Abbott

I had planned on writing a blog tonight about the general goodness of people, and I still will, but something else came up and I thought id let you know.


This morning at 7am I got a call from my friend Josh up in MN, he wanted to know if I heard that our company AMO (Advanced Medical Optics) had been bought out today by Abbott Labs.
They are a huge medical company, and seem like a decent outfit as far as I can tell. It will be interesting to see what sort of changes they make.

I'm not terribly worried about my job in particular. The Field Service Engineers are on the front line making all the systems work. We recently went though a downsizing due to the economy and the comparative percentage of FSE's let go vs. in-house and managerial staff was like 2-3% so I feel fairly confident that Ill be safe, but you never know so ill be working extra hard to make sure i'm valuable.

In the short run its an awesome thing for me, I have a few hundred shares of AMO that, as of last week were hovering around $6.00 a share. Abbott bought the company shares at $22.00 each. That's huge! If you had 100 shares, last week it was worth $600, today its worth $2200! WOOT!

In the long run though, Abbott will definitely make changes within the AMO group, it just remains to be seen if they will be helpful, smart and beneficial, or idiotic, useless and detrimental.

E

Lazors

What stops a lazor from going completely through an object . . . like say . . . an eyeball?

-Chrystal Pond

I have four answers for that question;

First answer;
Its Laser. Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation and not Lazor as spelled by Chrystal and Strongbad. ( I told you that I would always find something in your question to make fun of, so thanks Chrystal for making it so easy!)

Second, in Lasik there are two ways of cutting the lasik flap; the Intralase method and the microkratome method.
The microkeratome method uses a surgical blade driven by a miniature geared motor to slice the epithelium. The flap is pulled aside and then the laser is activated.

The reason the lasik laser does not go completely though the eyball is by design, the material being removed, corneal tissue, is matched with the wavelength of the Excimer laser 193nm (or .000000193 meters).

The corneal tissue absorbs completely the 193nm wavelength, when the energy of the laser pulse is absorbed into the corneal tissue molecules, it breaks the bonds and the result is a solid to plasma to gas transition. Isn't that freakin awesome!??! Your eye tissue turns to a plasma for a microsecond!

This phenomenon is called surface ablation. Only the very top surface of the corneal tissue is affected by the laser, this is the whole scientific principal for why lasik works. By ablating only certain amounts and parts on the corneal surface we can reshape it to give you perfect vision, cool eh?

Alright, third answer;
The intralase method is so crazy cool. Instead of using a blade (how 1800's!) the intralase laser (IL) uses a completely diefrent scientific principal. It uses a specific focal point at precise depths to create a tightly packed layer of bubbles under the epithelium, that can then be lifted to allow the excimer to ablate the cornea.

A good example of the way the IL works are these;
They are 3 dimensional pictures inside of a glass cube, you've probably see one at the mall.

They work by moving the focal point of a pulsed laser (one pulse per bubble) to the programmed points of the image being created.









When the beam enters the top layer of the epithelium, it passes though without harm until it comes to the focal point of the beam. At that specific point, all the IL beams energy is concentrated in a spot the size of the tip (not the head) of a needle. It heats the spot for a femtosecond (.000000000000001 second). This creates a small bubble because the gas created by the pulse has to go somewhere.

Any remaining IL light is harmless because its lost its power once it passes the focal point.



And finally;
The majority of high power lasers will bore a hole straight though your skull if you're crazy enough to get one at eye level.
Oddly enough, there has never been a reported death caused by a laser beam. Now this doesn't mean that people haven't died working on the 50,000,000 volt power supplies or because the beam ignited a gas canister, but the beam itself had never killed anyone.
But it could.

HELP!!

This is supposed to be where I talk about geeky, techy stuff. But I'm not for some reason.

Help me out!

Leave a comment or question about something I can explain, make fun of, disprove, or otherwise make you feel silly for asking.













Please?

Unbalanced

Ive been feeling rather off kilter lately, and im not sure why. But today was a good example of my de-kilterification (yeah i made the word up, so what? wanna fight about it?)(do you ever re-spell words with as many letters as possible? I do all the time! like this; Wraght:Rat Bhrayghnes:Brains Ckhaghrre:Car I made a four letter word into 28 letters in college, that was awesome... what was I talking about?)
(I remember!)
I have 3 tiers of management I work with directly. The big boss, Mike, is the Midwest regional manager. I used to report directly to him, but when AMO acquired Intralase, the number of employees under Mike doubled, so we got Supervisors. John is the Supervisor that I report directly to now. If he is out then we report either up to mike or down to Charlie the Senior Field Service Engineer. Got it?
Mike
John
Charlie
Me

So, Mike is in the hospital (for something not terribly hideous) and will be out for a week or so.
John went to Thailand for his winter vacation (because when I think of the most magical place I could go for a Christmas vacation, I think
Nakhon Si Thammarat)
And we all know about the bombing there, so he is stuck there for another ten days.

