http://4thgear.bastula.org life in the fast lane of a medical physicist Sun, 25 Sep 2005 05:13:13 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en We were at Ikea today and noticed an interesting phenomenon: many of the young couples there were in interracial relationships. Not that this is anything new to us, but we never expected that it would be so apparent at a single location. I guess it makes sense though that young ... http://4thgear.bastula.org/2005/09/24/mixing-it-up-at-ikea/ For this quarter, Alex decided to change our seminar class to a treatment planning course. This course involves working on a treatment plan for a different patient every week. Each student gets to present once and this coming Tuesday happens to be my lucky day. This week, we were supposed to ... http://4thgear.bastula.org/2005/04/03/treatment-planning-course/ Alex typically doesn't do the IMRT QA at Silver Cross. Instead, he only does chart checks and mechanical QA. I went with him this morning and we checked the outputs for all the photon and electron energies. We also did an energy check, which basically is determining whether the beam ... http://4thgear.bastula.org/2005/03/26/a-consultation-in-joliet/ Alex had me working on a plan that had two courses of a treatment: the initial plan and the boost plan. He had already finished preparing the QA for the boost and wanted me to complete it for the initial plan. Basically, this entails going into XiO (our treatment planning ... http://4thgear.bastula.org/2005/03/25/imrt-qa-planning/ I have been pretty busy lately with exams, a paper, work and I am now working on my project in full swing. I didn't even mention dealing with all the amassing amount of paperwork in prepration for the upcoming start of the new school quarter. Anyways, it seems that ... http://4thgear.bastula.org/2004/08/27/summer-is-coming-to-a-close-but-the-work-is-just-about-to-begin/ We completed the CT annual inspection this week. It was pretty straightforward, but it also makes me see how boring this job can be. I also don't think Mark has been too happy with me lately. I haven't spoken to him since Wednesday, but yet I have done work for ... http://4thgear.bastula.org/2004/07/23/ct-annual-and-other-ramblings/ This week went pretty slowly. First couple of days we just read and analyzed some data for BrainLab. Also got a lot of QA work done and out of the way - Mark seemed pretty happy about that. On Wednesday, we had training with Mike, the guy setting up our ... http://4thgear.bastula.org/2004/07/11/long-week-a-few-more-til-school-starts/ Felt pretty tired as I had to drop my parents to the airport this morning and go to work directly. I could barely stand as Mark was showing me what to do with some of the data that we took from the previous late night. I finished that and then ... http://4thgear.bastula.org/2004/07/02/feeling-tired-and-beat-up/ Today we had to run some diagnostics on the linac to prepare for the Brainlab system which will be done probably next week. Me, Mark, Jagan, and John were there taking measurements using this giant plexiglass box filled with water. There was some crazy machinery involved that we used and ... http://4thgear.bastula.org/2004/07/01/late-night-with-a-giant-water-box/ When I got to work today, Mark wasn't there. I wasn't really surprised as he is usually busy and it is always hard to get a hold of him. Anyways, I saw that he had left me a note to finish the calculations for some electron cutout factors. I did ... http://4thgear.bastula.org/2004/06/29/hey-electron-cut-it-out/