.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Elevator 2.5
The RSNA is holding its annual meeting at McCormick Place: a multiplex of huge and bizarrely-lit barn-like structures.
Radiologists work all day in the dark, and often commute both ways in the dark this half of the year. We therefore tend to be a bit pallid as a group. This natural pallor is not improved by the odd, not-found-in-nature spectrum of the overhead lights here.
After spending the morning wandering through crowds of corpse-hued radiologists, a lunch-time elevator ride added briefly to my sense of unreality. I did a double-take while punching in my destination, and pulled out my iPhone for the following picture:
Google led me to a floor plan of level 2.5, but so far, not to any explanation of how it got numbered thusly. If McCormick Place were built by Microsoft, I'd conclude that the level has been out of beta for a few years now, and is now finally safe enough for general use. Even so, most experienced users would wait a few floors and get off on level 5.0.
After spending the morning wandering through crowds of corpse-hued radiologists, a lunch-time elevator ride added briefly to my sense of unreality. I did a double-take while punching in my destination, and pulled out my iPhone for the following picture:
Google led me to a floor plan of level 2.5, but so far, not to any explanation of how it got numbered thusly. If McCormick Place were built by Microsoft, I'd conclude that the level has been out of beta for a few years now, and is now finally safe enough for general use. Even so, most experienced users would wait a few floors and get off on level 5.0.
Whatever the reason, I suppose we can be grateful that at least they named it using the metric system. History suggests that it could have been a lot worse...
RichardSolo 1800 Update
I briefly posted a few days ago about the RichardSolo 1800 battery pack. Here's a quick update from the RSNA battlefront on this device.
After lunch today, a friend noted that her iPhone was down in the red. Mine was down to about 40%, so out came the 1800 -- an hour later, her phone was back up to 100%. Another hour later, mine was back up to 85%.
Collectively it seems that we got just under 1.5 full charges out of the device -- an encouraging first test.
After lunch today, a friend noted that her iPhone was down in the red. Mine was down to about 40%, so out came the 1800 -- an hour later, her phone was back up to 100%. Another hour later, mine was back up to 85%.
Collectively it seems that we got just under 1.5 full charges out of the device -- an encouraging first test.
Made it to Chicago
I made it safely to Chicago (and the RSNA meeting) from a place that is at least 20 degrees warmer. It was a fine flight until the last 30 minutes, when we descended into a cloud. We then experienced enough bumps to make us think we were hitting snowballs during the rest of our way down.
.
Chicago currently has about an inch or two of accumulated snow on the ground. The iPhone picture above from my hotel room hints at some of the drear awaiting one without. The wind coming in off Lake Michigan feels at times like it could strip the flesh right off one's face.
Fortunately, I bought all of my winter hiking gear along except for one key ingredient: the polypro underwear. Alas, the Chicago branch of REI is about 3 miles away from my hotel -- a tad too far for me to feel like walking in this weather. I'm only here for a few short days, so I'll just pretend that my legs aren't that cold.
.Chicago currently has about an inch or two of accumulated snow on the ground. The iPhone picture above from my hotel room hints at some of the drear awaiting one without. The wind coming in off Lake Michigan feels at times like it could strip the flesh right off one's face.
Fortunately, I bought all of my winter hiking gear along except for one key ingredient: the polypro underwear. Alas, the Chicago branch of REI is about 3 miles away from my hotel -- a tad too far for me to feel like walking in this weather. I'm only here for a few short days, so I'll just pretend that my legs aren't that cold.
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