good man, john. good show. welcome back to the human race.
but you know what? i’m feeling too good right now. so i’ll only mention the last part.
ladies and gentlemen, i give you the best part, if not the only good part of the bush legacy.
the first african-american president elect in the history of the united states, barack obama!
CONGRATULATIONS AMERICA!!!
IF you haven’t been following the new orleans murder blog, you should be. while he gets over 1500 unique IP visitors per month, my brother (a.k.a the editors), very, very seldom actually allows comments to be posted. since i’m reasonably sure he won’t publish mine for this post, i’m going to go ahead and reprint them here for posterity.
“if it’s a sushi place in NOLA, it’s gotta change it’s name weekly just to keep pace with word of mouth telling people not to eat there.
sushi in that city is a chimeric blend of stale rice, fake crab, and southern food (i.e. disgustingly copious amounts of mayonaise). the purveyors of that garbage should be treated to western justice served up by lovers of eastern food. tar and feather those bitches and ride them out of town on a rail!”
i’ve started working on a project for him, to map each of the incidents he reports on the blog. a so-called google maps mashup. maybe it’ll be done before the end of march. never know.
oh and happy belated internet birthday to d, who turned 30 on monday =D
my present to her was to tell her that she could finally get a kitten. i shall elaborate on that later this week perhaps.
from kevin:
Gym membership? I though you were walking or biking to work or something. In fact, I think you should walk to work every day… stopping at the Tullys for a treat each day.
yeah, the plan is still to ride my bike to work regularly, but that presents the problem of showering before i roll into the office covered in sweat, leaving me chilled to the bone and forcing my officemates to smear menthol paste under their nostrils. that’s actually a big reason for the gym membership. i was shown the shower on our floor and you actually have to go thru a door that says “women” to get to it. you go thru that door and enter a small antechamber with the door to the left leading to the women’s bathroom and the door in front of you to a room with a single shower in it.
it’s really hard to get this next sequence with a damn camera phone. cant get back far enough to get it all in the frame.
when scott told me of the existance of this penicillin breeding ground, he suggested that i wait until most of the people in the building had went home before i made a foray behind the door marked “women”, lest somebody see me exist the outer door and get the wrong idea of what i was doing back there (i assumed).
you can see that these are litterally right behind door number 1. it’s not like it’s down the end of a long hall here.
of course, i negleted to heed this advice and lo and behold, right after a very quick and clandestine peek behind the door to the shower, as i turned around to walk out, some chick walked in behind me and saw me standing there. first she did a double take at the door, just to make sure that she herself hadn’t screwed up and went in the wrong one. i got skurred! i stammered something like, “uh, so there’s a shower behind this door, right?” to which she replied “yes” and gave me a scowl as we tried to manuvuer around each other, while i held the door and she figured out how to get in there without opening the inner door to the bathroom with me standing there.
more clandestine camera work. taken after 6PM.
only after that did it occur to me that maybe the shower was only actually meant for women (an idea that scott retorted with “but that’s why it’s a single unit! so anybody can use it!”). that seems kind of unfair to me, but then, when i was in eighth grade and checked out the girls locker room at the litchfield park elementary/middle school, it struck me as unfair that they should get individual stalls with curtains when we had to do the whole communal shower thing. i value my modesty after all..
i should probably tell that whole story sometime.
i signed up for a gym membership at the place next door this afternoon. then i went and got a pumpkin cheesecake bar at the tully’s across the street from the place, because that’s how i roll.
word.
first day.
as i drove to work and then home again over the last few days of my employment at boeing, fighting despair at the prospect of another 45 to 60 minute commute, the only way i kept from going apeshit, hopping the median and driving north in a southbound lane was by consoling myself with the knowlege that today, finally, i would be able to enjoy the glories of only working 10 minutes from home. and then i had to drive to freakin bellevue this morning (on the otherside of the lake across the perpetually clogged WA-520 floating bridge for those of you not from seattle) to go to the HR company that ventripoint contracts with to handle payroll and benefits.
i figured since today was my first day, i probably should try to make an effort at a good first impression and not, for once, show up in my regular jeans and a t-shirt ensemble. with this in mind, i went downtown yesterday and bought some new dress shirts and pants. when i materialized today in a brown button down shirt and charcoal pants, i think there was a mild bit of well disguised shock and later when all 5 of the ppl in the office (i.e 71% of the current company) were standing around kinda joking about it and i was basically told not to dress like that again. i just looked to damned good i guess. but seriously, this is a start up after all and we are in seattle. if you show up to work in a dress shirt and slacks, you either work at a bank or you’re a pretentious bastich and i dont think anybody in this town owns a evening jacket that’s not made out of goretex.
