More in the photo gallery.

Step 2: Buy plastic film (not shown) and packing tape in Costco quantities. (1 CEU = five miles.)

Step 3: Wrap vacuum in plastic film so it doesn’t spoil.

Step 4: Wrap plastic film with packing tape. Men: try not to get tape on your hairy forearms!

Step 5: Mold the edges for authentic look.

Step 6: Take “before” photo for future blog entry.

Step 7: Gently cut the cast.

Step 8: Tape seam, admire handiwork. Lightest… vacuum… ever… and unencumbered by the need for disposable bags. Or electricity. Or breakable belts.

Step 9: Sell faux vacuum on eBay for a million, jillion dollars. Quit day job.

Step 10: Find other things to wrap! (Besides the girl!)

Since tomorrow is April Fools’ Day, the vacuum will mysteriously appear in the middle of my front lawn, underneath the banana tree. Tropical weather is a state of mind! (Flickr gallery.)

1. Copy stuff over
2. Edit configuration files
3. Populate database
4. rock on

Here’s how it actually worked:

1. Copy stuff over
2. Edit configuration files
3. Populate database
4. Software was unable to connect to a database because php5’s developers do not enable mysql by default.  Their claim, “This won’t actually affect that many people.”  Ex-squeeze me?  This is like saying you’re not going to include a fuel system in an automobile, customers can install their own.   Yes, that wouldn’t affect many people, if your definition of “many” is “everyone plus one more.”
5. For most software, I would expect I could just plop in a runtime library, twiddle a config file, and move on.  Nope.  PHP’s philosophy is you need to rebuild it from scratch.   They don’t make this easy, either.  Just replicating the set of options my runtime non-MySQL-aware version had took several hours over a weekend of iteratively downloading, configuring, installing, cursing, updating, reconfiguring, and recursing.  Thirty packages, much of the time guessing the magic name to feed to “yast” or resolving dependencies when manually compiling from source.

A few weeks after recovery, I was talking with someone else about the wiki site I host and he mentioned using XAMPP on his windows box to test site changes.  Turns out they’ve done all the heavy lifting by pre-packaging all of the open source runtimes into a clean installation.  It’s a pretty complete set for Linux, Windows, Mac and even Solaris.

So, there is apparently no need to struggle with the insanely stupid decision the PHP team made with PHP5 because the ApacheFriends have taken care of this.

Props to them!

Who wants them?
Business! Among the benefits:

• For the supplier, RFIDs provide a way to track a product through its complete lifecycle.
• For the retailer, it offers quick counting. UPC codes often require you turn over the object to find the code. (This is one of the annoying aspects of self-checkout.) RFIDs do not require a line of sight to communicate.
• For both, there’s better inventory control.
  • RFIDs are rewritable, allowing the supplier to update information as the product passes through the chain.
  • By having an RFID reader on the shelf, periodically interrogating the items around it, a retailer can determine when products are running out. (For high-churn things, this may not make sense.)
  • It would be possible to triangulate mis-shelved items in a store.
  • Anti-shoplifting. For example, if you go into Barnes and Noble, the tags are placed in random books. The reader is at the door. The RFID is deactivated at the register.
  • A supplier can isolate where “shrinkage” occurs. (Shrinkage is also known as “the object fell off the truck.”)
• A broader catalog. Whereas UPC codes are limited to 100k manufacturers with up to 100k items each (which is more restrictive than it sounds because products can be phased out), RFIDs’ Electronic Product Code fields offer enough items for individual serial numbers, a marketer’s wet dream. The 12 bytes break out into[3]:
  • 8 bits for a header
  • 28 bits for the company (268,435,455 companies)
  • 24 bits for the object class (16,777,215 groups)
  • 36 bits for the serial number (68,719,476,735 items)

  The 96-bits could be extended pretty easily, apparently, accommodating the number of Big Macs sold if necessary.

• Harder to spoof. There are apparently scams where people print UPC codes on stick-on labels to fool scanners. (I suppose this is a variant of the black marker scheme. I don’t know if this is as common as people believing what they read on CraigsList.)

The potential market for RFIDs was described in the Trillions (Texas “T”).

Passive tags are of most commercial interest.

