Ah, the holiday spirit has arrived at my house; of course I’m talking about my annual Shock & Awe campaign of holiday decorations in an effort to win the Christmas lights arms race with my neighbor, the former center for the Denver Broncos. I’m reasonably sure I’ll prevail in this rapidly-escalating conflict as I have added a new secret weapon to my lighting arsenal: LED lights.
LED lights are to decorating warfare as Charlie Wilson’s Stinger missiles were to the mujahideen in the Afghanistan conflict. Of course, unlike the results of that conflict, I’m hoping my lights aren’t stolen and come back to be used against me in a future decorating conflict, but I digress.
LED lights have a technological advantage over incandescent lights in that their extremely low power consumption allows thousands of these lights to be strung together in a serial fashion as opposed to the 3-string limitation of the incandescent lights that, when exceeded, sends the cursing decorator back to the garage in a crazed search for that little plastic bag of fuses to fix the one you just fried. What this means in Christmas Lights Combat is that you can string many, many lights in a much shorter time because you don’t have to jury-rig additional cords to power subsequent strings of lights to beat the aforementioned constraint.

LED lights were one of those painfully obvious technologies that have been sitting around for decades since the days they illuminated the displays on hand calculators back in the 70’s. Indeed, they’re so popular now; the premium flashlights on the market have these little nuclear-powered diodes as their light source. My SureFire Defender® is a little 5 inch long flashlight that fires 200 lumens of retina melting power. This light is actually marketed as a defensive tool, and once you test fire it into your own eyes to validate the company’s claims, you’ll know that any mugger you can manage to bath in the fantastically bright beam will fall to the ground allowing you to kick and pummel him at your leisure. Heck, after doing so, he’ll still be rubbing his eyes while you pick his pockets, thus turning a potential robbery into a financial windfall!
As my neighbors are humiliated by my blue spruce with 1000 LED lights on it, causing them to lose their will to fight (I believe this was the theory behind anthrax as a biological weapon), I use the time to reflect on the fact that the holiday season, and well beyond, is also the season for the H1N1 virus we have come to know by several names, not the least of which is the Swine Flu.
This particularly nasty virus is meeting its own formidable opponent as STARLIMS is being leveraged by several public health agencies to combat H1N1 by greatly expediting the operations of their microbiology, virology, and immunology laboratories. Please have a look at STARLIMS approach towards combating H1N1.

And then, we have a specific success story, as told by the Indiana State Department of Health in their efforts to log in an avalanche of virology specimens flooding the agency to be characterized as to whether they are in fact the fearsome H1N1 virus. Forgetting for the moment that the sheer logistics of tracking thousands of virology specimens can be greatly reduced with the advent of STARLIMS bar code identification, there is the critical requirement that test results can be entered and swiftly reported to the submitting clinics so that treatment options can be evaluated.
There is a very detailed account of STARLIMS’s role in the Indiana State Department of Health’s fight to identify and contain this dangerous and potentially fatal strain of the flu.

Maybe there’s nothing you can do to fight your neighborhood’s version of Clark Griswold, but with a little luck, maybe your local health agency is mounting a serious STARLIMS informatics response to your own local H1N1 epidemic.