sorry for the lack of updates. i shall try and be more regular. or rather, i shall try to post more regularly, lest there be some confusion there.
i think that most people declare the end of summer in seattle when you wake up in the morning for the first time and there’s fog or light rain. When you have to wipe the condensation off of the windows and the side view mirrors before you drive off for the day. When you have to actually think about wearing some fleece when you leave the house before 10AM.
then of course there’s the scientists that would say that summer ended exactly on september 24th, because that date corresponds to a particular position of the earth in it’s orbit around the sun.
my criteria has always been a little different however
when i walked out of the house this evening to go home depot, i got hit by this sudden, intense flash of mental imagery. the briefest scene of the halls of gastineau elementary around thanksgiving. the dark, the fluorescent lights, the cold, the warmth, the colors, orange and brown and red, the smells. it’s something that happens every few years on the right day, triggered by something environmental, that comes unbidden, but amazingly comforting. it’s a kind of crispness to the air that’s difficult to describe. maybe a particular smell. i often think it’s the color of the sky at the horizon, right before the sun goes down, but since i got the sudden nostalgic feeling tonight when I left the house after dark, so that couldn’t be it.
that feeling comes and then i start to think about october as a kid in juneau. trick or treating. it comes so quickly on the heels of the first image that it’s almost reflexual (if that’s even a word). i miss alaska. it was a good place to be a kid.
once, the same thing happened when i left the union during my sophomore in colllege. i actually wrote something about that for a class. i wish i could find that file. i was kinda proud of it.
incidentally, i’m watching the premier of bionic woman at the moment. i’m reserving judgement until a future episode, but they cast the chick that plays starbuck on battlestar galactica, so it’s off to a good start at least
this entertaining response to my farewell email comes from a fellow boeing engineer contemplating his career plans outside of the company. it deserves to be immortalized at a cosmology conference.
I will know more in the next month. Things outside are slowing down (play wise, before the ski-season) and I will have some time to make decisions. It is exciting. I only hope that I will be able to make a good one–or just one that is so interesting that somebody somewhere will write a song about me. That’s why you started with Vetripoint, right?… The songs, Zane….the songs….you said it wasn’t for the money. I liked your analogy to the bird-girl, too. Interesting; you were both jealous of the other. Her for your bling, you for her satisfaction in her work. We should try to accelerate both positions (in a particle accelerator, of course) until it approaches the speed of light, and then collide them! The yield (if they don’t disintegrate) would be a perfect harmony of job satisfaction and income. I don’t know what it would look like though… a bird estuary (sp?) with a cube-farm around it, or a forest with an ATM machine complete with an included card and PIN number….
~T
thanks for writing today’s post for me travis! you clever bastard! =D
this was ang’s reaction when i asked her if she thought i could use the text in the last entry as a farewell email to the ppl i work with and such. i was worried that the birth analogy would be a bit much, but this was her reaction
Angela C says:
um.. i think its fine. i just think its kind of long and somewhat narcissistic for a goodbye email.
Zane B says:
lol
Zane B says:
narcissistic
Zane B says:
indeed
Angela C says:
if thats the kind of last impression you want to leave.. then i say by golly send it out.. photos and all!
Zane B says:
not self-depricating enough?
Zane B says:
heh, i’m gonna giggle and obsess about that word all day
Angela C says:
what? narcissistic?
Zane B says:
aye
Zane B says:
didnt realize i came across as so concieted
Angela C says:
yah.. i used it because i was listening to NPR and they used it to describe OJ
Angela C says:
haha
Zane B says:
lol!
Zane B says:
that’s awesome!
Zane B says:
Angela C says:
thanks!
Zane B says:
in fact…
Zane B says:
i’m gonna post that
yeah, i know it was long, but conceited? *sob!* for some reason i put a high value on what ang thinks of me, so now i’m worried that that whole thing makes me come across as a stuck up jerk.
that having been said, i dont think anybody here would be surprised by that stuff and would probably expect nothing less from me.
Wall of text follows:
Amigos y Amigas,
Spanish is an interesting language. While I’m not as fluent in Spanish as I am in German, I did take a few years in high school and of course, I grew up in Arizona so I’ve picked up a little along the way. One thing that I always found curious about the language is how not every letter in the Spanish alphabet really gets its own name.
One example of this are the letters “B” and “V”. The letter “B” is simple enough. Similar to its English equivalent, it’s called “be” (pronounced “bay”) or “be grande” (big “B”). “V” on the other hand, seems to have been deemed insufficiently important to warrant being bestowed with a name of it’s very own, and instead is known as “be chica” or little “B”.
