Before I forget, I have a Scientific Computing column available discussing the folly of “Meet-and-Greet” conferences, and why they’re a bad deal. (You may also learn something of the dangerous sport of snowboarding).

Several years back, during my Digital Equipment Corporation days, I was working at a large chicken processor who wanted to put in a LIMS to help track their product quality control. The project was enrobed in a cloud of doom from the start.
The terrible saga began when the salesman who sold the project was so severely abused by the customer’s Purchasing Agent that he agreed to sell them a LIMS on a too-small computer. He’d asked me a few weeks earlier about the bargain-basement configuration, and I told him it simply wouldn’t run on the system he was proposing. Not to be deterred by a mere engineer, he kept calling our corporate office until he got someone in marketing to say, “Well, theoretically it could work. Maybe.”
Of course, he ran with that bit of advice and sold the project.
(Sign of Doom number 1)

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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.
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Science has come so far since I was in college; it’s difficult to paint a picture without sounding like one of those “I walked 5 miles to school in a blinding snowstorm” stories.

While I didn’t have to walk that far to school, the Mesozoic era of chemistry that I worked in is laughable when I look back at it. Let’s see; we wrote programs for physical chemistry labs by using a line editor, typing on teletypes, linked to a distant computer via an acoustic coupler modem. I don’t even want to tell you how slow these things were.

How about the x-ray diffraction equipment? We took crystals, mounted them in a small container, surrounded the container with a strip of undeveloped x-ray film, set it in the center of a room, then ducked behind a barrier to blast the thing with x-rays from a projector. We’d develop the film, and then the fun began with interpreting the lines on the film.
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There is an increase in chatter in the lab informatics industry these days regarding using Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems as a LIMS. While tempting, especially for companies already invested in a large-scale ERP, there is a growing list of reasons to consider a full-scale informatics vendor rather than a constrained point solution.

Let’s start with an analogy of the tailor-made suit.

Here in the United States, bespoke suits cost thousands to make. There are measurements to be taken, and the suit is cut to exact dimensions. Let’s follow Lester, our man on the move in business. Lester wants to make a good impression at his new job, and decides to bite the bullet and plunk down $3000 for a tailor-made suit.

Ah, but we have issues in the U.S. with overeating, and to be honest, Lester has a hard time with holiday eating. At Thanksgiving, Lester plunders a turkey dinner like a Buccaneer who’d been marooned on a desert island for a year. Turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, and pumpkin pie disappear like Bernie Madoff investments.

Now, Lester’s $3000 investment is strangling him like a boa constrictor. His face is purple as the blood in his head can no longer find its way back to his heart. Lacking fresh oxygen, Lester’s head looks like an eggplant just before it explodes.

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The hike up to the top of Longs Peak (yes, without an apostrophe) in the Rocky Mountain National Park is not for the heavy smokers in the crowd. At 14,259 feet, it is one of the “fourteeners”, meaning one of the 54 peaks in Colorado above 14,000 feet. While it is not a “technical climb”, it is still dangerous as some parts of the trail are only a few feet wide, and they are of the “if you fall, you die” variety. The elevation of the mountains in Colorado is quite remarkable. For example, the base elevation of some of the Colorado ski resorts is higher than the peaks of the Ski Mountains in Utah and California. The Park City resort in Utah has a base elevation of 6,900 feet…that’s only 900 feet higher than the elevation of my house. The summit of Park City is only 10,000 feet. Compare that to Loveland Ski Resort less than an hour from my home. The base at Loveland is 10,800 feet, and the summit is 13,010 feet. If you live at sea level, you’d be well advised to think hard about skiing with the local Sherpas at Loveland as you’ll be wondering where all that oxygen is.

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Hi All –

As we are preparing another tantalizing blog for your education and entertainment, please have a look at my most recent posting on Scientific Computing Magazine’s web site:
http://www.scientificcomputing.com/article-in-Project-Disablers-Cant-live-with-em-Cant-shoot-em-082409.aspx

“Project Disablers: Can’t live with them, Can’t shoot ‘em”
In this piece, I address the underbelly of troubleshooting the LIMS deployments of recent years whereby disparate components are scattered all over the corporate landscape. You’ll also get some of my personal tips for dealing with tomato-stealing mammals in a way sure to annoy your neighbors.

