Imablog Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.

Fetch that bouncy green round thing!

Until we get the yard for our new place fenced, we're going to have to find a nice safe enclosed place for Nala to run around in. The tennis court here comes in handy for that. I'm trying to teach her how to fetch things. She does pretty good running after the ball, needs a little bit of work on bringing it back though. Early on in our play session, she'll come zooming back with the ball and overshoot me and just keep on running, so then I have to coax her back. During the middle of the session when she's run out some of that Lab enthusiasm, she's a little bit more reliable at bringing the ball back. Then towards the end of the seson, sometimes she'll just drop the ball and keep on running back. Other times I'll toss the ball, she saunters over to it and just keeps on going. That usually marks the end of the play session, so it's back home to do other things. Following a play session like this, that's usually a nap.

We've managed to get her to drop things reliably, which is a good thing because Nala's forever picking up stuff. She has this penchant for munching on live oak leaves. I'm not sure if she finds them tasty, thinks they look like her kibble or if she's just checking them all out.

Echolocation by piledriver

There are two great big honking machines on the site of the new hospital hammering big long concrete pilings into the ground. You can almost do the bat thing and practically navigate the construction site with your eyes closed just by listening for the echoes from the pile driving. With a little bit of concentration, I can just about make a mental map of the surrounding buildings just by the echoes. Of course knowing where the surrouding buildings are helps a bit too.

When they're both going at the same time, they make quite the racket. And from the looks of all the big long trucks delivering pilings, it's going to be going on for quite some time.

Permanent residency status finally!

After a 2 1/2 year patient wait, we were summoned to the Charleston USCIS office (formerly INS) for my Adjustment of Status interview. Armed with my ream of paperwork (still ended up forgetting a couple of things), we headed off to their new location off Highway 7. A much nicer setting than their previous location on Meeting St, although not nearly as nice a view. Actually no view at all.

After a short wait (30 minutes or so), we met with the USCIS officer, told him our story, gave him the requested documentation, answered his questions and at the end I was rewarded with a stamp in my passport giving me permanent resident status (more colloquially known as the "green card")! I'm told the actual card should be coming in 2-6 months. Hopefully it doesn't get lost in the mail when we move.

Now I can live and work here without having to remember to renew this or that every year. Big weight taken off now that I don't have to worry about it.

Now if I can only get this house thing wrapped up...but that's a story for another post.

Review: Babylon 5: The Complete Series

This is a fantastic DVD set. Babylon 5 was a cutting edge series when it came out nearly 10 years ago, and to me is still one of the best sci-fi series ever. But this isn't about the series. Everyone knows the series was great and what it was all about.

The 5 season collection is pretty huge. With 6 DVDs and 22 episodes in each season, it's a lot of TV watching. Nothing any die-hard B5 fan wouldn't object to or find overly strenuous, especially since the entire series can be watched commercial free (with pauses for bathroom breaks and food of course)!

The slip cases for each season are nice and colourful and provide a very nice presentation for the series. Each season comes in a book-style cover with disk on each side of a plastic DVD disk holder. My only complaint with the boxed set is that the disk holders are simply glued in and not very solidly at that. Already I've had a two of the disk holders pop out of the covers when they got dropped (onto carpet). The cover is creased between each plastic holder to make for easy opening, but doesn't seem like it will withstand a lot of opening and closing. It's not likely to fall apart soon, but it seems to me the binding could have been done a little better and more solidly.

There are special features on disks 1, 4 and 6 of each season, which I haven't had a chance to go through yet. 2 or 3 episodes in each season have commentary from JMS and others. The special features consist mostly of character, equipment and technology background in the form of 'data files'. Gag reels are included in the last couple of seasons. A few short documentaries are also sprinkled here and there.

The series itself of course I give 5/5 to. The DVD collection I'll have to give 4/5 to, mostly because of the relatively poor binding quality and ho-hum special features.