An active tag has a battery: it’s essentially a radio. They’re larger (120 x 100 x 50mm), operate at higher power, considered more reliable and better suited for water-based environments like people[2] or large objects that would be interrogated from far away (think: shipping containers). Battery life is 5-10 years.

Because passive tags do not have batteries, they’re smaller, cheaper, and have a potentially unlimited lifespan. Their power comes from induction in the antenna occurring in certain frequency ranges. Interrogation ranges vary from a few meters up to 100+ meters[2] on the newer chips. The tag is a tiny chip about 0.75 mm attached to a piece of paper. The antenna is silk-screened on with conductive ink.

Wikipedia[2] mentions semi-passive tags that use a battery to power the chip, but inductance to send information back.

Size matters

The grain-sized Impinj ZumaRFID chip field-writable, with an 25′ read/18′ write range. (The protocols limit the reader to identifying 500 tags per second.) They get about 40,000 of these chips in one 8″ semiconductor wafer. The sample wafer shown had a lot of empty space on it, presumably for testing chips.

The chip has 41,798 transistors (compared to 29,000 on the original Intel 8086). Power consumption is 8 microwatts, or 1/500,000th the original 8086. Subsequent chips[5] have 50% more transistors in 30% less area, but with similar power consumption.

The antennas are the largest part of the package[7]. The reader can process up to 500 RFIDs per second[1]. However, success rates in the field are still in the 80th percentile[2], slowing the adoption by large agencies like Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense[6].

Tag, you’re it!

The communication protocol was described as being analogous to the reader having a flashlight and tag having a mirror. To send information to the tag, the reader modulates the “light” sent to the tag. To receive information, it holds the light constant while the tag uses the “mirror” to reflect or not reflect. (The tag returns its electronic product code by reflecting incident RF.)

Then there are the logistic problems… The reader must be able to identify all the tags present in the room. The tags are essentially blindfolded, nearly deaf, talk by whispering, and cannot hear each other. The reader is blindfolded, doesn’t know who’s in the room (because the tags, if present, are all powered off), can’t listen to more than one tag at a time, and needs to yell a million times louder than the tags can respond. Furthermore, since the reader broadcasts with enough power to be observed outside the retailer’s premises, it cannot say the tags’ names, lest the retailer’s competitor learn what she’s selling.

The example algorithm he presented was showed how the set of numbers was exchanged without the reader calling the chip by name. Once identified, a chip is asked to go to sleep so it doesn’t cause collisions. (He didn’t elaborate on the mechanism to handle multiple responses, though it sounded like it was a variant of the Ethernet CSMA/CD scheme: if there are collisions, both parties wait for a random, exponentially increasing period before trying again.)

There were additional tricks needed to deal with the physical issues with the silicon. For example, very cold conditions can make the RFID chips stay “asleep.” If something was scanned before being loaded in a truck in a typical Minnesota winter, it might take half an hour for it to warm up enough to turn on.

Many of the passive RFID examples assume they’re on a non-metallic and/or dry surface. RFIDs being implanted (!)

Miscellany:

From a pure technology and future, benevolent application perspective, it’s pretty cool.

There are a lot of privacy[9,10] and security[8,11] concerns.  I haven’t read through this literature; however, I have the urge to cough *bullshit* whenever I hear “uncrackable” mentioned.  Such as [8].   I don’t know how much to make of the problem, though, as people apparently put highly personal stuff on Facebook because they believe it’s secure.

And health concerns.  RFID reader transmission power is in the 900MHz band, and of the power of 2 cell phones, but is not held against your head.  Diorio asserted that this background radiation “acceptable health limits.”

There needs to be a critical mass for these to work. Some retailers have run into slow adoption. For example, Wal-Mart[6] has only 600 suppliers out of 20,000 using RFID technology.  Sam’s has recently imposed a fee for suppliers not using them.

