The Final Test

Although I now work as an Emergency Room doc my initial training was in a Family Practice residency.  I finished that in 1985, but to be officially Board Certified I had to pass an exam.

What a lot of folks probably do not realize is that to stay Certified you have to keep taking the darned thing every seven years.  My lawyer friends cringe at the thought of having to repeat Bar Exams, so I think this is something that the medical profession (Family Practice was first but I think it is general now) can take pride in.

I was a smart monkey back in the day.  I passed Boards with very nice scores and did so without bothering to study.  I think one time my brother and I helped my parents move all day, then went out for well deserved pitchers of beer....next day I took the exam and scored in the 85% percentile.

But this time I was worried.  Having spent six years in an intense but somewhat limited scope of practice there were a lot of things I did not know.  New outpatient diabetes drugs.  Changes in guidelines for mammogram screening.  Details of post op care following cardiac bypass surgery.

So I fretted a lot, studied a little, then finally decided to just show up and give it my best shot.  If I flunked it, well, time to retire.  This was not an entirely unappealing concept.

The first couple of times I took the exam in a big hotel ballroom.  A couple of hundred folks scratching away with pencils, filling in circles to answer multiple choice questions.

Now it is all computer based.  And kind of an odd experience.

You show up at a "test center".  Basically a computer lab that runs exams for all kinds of purposes. They take their security very seriously at these places.  You have to show ID to prove you really are who you claim to be.  You have to roll up your pants legs to prove you don't have a smart phone holstered somewhere.  They scan you with a metal detector wand.  You do get (one) pair of glasses allowed but I bet if you put a Google Glasses sticker on them you'd hear about it.

After passing through what approximates airport security you get to go to Dilbertville.  A room full of cubicles each with its own computer terminal.  Cameras watch you all the time.

I expect I did alright on the test.  I signed an agreement not to talk about specific content but there are a few things I can observe for the benefit of other grizzled veterans undertaking this or similar tasks.

1. Working in ER is most excellent preparation for this sort of exam.  On a constant basis I get presented with scraps and bits of information, sometimes conflicting.  I have to quickly consider a range of possible diagnoses and whittle it down fast.  This is very useful when you get a one paragraph scenario and options A through D as answers.  Even when I did not instantly know the right answer I could rattle the decision tree efficiently.  In the real world you often narrow it down to a couple of choices and run tests to confirm your ideas.  In the Unreal world you narrow it down and sometimes just pick the best of two options.

2. After three decades of doing this sort of thing I really have seen almost everything.  I can be fooled, but the Universe has to work at it a bit.  And with 9 hours of sleep and three cups of morning coffee on my side, it has to work pretty hard.

3. Board exams always, always have a few pet diseases.  I am not going to name it but one particular obscure problem appears more than once on any exam you will ever take.  It is a rare bird.  So rare in fact that it is The Great White Whale of diagnoses, the sort of thing that physicians spend an entire career obsessively chasing.  Most of us never find one.

4. I am a probably bit more computer savvy than most physicians of my generation.  Constant use of computers makes an exam of this sort seem familiar.  EKGs still look like scratches and scribbles though, there is something about them that translates poorly to a screen.

I learned some things preparing for this exam so I guess it is a good thing to do.  In the preliminary stages of studying I did a batch of online "modules" from the American Board of Family Medicine. They were very difficult indeed.  I am quite sure that the Knowledge Masters do this on purpose. Rather like swinging a weighted bat in the on deck circle.  If their intent was to scare me into additional study it was a worthy one.  And a successful one as well.

I will be 57 in a few months.  I am not planning on working much after 60.  So this really should be the last time I have to gear up for this experience.  It will be interesting to see if my pervasive fever dreams of being  unprepared for an exam start to fade.  But I wonder, do the things we fear in our own depths ever really change?

Well, time to go hunt whales.

Easily rests the head that wears the Nerd Crown

My middle school combat robotics class has reached its kinetic conclusion.  All the supplies are boxed up until next year.

Most years I then proceed to an " Advanced Robotics" class with a smaller group.  We have done some fun projects in the past.  But this year other duties call, so no dice.  Or maybe just dice...

I did agree to reprise last year's Dungeons and Dragons group.  It was an implausible success, and of the many classes I have done over the years (about 15 basic robotics, 6 advanced ones) it was by far the easiest one to do.  I understand that the group I had last spring continued to meet and play on their own all summer.  Heck, they may still be doing so.

I was surprised to learn that this year's D & D class filled almost instantly.  They could have filled it 4 times over.

Maybe I should not be surprised after all.  Call it the Big Bang Effect but it is fashionable to be a nerd these days.  Nerds go on to get jobs.  Nerds can troubleshoot smartphone problems for cheerleaders.

Hey, it worked out for me.  I have a good job.  I am married to a smart lady who claims to have been a cheerleader (I know its not true but so what).  I am a grown up pretending to be a kid.  They are kids who are ahead of the game of becoming grownups.