Approaching the end of the house saga

It's finally coming to the end. We're going to end up closing a few weeks later and paying a bunch more in closing costs because of issues with the appraisal and getting that clarified.

First it started with the loan people contacting me asking why I hadn't responded to their emails about the appraisal report. Since I never received the email with the appraisal report, and didn't know the appraiser had gone back out there, naturally I was a little confused. So, a copy of the report was sent out again. Much to my surprise, the appraiser valued the house somewhat lower than the purchase price...$14 000 less. So then began a two week long exchange of recent sales figures, discussions and reviews of the appraisal, which didn't end up changing anything in the end.

So after all that, there were two choices: walk away and start the house hunting process all over again, or cough up an extra $14 000 at closing to cover the difference between the purchase price and the appraised value. After all, the lender isn't going to want to finance a house that costs more than someone thinks it's worth. I know if I was a mortgage lender, I certainly wouldn't.

Crap. $14 000 is going to be a lot to pull out of my pants. Well, I figure it'll be short term pain, long term gain. We'll be here at least for the next 4 years, location is pretty prime (10 minute commute to work in moderate traffic at the worst), nice big house, nice big yard. Even if after 4 years the appraised value only appreciates up to the original purchase price, I think we'll have gotten our money's worth (as long as a hurricane doesn't take it out on us before then), and we'll still have a some equity built up into it.

Still, it's a little bit inconvenient though. One of the tips in all the house buying books we read was not to buy or build the most expensive house in the area for just this reason. I suppose if it's the house you want and there aren't any other comparable houses for sale where you want them, you just have to bite the bullet and go for it.

Time to think about storm season

Mark Treadwell over at Geekswithblogs.net has a hurricane category with a bunch of good tips for preparing and suriving hurricane season.

Now that I'll have a house to deal with this year, there will be a lot of work for me researching and acquiring the tools to storm-proof the house.

Journal Club: Radiation Exposure of Patients Undergoing Whole-Body Dual-Modality 18F-FDG PET/CT Examinations

It's been a while since the last journal club article. Partly because I hadn't come across too many articles I thought were interesting enough, mostly because I haven't had much time to do much journal reading lately. And now from this month's Journal of Nuclear Medicine come two articles that I found very interesting and informative.

The first one looks at radiation exposures to patients from combined PET/CT scans, an increasingly popular (and quickly becoming 'standard of care') method of diagnosing cancer and monitoring therapy efficacy. CT and PET radiation doses were examined at 4 hospitals each employing a variety of techniques: low-dose CT for attenuation correction, diagnostic CT for attenuation correction and localization, contrast and non-contrast studies. Total radiation dose came out to around 25 mSv (about 7 mSv from PET, 18 mSv from CT) and was surprisingly mostly independent of the protocol used.

A handy table of dose coefficients for various organs is also provided, which will make it easy to estimate the radiation dose to various organs from an exam given the injected activity and CTDI from the CT scan.

What was not clear was if any of the scanners had any of the CT dose reduction methods being used in the newest scanners (the ones that dynamically adjust tube current throughout the scan). These have been shown to effectively reduce patient dose while maintaining a desired image quality. I'm sure these methods incorporated into the newest PET/CT units can bring down the radiation dose a little more.

This ought to be a useful paper for any medical physicist or radiologist finding the need to estimate radiation dose from a PET/CT scan, or wanting to optimize their protocols to minimize dose.