Finally we have Charlie who is also in the hospital. (again nothing hideous)

So I have no boss, not that its a huge deal, because I work by myself anyway, I rarely see my bosses, or even talk to them. But its still an odd thing.

And then today I got a call that I needed to go to Omaha to fix a system. So, I drive 3 hours get there and fix the problem in 20 minutes, and drive back home 3 hours.

Thats so odd!! I get paid for this.

I love the movie Joe vs The Volcano. Its a metaphor for life.


This Picture is amazing!!! I feel like that a lot.




Well....

This post is stupid, and didn't go anywhere.

I'm not even going to post this.

I'm serious. I'm not going to hit the post button. Its not worthy.

Crap.

Romanticide?

I just posted this comment on Jana's blog in response to her post about the Mario Kart song.

"That was a hideous Video.
I hated it and couldn't even finish it.
He was so creepy!
You women are so starved for romantics that you cling to even the worst of the vaguely tender emotionality shown by a male of your species.
Then again, you may swoon at a badger singing that song.... curly mustache or not."

I'm sad. Not because of the song itself, but the response of the women to it. Honestly it seems to me as though if a guy shows any sort of consideration to a woman then he is praised for it by her peers. Like that awful "He went to Jared!" commercial. Why are Women praising Men for simply showing a feeling? It should be common place. It should be so normal that when we guys do something nice that its not a big deal. I don't mind getting a little notice when I do something over-the-top insane, but other than that.....

Look, my point is not that the Ladies who posted a love note to the curly-'stached Kartman are nutso, but that it should take a whole lot more to impress you.

Take me, for example. Some friends of hers didn't believe what a typical Tuesday afternoon was like at the Rowley home, so we took a few pictures of my day.







Guys, take care of your Sweetie.

"Stuff I'm doing" update

So, obviously I haven't built my Yana computer. I would have taken a million pictures and posted them everywhere.
So, I got the Computer from Jana, and tested it out when it got here.
Didn't work at all.
When she shipped it, she didn't know that there was a loose hard drive in the tower that was rattling around. So when I got it, there were micro resistors, diodes and EPROM chips loose in the case. It's okay Jana, I forgive you for being the devil.
I ordered a bunch of stuff and spent like over $100 and still have had no luck for various reasons.
So the project has fallen aside while i work on other projects.

"What projects?!" I hear you all yelling at top volume. Well ill tell you if you would just shut up!

Seriously, quiet down you in the red shirt...
No not you! Your shirt is more of a burnt umber, pay attention!
Your shirt is an RGB of (138, 51, 36)
I was talking to RGB (150, 0, 24)
I guess that's more like a Carmine red... but still...

RED SHIRT! shush!

Thanks.

What were we talking about? Stupid burnt umber shirt lady.....

So, I bought an 86' (is that right? 86'? or is it '86? it must be '86 because if it was 86' then it would be 86 feet! haha! I'm so smart!) '86 CRX (wait, if you follow that correctly though, it actually says that I bought an eighty six foot 1986 CRX! Awesome! Long car.) off of craigslist for my friend Brandon who desperately needs a good car to get him to work. And I've been working on it for weeks and weeks now. Its a pain in the neck. I fix one problem and another comes up. That's what I get for attempting to fix a really old engine that I know nothing about.

I eventually plan to buy a '90-'92 (got it right! Rock on.) CRX and do an engine swap. Ive learned a LOT about Honda engines recently and I love the idea of having a tiny car that can beat a mustang off the line. If I swap in a B16* engine from an Acura, it'll be crazy fast and fun.


I'm working with Jason W (a good friend of mine who is close to as odd as I am (not close, close but close like a rhino is close to a hippo genetically speaking(or at least closer to a hippo than it is to a lemur))) (that was funny)on a prototype for a new style of snowboard binding.

When we are done with this, and it hits the market, no one will use the current style of binding. Its an incredible idea that we plan to have completed by mid January in time for our annual Colorado ski trip (now why would we call it a ski trip if the only people who go are snowboarding? Odd that.) where we (or rather I (Jas, you wuss)) plan to test its functionality and usability.

This is the most exciting thing I've worked on in years, and I have the greatest partner to work on it with. Its going to change the snowboarding world....

Wo0t.

Storytime!

Got a call from my Dad the other day, just to tell me this story;

While at a Newspaper-ish meeting my dad was talking to a lady who said to him,
"I have a confession to make, years ago, I was a substitute teacher at Flagstaff High school, and your son was in my class. I had to send him to the principals office because he was shining a laser in my eye."
My dad kinda laughed because of course he remembered me getting suspended for that, and subsequently starting a new school.
then she asked my dad what I was doing now....

"Well..... He shines lasers in peoples eyes for a living."