• [1] Chris Diorio, UW Television, “RFID: The Next Big Little Thing,”April 28, 2005.
• [2] Radio-frequency identification, Wikipedia
• [3] RFID Security, Frank Thornton, ISBN 1597490474.
• [4] “Hot Topics: RFID,” Stanford Graduate School of Business, Jackson Library.
• [5] “About RFID,” Impinj.com
• [6] “Wal-Mart Rethinks RFID,” Information Week, March 26, 2007.
• [7] Technovelgy.com
• [8] “Arphid Watch: Find Own Foot, Aim Hastily, Pull Trigger,” Bruce Sterling, wired.com
• [9] Electronic Privacy Information Center.
• [10] Spychips.com
• [11] Gildas Avione, list of papers on RFID security and privacy.

During last week’s ride, I hit the limits of my GPS‘ ten to eleven hours of internal battery capacity. So, with it officially being spring, when young minds turn to thoughts of riding more, it seemed to be a good time to build the Minty Boost kit I received for Christmas.

The Minty Boost is a DC/DC converter that lets one power (or, in this case, charge) an USB-powered devices with a pair of AA batteries. On iPods, it’s equivalent to 1 1/2 full recharges. Just doing the back-of-the-envelope, on the GPS this could mean another 18 hours of power. (If I’m doing the back-of-the-envelope correctly, an 80% conversion efficiency should power the GPS’ 3.7V, 910mAh[5] battery for 17 hours on a fresh pair of 2000 mAh batteries.)

As with Mitch Altman’s[4] brain machine [2] (based on Limor’s MiniPOV [3] kit — POV = Persistence of Vision) and TV-b-Gone (for serene visits to [redacted]), the first task is to inventory. This inevitably brings a wave of nostalgia, for when I was a youngin’, Radio Shack actually sold electronic kits. (Ah, 120-in-1 kit!) Fortunately, in the land of the Internets, there are companies like Mouser and DigiKey that will sell small quantities of parts.

This is always a good opportunity to spool up the soldering iron. When I want it to heat, it takes forever, when it’s accidentally dropped onto the carpet, it heats very quickly.

Since doing the previous kits, I’ve been convinced that a vice or third-hand tool would be a nifty addition. I spent a birthday gift card on a small one. No more holding the board with my feet as I solder!

The board’s markings help ensure one doesn’t mess up the polarity on the capacitors or the diode, but I still feel compelled to quadruple check before trimming the leads. Next, came the two other capacitors and the inductor. The inductor made me appreciate having the vice.

Before I could admire my soldering handiwork too much, I came to the part where the USB port was added. The instructions recommended adding a couple of extra blobs of solder on the side of the plub to better hold it on the board. This got a little messy, leaving browned resin on the back. Ugly, but mostly harmless.

The chip socket came next, and was trickiest component. Its legs were too short to bend to hold it into place, but it was also shorter than the surrounding components. I had to prop the board up cockeyed on a roll of tape to solder one of the eight legs, then move the board to the vice to do the rest.

With the board all soldered, I wanted to plug it into my GPS, but felt that it would be wise to test my work with a voltmeter. I noticed the battery pack read 3.45 volts, which seemed too high. The output, as measured from pins 1 and 4 of the USB port, was 7.7V, waaaaay higher than expected. I checked again, then looked for cold joints. Nothin’. The forums had a few examples where people encountered unexpected output. All of the responses began with “check your voltmeter.”

I tried an individual battery: 2.45V. That’s wrong. Next, the household current: 197 VAC. Okay, my voltmeter was definitely wonky. It’s been a while since I’ve used it, so I popped a fresh 9V battery, and lo! It was now reading correct values for the individual battery and the household current. Once again, I tried the circuit’s output: 4.99V. Whew!

Now, the fun part: putting this in a case. I have, literally, a dozen gently-used Altoids gum boxes in a desk drawer. The little metal containers amuse me, especially for projects like this, and I remain optimistic that the Peppermint Gum Fairy will refill them. Thus, I cannot be compelled to throw them out.

I first tried cutting a notch out of the side with snips then bending the metal until it fatigued itself off. This was very awkward, and I could never get the cuts parallel. I tossed out the box and started over, this time with a dremel tool to grind out a hole on the side. Much better. I smoothed out the edges with a pointy, conical bit. Batteries disconnected (for obvious reasons), I tested the fit. Pretty darned close.