Ah, the Fourth of July has passed and with it my annual recollection of the halcyon days prior to 1966 when kids were kids, and firecrackers were firecrackers. We’re not talking about the pathetic little annoyances they sell by the roadside these days; we’re talking the big boys: M-80s.

Yes, prior to 1966, kids could badger their parents into buying cherry bombs, Silver Salutes, and my personal favorite, the Holy Grail of firecrackers, the red tube of fun, the M-80. Today, by federal law, firecrackers can contain a miniscule 50 mg of explosive powder. Compare that to the 3000 mg of eardrum bursting, finger amputating, eyeball obliterating power of the M-80, and you can understand why mamby-pamby legislators rained hell down on the Über-explosives of yesteryear. Ah, the good ole’ days. M-80s were sold by the gross, and I always scraped together enough money each year for at least four gross of the red demons, and a couple of gross each of Silver Salutes and cherry bombs, and of course, a few thousand Black Cats, bottle rockets, and similar lower-powered ordinance.

You haven’t lived until you’ve shown up to family reunions and waited for the aunts and uncles to retire to their lawn chairs to drink beer and smoke heavily while ignoring the kids on the other side of the shrubbery who were touching off the characteristic green fuse of the little crimson mirth maker. The report of an M-80 is a devastatingly loud roar that makes a shotgun blast sound like parakeet flatulence. Touching off one of these babies is easy, but the truly difficult task associated with scaring the living hell out of all those relatives who ridiculed your haircut a few minutes earlier, is the prospect of trying to outrun the fuse in a seven second wind sprint while laughing so hard that you wheeze out critical oxygen, and stumble to the Earth a bit too close to ground zero.
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Today’s object lesson in the changing rules of informatics starts with a bit of an allegory from the world of swimming.

During this past Olympics, much was made of comparing our current star swimmer, Michael Phelps, with the star of the 1972 Munich Olympics, Mark Spitz. In this one case, quite a few time comparisons could be made between the two swimmers because Spitz competed in only freestyle and butterfly events, and their times could be compared. But for other events, rule changes over the past several years obfuscate our ability to make apples-to-apples comparisons.

With a very minor technical exception (I’ll discuss later), the butterfly and freestyle strokes have remained unchanged in modern-day swimming. But backstroke and breastroke have changed so markedly that all references to times of yesteryear are invalid. It started in the breastroke. The rule used to be that the head had to break the water at all times after the start and turns. Also, adding a little dolphin kick during the start and turns would get you disqualified (as happened to me in the Mid-American Championships many years ago).

About a dozen years ago, the rule regarding submersion was changed, and swimmers used the change to rise up very high out of the water, and plunge deep under water after every breath. This made the stroke much more streamlined under water, and times plummeted. In 2005, a single dolphin kick (the same kick used in the butterfly) was allowed on the start and after each turn.
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The often-quoted colloquialism that lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place is of course horse manure. Poor Ray Sullivan, a park ranger from Virginia is still listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the person who has been struck the most times by the Bolts of Zeus (7), so maybe he was complacent about the danger of walking atop the Virginia hills.

I am no longer complacent about natural disasters. I was working at a radio station in Kalamazoo in 1980 when the building housing the radio station came under a tornado warning. In Michigan, people routinely dismiss such notices as superfluous nagging…as I did. Well, I looked out the window that day and saw the tornado snaking down Main Street in Kalamazoo, just like the scene in the Wizard of Oz. The result was almost the same as well. While I can’t confirm the Wicked Witch of the West was clobbered by a falling house, we did lose the 9th floor of the building (and hundreds of windows), and the microwave relay dish, used to send the radio station’s signal to a distant antenna site, was last seen taking off like a giant Frisbee, and never was found.

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Many years ago, a friend of mine and I were walking the halls of the hallowed Central High School in Kalamazoo (home to Derek Jeter, among other luminaries). We were between classes, and he mentioned he had to get something out of his locker. We came up to it, and he pulled out a long object wrapped in some sort of small blanket.

“What’s that?”

He pulled back the towel a bit to reveal a 22 rifle. Now, my friend wasn’t about to go on a rampage, but even in those days, I imagine there would be some reaction to brandishing a weapon in the halls of a school. His motivations were actually quite simple: there was a gunsmith near the school and he needed some work done. We walked right among thousands of students, and he went down the stairs and disappeared out the door toting his weapon.

Can you imagine what would happen today?

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