Give Blood, Give Life...get Cookies and Juice

Here goes my public service announcement to satisfy my obligation of a Commit for Life member of the Gulf Coast Blood donor program. The program requires me to donate blood at least once a quarter and spread the word about donating blood. So, been taking care of the blood donations, but now to spread the word.

If you haven't given blood, I highly encourage you to give it a shot. Like most Americans, the thought of a blood sucking needle being stuck in my arm sends shivers down my spine. How did I overcome my fear? Simple, I just went and did it. OK, actually, it took me about 11+ years to get the nerve up. Honest! Let me explain. When I first graduated from college in 1995, I went to work for an environmental risk management company called Versar. At the time, I was living in the Denver area having just completed by graduate studies in Civil Engineering. Versar was the primary contractor responsible for the environmental assessment of the Lowry Air Force Base, which was shut down in 1994. On the site was a blood donation center. We had a field office set up on the base, and every time you would go to it, you would drive right by the center. Seeing the building, plus the regular giving of a few coworkers planted the seed. But, I was still chicken.

Fast forward to 2001. I'm was still a chicken and working at Enron in downtown Houston. The significance of this is that every month, Enron would sponsor a blood drive. Lots of people did it...except me.

Now jump to 2006. Working at my current employer, I finally got the courage to give donating blood a try. You see, after 11+ years, I knew donating blood was easy and a valuable service to the community. Blood is one of the few things that medicine can't produce synthetically. That is, all the shows you see on the Health Channel like "Critical Hour", "Untold Stories of the E.R.", "Medical Incredible", and etc. all have one thing in common...blood donors. All the people profiled on shows requiring emergency blood infusions are made possible by people like me. But, emergency rooms are just the tip of the iceberg. Many cancer patients require blood during treatment along with a multitude of other medical conditions.

That's my story...simple, eh? It just took one decision during one day of my life that made it possible to overcome my fear. Here is a good F.A.Q. to answer your questions.

Give blood, so you can give life is a literal statement. You don't ever know who is the recipient of your blood, but I guarantee they are thankful and in many cases are thanking God for your selfless act. Try it, you'll get hooked and some cookies and juice out of the deal.

Kudos for Weslo Treadmill, Cadence 80

This weekend, we purchased a treadmill for our home. As with many things you purchase now days, assembly was required. The instructions for putting this together were the best I've ever had. The best part that I liked was that all the bolts, nuts, screws, and washers were sealed on a cardboard backing clearly labeled. It wasn't just a big back of crap that you have to figure out is this the #8 or #16 screw. All-in-all, it took about an hour to put together, but no curse words came out of my mouth. Also, you had to feed an electronic coard from the motor to the control panel...the tube came pre-configured with a wire to pull it through! It was flawless.

What did they say?

Not that I'm going to make it a habit to post links to articles on Scientific America to try and make it look like I'm smart...but, I was reading an article in an attempt to satisfy my fetish for physics, and it contained the following sentence:

The MiniBooNE team was looking for signs of muon neutrinos morphing into the electron variety.

It tickled my funny bone. In case if you care, here is the article is titled "Experiment Nixes Fourth Neutrino".

Attosecond?

While trying to satisfy my quench for quantum physics, I came across an article discussing an attosecond. Curios? I was. Here are some definitions:

1. 1 attosecond is the amount of time it takes for light to travel the length of 3 hydrogen atoms (wow, that's fast)
2. 1 attosecond - estimated time it takes for an atomic nucleus to recoil (errr...hmmmm...ok)
3. about 200 attoseconds – half-life of beryllium-8, maximum time available for the triple-alpha process for the synthesis of carbon and heavier elements in stars (ahhh....haaaa...it all makes sense now)

In other words, 10^-18 seconds...or 0.000000000000000001 seconds. That's one billionth of one billionth of a second if you do not feel like counting all the 0's.

flickr Badge Added

In an effort to provide a bit more insight into who I am, I've added a flickr badge to the blog. I maintain a flickr site for the few photo's I take. There was a time when I would take photos for the fun of it. I would get up early in the morning, walk around town and take photo's. Early morning and early evening offer the best times for taking photos because that's when the light is softest. But, I really enjoyed the time in the dark room the most. I could spend an entire day working on printing photo's (black and white). For me, black and white photo's when properly exposed and printed offer a whole host of colors that bring them to life. I use to love looking for that perfect exposure time and correct filter to get capture the essence of the photo and expand upon the content. It was really a release.

I guess the now days, my releases come in the way of yard work and mowing my yard. It's easy to get absorbed in the work. In a lot of ways, maintaining a yard and printing photos are very similar. They take a lot of time, require the right combination of ingredients and patience. Grass doesn't turn green overnight, but, weeds sure do sprout fast.

If you do head over and take a look at the flickr site, I can't take credit for the flowers. Those are all my wifes doing. I'm just around to do the heavy work, like dig holes and make flower bed borders. None-the-less, I find yard work relaxing and I guess that's a sign of me getting older. It just seems like yesterday I would mow my neighbors yards for $20 and hate every minute of it. But hey, it kept me gainfully employed through the early years of high school before I went overseas.