“Why,” you may be asking yourself right now, “is this remotely important?” Well, on October 2nd, I shall leave the warm, safe, friendly womb of the Boeing Company, squeeze out past the armed sentries who so diligently guard her commercial sites, and begin life anew (albeit not bare-assed and screaming) as the sole mechanical engineer at a medical device/biotech startup in lower Queen Anne. A company called Ventripoint.
A six year gestation period is pretty long. I feel like an elephant.
“So,” you might say, “Explain to me exactly what a tool designer from an aerospace company would do at a snazzy, high tech medical device startup? For that matter, what do they make there?”
Well, I’m glad you asked. Let me answer the second question first. Ventripoint is the holder of an exclusive licensing agreement to commercialize a patent from the UW Department of Cardiology. To summarize their website, the system that they’re developing involves using echocardiography (i.e. ultrasound) to accurately determine heart volume, or more specifically, right ventricular volume. Using a hospital’s existing ultrasound machine and a three-dimensional tracking system to determine probe vector, the sonographer will chose from a series of about 30 points on the US scan. These points are then used by the proprietary database of 200 hearts collected at UW to parametrically spit out a number (and sometimes a 3D model) back to the cardiologist. All of this happens in about the space of an hour, from the beginning of the scan to the cardiologist holding the printout.
Why is this important? Tens of thousands of people in the US (and probably millions world-wide), primarily children, suffer from congenital heart disease. As ventricular volume is a primary indicator of the progression of the disease, each of these people are expected to have their ventricular volume checked at least once a year and often twice. Currently, there are only two ways to do that. The first is using fluoroscopy, which in layman’s terms is basically a real-time, continuous x-ray. Not good for anybody. The second (much safer method) is using MRI, which can cost around $10k per scan, take several hours to perform, eats up time on a very expensive machine and takes days to analyze the results. The technology that Ventripoint will be selling will cost the patient $135 and can be done 8 times in a shift.
I could tie this in, in so many ways. This is not an FDA approved method for measuring ventricular volume
My job will be… well, it’s gonna be a lot of jobs actually. I’ll be responsible for validating the 3D tracking system they’ve chosen (or possibly identifying a more reliable one), figuring out how to fix a the tracking sensor to the probe (of which there are probably hundreds of designs out there), developing a calibration routine for sensor/probe pairs (because the probes aren’t made with high tolerances), and a crap load of other things, including designing a mattress to keep the patient comfortable and relatively still.
“OK, OK,” I can hear you saying. “I’ll buy for the moment that you might actually have something to contribute that kind of work, but that doesn’t explain why you’re going. I mean, heh heh… we know it can’t be the money.”
Yes, you are right. It’s definitely not the money. This is already a long diatribe and if I were reading it from one of you, I would have probably quit a long time ago, so I’ll keep this short. I like to think of my friend Kate, who once lamented to me that she was making less than half of my salary studying the mating habits of some species of bird near flagstaff. Ultimately though, I was the one jealous of her. Working at Boeing has it’s ups and downs. Sometimes it’s fun and sometimes it’s nauseatingly tedious, but it’s never been for me what studying birds was for Kate. It’s never been soul satisfying. I want to move out of aerospace and into a field where I can see exactly how everything that I work on will benefit somebody else. Where what I do will make a difference to somebody’s quality of life. Building airplanes is cool and all, but it’s not helping sick children. You know… minus helping them to push just that little bit over the edge from nausea to vomiting that is. I mean, we all feel better after we throw up, right?
Oh and yeah, my commute will go from 30-45 minutes each way to 10 by car. Although I’ll be biking and bussing it from now on. I tell D that that’s not a major factor in my decision to take the job, but that’s a bald-faced lie!
Predictions abound that when that particular period is over (or, god forbid, the company go out of business) that I will one day return to the Boeing Company, as many do over their careers. And I’m sure that after the intial excitement of being out in the real world, I’m sure I’ll be wishing I could do just that. However, just as one cannot climb back into the womb (usually because we’ve gotten way to big) I don’t think I can let that happen. This is gonna be the first step to a brand new world and I’d like to think I’m not the type to turn back from adventure. Call me Indy. It was my nickname in college.
I can’t come up with a good caption this time.
Anyways, back to the spanish thing. See, I’m leaving the “Big B” for the “Little B”. You see what I did there? Get it? Truly, I have been blessed with a wit and way with words that has no equal. Don’t deny it!
