Yawn! and my contribution to medical science

Yesterday went fairly smoothly. As predicted, I made it home around 10'ish last night. I logged onto Warcraft for a bit and was there to see beerhorse's hunter tame her first pet, then another, and then finally, the one she was really after, a named cat called The Rake.

I'm wondering if my hunter character is a magnet for rare spawns. I managed to find and tame or at least be around when a number of rare spawns actually spawned for him or someone else to tame. Heck, I spent a ton of time with him recently marking the 3 spawn points for Broken Tooth, figuring out where to stand to check those spots from one location. I wasn't sure I was looking at just the right spot for one of 'em and ran over to check the coordinates when..poof..he spawned right next to me. Had something similar happen in the past when I was after Lupos and Takk the Leaper. Anyway, beerhorse and I looked around for The Rake for a while to no avail and just as I was about to head off to bed, she spotted him. I went over and cleared out other nearby mobs that might interfere with her taming and then freeze-trapped him so she could tame without getting attacked for while. I'm really happy she got him. He was the first pet I wanted to tame long long ago but could never find.

Back on topic...I was surprised my mother held up as well as she did through all the driving around and not being able to eat and such. Once the batteries were replaced, the effect of the again-functioning implant was noticable in about a half hour. It's interesting to see how much the devices they use to program and test the implant have advanced in the past few years. The main one they use now is nicknamed The Interrogator. It's what they use to check whether the thing is actually on and how it's performing. It's a far cry from the original method they used to check.

When my mother first got the thing, it was part of the clinical trials or whatever for the implant. Back then, they really didn't have any good way of telling whether the thing was working. The implant is sensitive and a strong magnetic field can shut it down. (It's powered on and off using powerful magnets) One day, when my father was going to take my mother down to have it looked at years ago, he was saying how the doctors griped about not being able to tell whether it was turned on or off. Basically what they'd do was to do the power on/off procedure, wait a while to see if the patient improved, and if not, do the on/off thing again, assuming that the first time had turned it off. Sometimes they'd have to do it a few times, taking hours, before they could tell.

I made some off the cuff comment to my father that the thing was electronic and I was surprised they couldn't just use something like an electrician's inductive pickup tool to see if there was current flowing, indicating it was on. He ended up mentioning that to the doctors and they got all excited. Of course, their solution was a little different: tune any ol am/fm radio to a frequency with nothing being broadcast. Hold it near the implant and if you heard a buzz from the RF interference from the implant, it meant the thing was on. From there, they moved on to lots more sophisticated devices, such as The Interrogator.

I'm sure someone would've thought of just checking for current flow eventually, but hey, I'm the one that thought of it first. Yay me. Now if only I'd patented the idea...

I'm really beat today. All the driving around and waiting in various waiting rooms (I loathe hospitals, having spent so much time in 'em with other people. It's like they just suck all the energy out of me nowadays.), wore me out. When I got to bed last night, some really heavy thunderstorms rolled in. I was awakened a few times by some really close lightning hits. The storm also had the weather radio going off 4 or 5 times through the night, waking me more. Ugh.

I'm wishing I could close my office door and nap for an hour or so.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that, while the device has an offcial name, it's usually referred to as 'the neurostimulator' which just sounds so Star Trekkish to me.

Marketing!

Y'know, one of the fun, or at least amusing, aspects of the industry for which I work is also the most frustrating: selling ideas/products/the company to various parts of the military or gov.

Nowadays, any presentation pretty much involves PowerPoint and a lot of handouts and such. The real big players such as Northrup Grumman, Lockheed, etc. have the money to go much further and produce little movie presentations. No matter what kind of presentation it is, though, there are certain themes that are guaranteed to be present. Doesn't matter if a company trying to get a contract to make death rays or just better socks; if it's being presented to gov or mil, it's gonna have certain things in it. First off, it's gotta have American flags and plenty of 'em. Toss 'em in the background, or waving over some military guys, or just a big old closup of one with Super Defense Socks! above it. Another thing that's virtually a requirement is 'loved ones.' Just think how the new Mark 29x cuticle scissors will help keep all those families and children (who like to stand in front of American flags!) safer from evil terrorist threats! Lately, campaigns have to have North Korea in them too. You'll see it pop up in maps in the background, or simulations and such. Now you don't actually name the country, but you do include it, often surrounded by ships or tanks or orbital death ray satellites.

As I said, if you're a really big company, you make a video presentation. When doing this, you have to include lots of animations that look like they're from an early/mid 90's video game. Throw in some music and you show the potential customer something like this one pitching the DDG1000 for which a contract was awarded last year:

http://www.defensetech.org/images/ddx_promo.avi


Yeah, it looks like something Paul Verhoven would put into one of his movies, but that's exactly the sort of thing government and military types eat right up. They love that kind of stuff.

The reason I started rambling about this (aside from a serious lack of sleep lately) is that the latest thing they want to try to put on that ship is a battery of railguns. Someone read a bit of scifi somewhere and decided that putting railguns on a ship and raining down eleventy billion tons of random garbage per second would be really cool. Naturally, the materials produced to try to get funding going for that includes images of a DDG1000 parked off the coast of North Korea showing how the range of such a battery would let one ship rain refrigerators and old car parts down on the entire country from one spot.

There's no real point to this post. I'm just tired, rambling, and tossing in some insight into the industry I'm in.