RSNA Survival Kit No. 6

I'm flying off to the RSNA meeting in 2 days. Besides the usual clothes and anti-boredom gear, I'll be taking along the two presentations I'll be giving there.

After working like a slave on these presentations for the past two months, I'm taking extra measures to insure that they make it safely to Chicago with me. This is a whole lot easier than it was in the days of academic yore, when 35 mm slides ruled the earth.

I'll be putting digital backups of each talk on my laptop, several USB memory sticks, a university SFTP server and in my shiny new Dropbox account. To my computer, Dropbox looks like a 2 GB memory stick, but resides out somewhere in Amazon's S3 server cloud. The clever gnomes at Dropbox have created versions for Mac, Windows and Linux that all work the same way.

I've been storing stuff in clouds (servers) of my own for many years, so this is no new concept for me. What is new is the extreme ease of use and the deep intelligence that the Dropbox dudes have rolled into their product.

Since I'm a radiologist, I'll use a visual metaphor. Suppose you want to make a cup of coffee:

Alas, most network storage solutions look like this:


You know you want a cup of coffee, but how the hell do you get this thing to make it?

By contrast, Dropbox works like this:

The other thing I like about Dropbox is the several intelligent things it does to quietly keep me from fubaring my files. I can't improve on Rands' well-written account of this: Dumbing Down the Cloud.

(via Daring Fireball)

RSNA Survival Kit No. 5

I'm probably not the only radiologist who has longed for some virtual way of chewing their leg off to escape the trap of a truly boring presentation. I therefore did something a little wacky 2 weeks ago, while assembling my RSNA Anti-Boredom Countermeasures Kit™:

Most items in this kit have so far been extremely practical. The latest addition is there purely because I thought it would be cool. After eyeing ads for the MyVu Crystal video goggles for a few months, I took the plunge and bought one for my iPhone.


I should point out that this is not a picture of me. However, if you spot one of these headsets on someone in the meeting crowd, it might be me. Introduce yourself and find out.

So far, the Crystal works as advertised, and displays a virtual 640 x 480 TV screen of acceptable clarity, brightness and color. In a quick test, the virtual screen appeared about 30% wider than our 27" home TV screen when viewed from our living room couch. The audio quality for the built-in earbuds is also quite acceptable.

One caveat for myopic users: if you normally wear glasses, you will also need to order their Myvu Clip-on corrective lens kit. Otherwise, it will be like watching a TV from across the room with your glasses off. Their clip-on kit comes with -2 and -4 diopter options, as well as a blank template you can use to get a custom prescription from your eye doctor.

If I don't see you at the meeting this year, I now have a whole new excuse...

RSNA Survival Kit No. 4

The latest addition to my RSNA Anti-Boredom Countermeasures Kit™: a battery extender for my iPhone.

I must say that my iPhone battery life has been pretty good so far. On my last flight to Chicago, I was able to watch 3 hours of videos and still have plenty of power left. On the other hand, surviving a whole day of tedious presentations is going to take a lot more juice than that.


I was therefore delighted when my new Richard Solo 1800 arrived 2 days ago, just in time for RSNA. This creature has enough power to give a nearly-depleted iPhone a complete charge.  For some reason, it also includes a built-in LED flashlight and laser pointer.  No feces.

The next logical step: start looking for a bladder extender...

(via Daring Fireball)

Radiology Needs a Hot Dog Cannon

OK, this video frankly has nothing at all to do with radiology. I don't care.



On the other hand, a lot of next week's presentations would be hugely improved if RSNA had an official mascot break up the tedium by firing hotdogs (and better yet, emergency espressos) up into the crowds of captive radiologists.

(via Daring Fireball)

Exploding Job Offers

How well does a radiology residency prepare you to negotiate for fellowship positions and jobs? Not too darned well, I'd say.

Joel Spolsky speaks to this in his latest Joel on Software post. His advice is aimed at college students, but is also extremely relevant for any young physicians trying to claw their way up the food chain:

If you’re a college student applying for jobs or summer internships, you’re at something of a disadvantage when it comes to negotiation. That’s because the recruiter does these negotiations for a living, while you’re probably doing it for the first time.

I want to warn you about one trick that’s very common with on-campus recruiters: the cynical “exploding offer.”

In a nutshell, recruiters make time-limited offers to pressure recruits into taking a job. I got this kind of pressure when I was job hunting, and it still goes on. According to one of our recent applicants, a competing radiology fellowship director gave her 45 frakking minutes to make a decision. To her credit, she turned that job down.

Read Joel's post for several great tips on dealing with this kind of sleazy behavior. I wish I had known this stuff years ago.

RSNA Survival Kit No. 3

Another tactic for surviving the RSNA meeting: getting some exercise.

One of my favorite ways of exercising in Chicago is to visit the Chicago Barn Dance Company's great Monday night contra and square dance.

After a long sedentary day at the meeting, a group of us are planning to go and shake the McCormick Place dust off our feet by dancing to hot, live, old-time fiddle music at the Bethany Church hall. As the Barn Dance site suggests:

Start the month off right by dancing to the fine old-time fiddling of Aubrey Swift, leading Grand Ol' Aubrey. Jo Mortland presents a mix of squares and contras guaranteed to lower your brain age by years.

Newcomers session is at 7:30 pm. Hope to see you there.

RSNA Survival Kit No. 2

I'll be asking a lot of my iPhone at RSNA this year. Besides the usual anti-boredom countermeasures, I'll be testing whether several new apps will make my brief visit to Chicago a bit easier.

Restaurant Apps

I'll be eating out most evenings in Chicago, so restaurant applications will be handy.

One of my favorite restaurant apps is Urbanspoon, which I mentioned previously in Dining Out for the Indecisive. It's worked pretty well for me here at home, but I'm looking forward to testing its away game while I'm in Chicago next week.

A test just now for cheap food in the Magnificent Mile area wants to send me to Heaven on Seven, a Cajun cuisine spot on N Wabash. I might just give that place a try.

Another restaurant app I've got my eye on is OpenTable, which will let me find and book open tables at restaurants all over the country. A quick query for a downtown Chicago steak quickly offered me the following 3 times at Morton's:

General search app:

One could just use the Safari browser on the iPhone for general searches. However, the Google Mobile App does a nice job of optimizing Big Google for the phone's smaller screen. Besides, the Google gnomes have just added a very cool new feature: Voice Search. This feature uses the iPhone's proximity sensor to trigger a voice search when you hold the phone up to your ear.

As a test, I said "Gino's East, Chicago" -- one of my favorite Chicago-style pizza places. The app toodled when it was through listening, and sent the following waveform off to Google central:

A few seconds later, that screen was replaced by this one, with just the place I was looking for on North Wells:

Now it's all very well to play with this stuff thousands of miles from Chicago, when there's nothing at stake. However, as Helmuth von Moltke put it:

No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

I'll let you know how these apps hold up under battlefield conditions, when 30,000 famished radiologists simultaneously duke it out for dinner next week. Wish me luck.