The ultimate purpose of Floyd’s road trip: attending the ATA conference in Austin for some exposure to the world of telemedicine.

It’s definitely a neat idea. People from the medical and technology industries marrying their knowledge to create a new type of healthcare.

The technologies being developed are going to streamline workloads, support patient care, and do away with those back rooms filled with stacks of patient records.

These are the people who will be bringing specialists from all over the world to consult on a rare condition, or reach under-served rural areas.

We’re pretty fired up about it. Stay tuned.

The post Adventures in Austin appeared first on EMRL.

Back from Texas. I’m ready to get back to work.

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The check in process was something awesome: the owner of the motel loved to talk and he shared stories about everything from local history, his wife’s love for the golden age of Hollywood, and the fact that his father was a survivor of WWII German concentration camps. His wife shared stories too; she is excited about a particular Jean Harlow movie and it’s inspiring her to redecorate some of the motel rooms.

The motel owners just recently restored the neon on their tower-sign.  It looked pretty glamorous at night!

There’s also random paintings of things like Betty Boop on the outside walls the motel.

Just the kind of stuff you want to run across on road trips.

The post Route 66 appeared first on EMRL.

View Austin TX, via Everywhere Else in a larger map

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A guy and his dog go into a bar.

The bartender says, “Hey, get that dog out of here… we don’t allow dogs in here.”

Wait a minute, the guy says, “This is no ordinary dog! This is Plato the talking dog!”

“Yeah, sure” says the bartender.

I’ll prove it to you,” says the guy. “Plato… what’s on top of a building?”

“ROOF!” says Plato.

“Look,” says the bartender, “just how dumb do you think I am?”

“Wait a minute,” says the guy. “Plato, how does sandpaper feel?”

“RUFF!” says Plato.

“Do I have ‘stupid’ tattooed across my forehead or something,” says the bartender. “Now get that dog out of here!”

“Wait.. I’m not through”, says the guy. “Plato, who was the greatest baseball player of all time?”

“RUTH!” says Plato.

“That does it!!!” says the bartender, and he throws them both out on the street.

Outside, Plato the talking dog looks at his owner and says,

“Do you think I should have gone with DiMaggio?”

Groan.

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I saw this on my walk home from work yesterday, and was impressed with its use of color! Nice advertising – Very fancy!

The post Very Fancy! appeared first on EMRL.

Then I opened it.

I showed Brian and Corey and said “WTF it’s an Inception box” and we laughed about it, half hoping that there might be another Priority Mail thingie inside this one, to really complete the moment.

I thought no one could go three packages deep, but holy shit there really was a third package inside.

The post A Post About What I Got In the Post appeared first on EMRL.

This week we held the first in a series of regular EMRL lunches. The pace gets intense around here sometimes, and it is important to have a time for us to get a little bonding in.

This week we covered Ender’s Game, qualities of extremely pimp chairs, and gnomes. I’ve been threatening that future lunches will include trust fall exercises, and Floyd’s been threatening cocktails. Things could get interesting.

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When I first got hired here, I was told that writing these blogs was expected. And you know what? That’s cool. I actually like to write; I have a BA in English Lit and everything.

The problem with me, and the reason I only have two posts to my name so far, is that I only have two modes: pretentious or completely bizarre.

For instance, Floyd reminded me just today that there’s a blog post I wrote that’s been floating around unpublished since I started here. Why hasn’t it been published? Well, it’s because it’s pretty much design wankery. I think—embedded in that post—I have an image of a radio designed by Dieter Rams and a quote from Stefan Sagmeister or someone like that. It’s also most definitely about the evils of confusing decorating for actual design

Complete. Design. Wankery.

But what else do I write about when my job is to be a designer here? Do I write about the half naked Santa Claus figurine that’s at my desk that maybe I should probably either remove from my desk or make tiny pants for? No! I shouldn’t even mention that, most likely.

So there’s my struggle. Do I get on my high horse and become famous for my ability to put you to sleep with Ambien-like effectiveness, or do I default to writing about my strange obsessions with comic books about philosophy (Action Philosophers, you should totally check it out) and B-movie sc-fi?

I’ve chosen the third way: Chuchel-like reluctance to post stuff.

The post To Post? Or Not to Post? appeared first on EMRL.

with this one:

It’s clever but it’s certainly not bold.

When I was a little kid there were a handful of brands that really affected me and American Airlines was one of them. No other airline that I ever saw had planes that looked like that; unpainted planes that were gleaming and polished and beautiful. They had nothing to hide.

Naturally, the designs of the planes of the planes are being updated as well, no more gleaming aluminum

Side note: the US Flag has 13 stripes, American’s tail fin design has 11. American Airlines’ parent company has been operating under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for a while so I guess the stripes are their way of giving mad bailout props or whatever.

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