Gunnar Brix, PhD, Ursula Lechel, MS, Gerhard Glatting, PhD, Sibylle I. Ziegler, PhD, Wolfgang Münzing, PhD, Stefan P. Müller, MD and Thomas Beyer, PhD, "Radiation Exposure of Patients Undergoing Whole-Body Dual-Modality ¹⁸F-FDG PET/CT Examinations", JNM 46 608-613 (2005)

We investigated radiation exposure of patients undergoing whole-body ¹⁸F-FDG PET/CT examinations at 4 hospitals equipped with different tomographs. Methods: Patient doses were estimated by using established dose coefficients for ¹⁸F-FDG and from thermoluminescent measurements performed on an anthropomorphic whole-body phantom. Results: The most relevant difference between the protocols examined was the incorporation of CT as part of the combined PET/CT examination: Separate low-dose CT scans were acquired at 2 hospitals for attenuation correction of emission data in addition to a contrast-enhanced CT scan for diagnostic evaluation, whereas, at the other sites, contrast-enhanced CT scans were used for both purposes. Nevertheless, the effective dose per PET/CT examination was similar, about 25 mSv. Conclusion: The dosimetric concepts presented in this study provide a valuable tool for the optimization of whole-body ¹⁸F-FDG PET/CT protocols. Further reduction of patient exposure can be achieved by modifications to the existing hardware and software of PET/CT systems.

HHGtG: To go or not to go

I was really looking forward to going to see Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when it opens in a couple of weeks. But after reading parts of this review (warning: massive spoilers, non-spoiler version here), I'm not so sure I want to bother with it now.

I really wasn't expecting much out of it anyway, since 99% of what makes HHGtG so funny is the small dialogue and obscure British humour that's likely to get cut in any movie adaptation.

Rats...now I wish I hadn't packed up my big HHGtG Trilogy in Five Parts compilation...I'll have to wait until it gets unpacked before I can start reading it again.

Found at Slashdot.org.

Journal Club: Optimizing Imaging Protocols for Overweight and Obese Patients: A Lutetium Orthosilicate PET/CT Study

The second article again comes from the Journal of Nuclear Medicine and discusses the optimization of PET/CT protocols for large patients, something that is quickly becoming a problem in all imaging modalities. Large patients are the bane of all imaging modalities. Noisy, low contrast x-ray images and low count-density nuclear medicine images from increased attenuation and scatter make for images of marginal diagnostic quality.

Most PET imaging protocols call for a fixed amount of activity to be administered to the patient (typically 5-10 mCi) regardless of the patient's weight. For thin to normal sized patients, this makes for decent images. For larger patients though, often the result is a noisy image. This is typically compensated for by increasing the imaging time per bed position, which of course increases the total imaging time, the possibility of patient motion artifacts and may not be tolerated well by all patients.

Going to a weight based method (0.21 mCi/kg in the paper) for determining the amount of activity to administer the patient along with a small increase in imaging time per bed position is one method proposed by the authors. The idea behind this is that larger patients get a larger dose (up to 20 mCi), which compensates for photons lost due to increased attenuation. This also means that the imaging time per bed position can be kept the same, or increased by a smaller amount. At the 5 min/bed position time recommended by the authors, this comes out to roughly 30-40 minutes/study.

Benjamin S. Halpern, MD, Magnus Dahlbom, PhD, Martin A. Auerbach, MD, Christiaan Schiepers, MD, PhD, Barbara J. Fueger, MD, Wolfgang A. Weber, MD, Daniel H.S. Silverman, MD, PhD, Osman Ratib, MD, PhD and Johannes Czernin, MD, "Optimizing Imaging Protocols for Overweight and Obese Patients: A Lutetium Orthosilicate PET/CT Study", JNM 46: 603-607