I am it seems, the King of the Nerds.

Dogs Playing Dungeons and Dragons!

I like any variation on Dogs playing Poker.  The above is by a fellow named Jay Babcock.  He ran a successful kickstarter campaign selling prints of this.  You might want one.  I might want one....

Nerdvana

Machines Behaving Badly - After Action Report, November 2013

Running all day, fixing a radio failure here, a dead battery there, passing out a little encouragement when needed to a disappointed contestant.  I took a grand total of one picture at the event.  Behold, Robot Cemetery...

Fortunately for the historic record the local news was there and did a rather nice bit on the action. Only 1:41 and well worth the viewing...

The Robot Apocalypse comes to Middle School

We threw a few audience volunteers into the fray and they did quite well.  You may note a fair number of fancy, heavily armed robots in the mechanical boneyard.  As usual the grand prize was won by a quiet kid with a simple design...who could drive with ferocious concentration and discipline.  Not the kind of kid who gets picked first on sports teams.  But a champion today.

Eve of Chaos - 2013

Another "Machines Behaving Badly" tournament tomorrow.  It is approximately our 13th annual, maybe number 15 overall since we did the silly class twice a couple of years.  I should be excited, it is a fun event.  Gleeful kids, parents proud of what their young'uns have accomplished, a chance to see some old friends.

Maybe it is just bad timing.

I write to express my whimsical side.  But sometimes you go through stretches where the harder realities of the life can't be ignored.

At my age you can pretend to be a kid in some ways but the truth is that my generation are the Grown Ups of the world.  When things need to be done there is no dodging obligations.

My work, my wife and kids, all doing great.  Some other components of the family, less so.

So apologies if a few whiffs of maudlin creep in around the edges over the next couple of months.

But for tonight I will go to sleep pondering the minutia of Swiss brackets versus double elimination, and which frequencies to use, and how we will work in volunteer drivers from the audience.

Tomorrow hyperactive kids will drive their flimsy robotic chariots into battle, either to the giddy heights of victory or to the sudden abrupt surprise of a mangling encounter with spinning machinery. Bad puns are likely.  Monty Python sound effects a near certainty.

Combat robotics as technical education.  And as performance art.  And as therapy.

The Robots of November - Part Four

A round up of some more robots, with a few observations.

Decent weapon, it is some kind of masonry saw that will chew but not bite in.  Poor weight distribution even with all the battery power at the back.  We last saw this robot coming in third in our "robot race" video.

Four wheel drive pushers have a significant advantage.  Most matches that end dramatically do so when a victim is pushed into arena hazards.  I am not sure what that little electronic device is on the front.  Many of the kids are working quite independently now.  Seems to have its name written on the side in hot glue.

I am down to my last few scraps of quarter inch polycarbonate.  When sharpened it makes a nice weapon blade.  Lighter than steel and much easier to work with.  Robot has a very narrow wheel base and should be easy to tip.  Sometimes a machine like this can self right by powering up the weapon and bouncing around the arena until it lands right side up again.

Another four wheeled pusher. But with the wheels dangerously exposed.....

An Unlucky Man

When visiting the old family farmstead I had to go up the road a mile and pay my respects to several generations of my predecessors.  While doing so I noticed this sad sight:

Otto P. Ochsner.  Geboren (born) 1896.  Gestorben (died) 9 November 1918.  The star and the adjacent marker indicate he was a soldier.

The community he came from was almost entirely German and the wording of his tombstone suggests that was his native tongue.  He probably had a lot in common with the soldiers in the trenches on the other side of No Man's Land.  He would have had no difficulty at all walking out and talking with them, perhaps shaking their hands.

If only he had not been killed in action two days before the Armistice.

Boring Blog Maintenance Stuff

Just a few little changes.  Over on the Blog List I have dropped the We Dig Vindolanda link.  It was a site I had a hand in administering.  But a decision was made recently to "mothball" the site on 15 November.  It is/was an ancient site by internet standards and the effort to revamp it to current standards was felt to not be worth it.

We Dig initially existed to do two things.  It was a social site, a place where volunteer excavators could stay in touch in the off season and to coordinate rides, trips to the pub etc during the summer.  This function has largely switched over to other social media venues.

It also did yeoman service as a way to follow the excavations, to look back at the history of the site, maybe show a few odd artifacts (only after the supervising archeologists approved of course).

After more than a few false starts the organization running the Vindolanda excavation has started their own blog.  So far it is quite good, and is linked in the new Blog List.

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The other link changes reflect this and that.  Some blogs fizzle out and are not updated often enough. Some have political stances that might rile folks up.  The two "political" sites I currently link to, Borepatch and The Gormogons, are done by folks who have opinions I do not entirely share...but are witty and thought provoking.

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And so it goes, three days a week unless I am traveling, then it might be less or more.  Thanks for stopping in.