Thoughts from a Thursday Morning

In honor of the company meeting earlier this morning, here are some of the things I’ve learned and thoughts I’ve had this morning . . . bullet point style:

• I can’t decide whether Arcade Fire’s new album, “Suburbs,” is completely, utterly pretentious and lacking in fun, or if that’s me I’m thinking about.
• The second week of August may be the second best commuting week of the year. It has felt like the week between Christmas and New Years.
• The reception areas of Newton-Wellesley Hospital (NWH) are under construction, and the architects created a display of the materials they’re using. I like that a lot.
• Phlebotomists, who specialize in doing something inherently painful with a minimum amount of discomfort, aren’t paid well enough. I’ve been poked many times, and the ones who do it well really are amazing.
• The NWH lab dedicated to drawing blood is extremely quick. It’s where I prefer to go. It opens at 8:30.
• At 7:00 the main hospital lab claimed a 30 minute wait, but it was really an hour-long wait for 60 seconds of actual medical procedures.
• Some days I’m really eager to get to work and finish up what I was working on the day before. Today was one of those days.
• In early April, Sports Illustrated predicted the Chicago Cubs would finish second in the NL Central, with a record of 81-81. To make that happen, the Cubs will have to go 33-15 for the rest of the season. The Cubs also have an estimated payroll of $137M for the season, which is $100M more than the team one behind them, the Pittsburgh Pirates. (The Pirates!)
• I should have brought a book with me to the lab. I just finished reading about platypuses and have started reading about Romantic science.
• I was smarter during the company meeting. Now I know a lot more about “Black-point compensation: theory and application” and ICC color profile rendering intents than I did yesterday.

And now it’s time to muck around with run-length encoding.