High photon attenuation and scatter in obese patients affect image quality. The purpose of the current study was to optimize lutetium orthosilicate (LSO) PET image acquisition protocols in patients weighing ≥91 kg (200 lb). Methods: Twenty-five consecutive patients (16 male and 9 female) weighing ≥91 kg (200 lb; range, 91-168 kg [200-370 lb]) were studied with LSO PET/CT. After intravenous injection of 7.77 MBq (0.21 mCi) of ¹⁸F-FDG per kilogram of body weight, PET emission scans were acquired for 7 min/bed position. Single-minute frames were extracted from the 7 min/bed position scans to reconstruct 1–7 min/bed position scans for each patient. Three reviewers independently analyzed all 7 reconstructed whole-body images of each patient. A consensus reading followed in cases of disagreement. Thus, 175 whole-body scans (7 per patient) were analyzed for number of hypermetabolic lesions. A region-of-interest approach was used to obtain a quantitative estimate of image quality. Results: Fifty-nine hypermetabolic lesions identified on 7 min/bed position scans served as the reference standard. Interobserver concordance increased from 64% for 1 min/bed position scans to 70% for 3 min/bed position scans and 78% for 4 min/bed position scans. Concordance rates did not change for longer imaging durations. Region-of-interest analysis revealed that image noise decreased from 21% for 1 min/bed position scans to 14%, 13%, and 11% for, respectively, 4, 5, and 7 min/bed position scans. When compared with the reference standard, 14 lesions (24%) were missed on 1 min/bed position scans but only 2 (3%) on 4 min/bed position scans. Five minute/bed position scans were sufficient to detect all lesions identified on the 7 min/bed position scans. Conclusion: Lesion detectability and reader concordance peaked for 5 min/bed position scans, with no further diagnostic gain achieved by lengthening the duration of PET emission scanning. Thus, 5 min/bed position scans are sufficient for optimal lesion detection with LSO PET/CT in obese patients.

GMail keeps growing and growing

Google Mail is up to 2089 MB plus change of storage, and still growing. Ever since April 1, the storage space counter they've had has been going up and up. Slower now than it was before. So how much higher will it go? Is it all real?

Bai bai T3

Well, seems PalmOne has dropped the T3 from their Tungsten line. I have to say that since the T3, I've been decidely underwhelmed by PalmOne's latest offerings. None of PalmOne's current offerings really grab me or make me say "Ooooo, I need that!" like my Visor Platinum or T3 did. And with Sony out of the PDA market now, there isn't much left to choose from. The T5 just seems a little too long and clunky to me, while the E2 just doesn't seem to have the technical sleekness I'm looking for. The C is chubby looking but not for me. I just don't need wireless and a dinky little keyboard in my PDA.

So what's next? Buzz about the Life Drive says it should be coming out in the next week or so. It looks to be a bit of a chunky one if the renderings are accurate.

In the meantime, hopefully my T3 will last a good long time and something equally cool comes out by then.

Sprouting like a weed

This little puppy of ours is sprouting like a weed. She'll be 4 months in a less than 2 weeks, and at her last vet visit she weighed in at 33 pounds. Nala gets a kick out of visiting the vet. Heck, with all those people wanting to pet her, I wouldn't mind either if I was a dog. More booster shots and her rabies vaccine yesterday and she didn't even notice the needles. The bordetella vaccine she got intranasally made her stop and pause for a bit though.

She's definitely a lot taller now. Training her is getting to be a bit of a challenge. She seems to be getting to that age where she wants to try to rearrange the pecking order and challenge our rank above her. She's been testing us a lot more, so lately we've had to be a lot more stern when giving her commands. I'll be glad when we can get her into some obedience classes and get a little bit of professional help and advice with training.

Hot dog

Going for walks can be a trip now that it's getting warmer. Being a black dog, staying out in the sun can be a bit of a problem heat wise. But she's figured out that the darker shady areas are nice and cool to walk in. So when we're out for walks, she makes beelines for the nearest shady area and slows down her walking. When she's back out in the sun, her pace picks up towards the next shady spot she can see. It goes back and forth like this until the walk is done. Once we get within sight of our apartment building, the pace really picks up and if she's got the energy left, sometimes we'll break out into a run. And then back upstairs into a cool air-conditioned apartment and a big long slurpy drippy drink of water.

Who's Your Famous Blogger Twin?

Who's Your Famous Blogger Twin?

Found via Dude from Philly

Med student quote of the day

Today is the turning point. If you fail now, all you are is someone who's had their finger up someone's butt. But if you pass and graduate, then you're a doctor who's done a proctology exam - Anonymous med student following the male GI/GU examination

New MT!

Fresh off 6A's software mill is MT 3.16 boasting lots of fixes and code improvements.

Not a lot of changes or fixes that affect me significantly, although there are a few things that should keep newbies out of trouble.

• Authors can no longer delete their own accounts, which could result in disabled installations. (Seen more than a few people get nailed by this on the forums)
• Improved the application's ability to guess the desired weblog URL and filesystem path in new weblog setup screen. (Should be very helpful for newbies and non-techies)
• On setup of dynamic rendering, Movable Type tries to create most of the pieces it needs (.htaccess, compiled-templates directory) on its own. Better error messages help the user create these pieces when Movable Type doesn't have sufficient rights.
• Fixed a bug in which, given a large number of entries, rebuilds may time out when using dynamic templates (under dynamic publishing the FileInfo table is rebuilt, instead of pages on the filesystem). We are now doing these "rebuilds" in stages to prevent timeouts in the browser. (Always wondered what there was to rebuild for dynamic archives)
• Improved subcategory hierarchy display in the interface. Subcategories are displayed hierarchically in the following places: the Primary Category dropdown on the New Entry, Edit Entry and Quickpost screens, the category filter dropdown on the List Entries screen, the category filter and assignment dropdowns on the Power Edit screen and the popup category creation window.

Complete list of changes in the Changelog

Did I see a motorcade?

So I'm sitting at the light this morning waiting to get onto the main road so I can head off to work. Just as the light turns green, a couple of motorcycle cops stop in the middle of the intersection, stop traffic in one lane (headed the way I'm trying to go of course), wave traffic through in the other lane. I'm thinking this is a little bit early for a funeral procession and then shortly afterward a caravan of 7 or 8 police cars go through all with lights flashing. Definitely not a funeral procession.

Finally after waiting at the red light again, I'm finally on my way to work. The 8AM news comes on the radio, and they start talking about Bill Clinton (minus Hillary) taking a break down in Kiawah. Nowhere near the Folly Beach direction these police cars were headed from, but maybe he decided to take a jog down Folly or something.

Or maybe it was just a bunch of people headed to where The Bill was going.

Guess I'll never know...

Happy Anniversary!

Happy anniversary to my lovely wife! Hard to believe we got married 4 years ago today. Doesn't seem like it's been that long at all. Looking forward to many more years to come.

So long car!

After 6 years of mostly faithful service, I said good bye to our 91 Honda Accord today. It really hadn't been getting driven around much at all these past few months, and a few weeks ago decided not to start anymore. Plus there was something causing a slow drain on the battery. We decided that with all the outflow of money from the house, it was probably better to get rid of it. We don't really need two cars right now anyway.

We ended up donating the car to the American Diabetes Association. I probably could have sold it for a decent price by spending some cash and getting it back up and running, but there's not much spare cash at the moment to pump into the car to get it up and running. With our time frame for moving, donating the car seemed like it would be the most expedient way of disposing of the car rather than waiting for someone to come around and buy it.

Almost made it to 180 000 miles on the car too.

Boy, do I feel welcome!

USCIS sent me not just one welcome letter informing me of my new permanent residency status, but 7 of them! Maybe this is some form of beaurocratic enthusiasm or something. One would have been just fine. But 7? I guess I could frame one, keep another one on file. Maybe friends and relatives would like one.

I'd better just file them away.

It never fails...

As soon as you send your exposure meters out for calibration, there are at least 2 pieces of new x-ray equipment that need acceptance testing the next week.

Ribbit...POP!

Oh, this is just gross...

One can't help but have this morbid fascination about what it looks like though.

More than 1,000 toads have puffed up and exploded in a Hamburg pond in recent weeks, and scientists still have no explanation for what's causing the combustion, an official said Wednesday.

What Does Your Birth Date Mean?