I fiddled with which direction to mount the battery pack, finally deciding that I’d just route the wires along the inside, between the holder and the wall of the mint case. I needed a little extra loop around the capacitor to keep it snug, but here’s the final result:

Any bets on how often this will get me selected for a “totally random” TSA-style search?

Update: As Susan rightly pointed out, the case needed a little something:

For more background info, see [6].

I felt great when I rolled into Greenwater, the point geographically farthest from the start of Saturday’s 200k brevet. I got my card stamped inside the store, reloaded my water bottles with the unnatural blue sports drink, and chomped away on a slab of vanilla ice cream surrounded by two, chewy chocolate chip cookies. I reckoned the remaining forty, mostly downhill miles would be easily doable within the five hours of time remaining. All the steady winter riding had finally paid off. I’d complete my first ever brevet.

buuuut….

As I was pushing the bike back towards the road, I heard a pssht pssht noise coming from the rear wheel. Given how … seasonal the weather had been all morning, I attributed this to road sludge. Squirts of blue from the water bottle didn’t help. Loosening the brake actually made it sound worse. Strange. With the bike seat held up, I gave the pedal a spin. The tire was waaaay out of true: a spoke bolt had sheared off.

I seriously considered riding it some more on the theory that it couldn’t get that much more broken, and if it didn’t, I’d be that much closer to finishing. However, I didn’t want déjà vu. Also, Greenwater’s general store was the last facility for about 20 miles, and the “town” itself well within the cell phone dead zone. Thus began a conversation like this:

Janet: [no doubt seeing the Caller ID as "pay phone" or "idiot"] Hello?

Me: Can I ask for a huuuuuuge favor?

So as part of the agreement, I profess my idiocy:

• When I noticed the rim was worn on my beefy wheels, I put my spare wheel on so I could ride to and from work while the replacement was being built.
• The replacement was delivered Thursday. I should have put the replacement on then. However, after a rough week at work, it was easy to rationalize “I’ll do it Sunday, while I’m cleaning the bike up anyway.”
• As this book notes, 24-spoke rear wheels (such as the spare) are unsuitable for randonneuring, especially if the rider is over 120.5 pounds, and/or over the age of 30, and/or riding on imperfect roadways (uphill, in the rain), and/or of questionable sanity.
• I wasn’t carrying any spare spokes. (I just invested in a pair of FiberFix emergency spokes like John told me to months ago.)

While I waited, I listened to some other drama that put my situation into perspective:

Clayton and his friend Vince spent Saturday snowmobiling. Clayton, possibly under the influential goading of Bud Weiser, got a little too wild with his sled, flipping it over and disabling the vehicle. Vince went back to get the pickup. While backing it up, he broke its steering column.

Vince abandoned the truck in the middle of the forest road, then towed Clayton’s sled to wherever they initially started. They enlisted the help of “some dude” who gave them a ride to the general store where they could call a tow truck… only, there was some miscommunication and “Some Dude” didn’t wait for them. They were agitated at the prospect of their snowmobiles being parted out on eBay.

Their calls to the towing company were complicated by them:

• not having enough spare change. (They declined my offer of my phone card.)
• not asking about local geography, as in “We’re in Greenwater, the closest city is Enumclaw. E-N-U-M-C-L-A-W.”
• Vince trying to haggle price with the tow truck dispatcher. “How much credit do I get with an AAA card? If the meter’s running, then just meet us at the truck. It’s on Forest Road 70.” (Personally, for the extra $3, I’d just have them meet me at the store where there are toilets, food and drinks.)

The weather was manageable: rainy, but not as cold as some thought.   (Maybe low 40s?)  I wore a long sleeve wool jersey underneath my rain jacket, wool socks, beefy windproof spandex pants (over bike shorts), full-fingered gloves, and rain booties. The only thing I was kind of missing was the head beanie, if only to keep my ears warm.  After the first half hour, I reached a nice equilibrium.

I liked the route, especially the parts to the far west (Dash Point, with its occasional views of the billowing plumes from the Port of Tacoma) and far east (Kanasket/Cumberland farmlands).  There was a pleasant dearth of chip seal!

Janet was very nice about this whole thing. I owe her big time.

“WHAT DO I NEED?

• A meal requiring tomato ketchup (it’s not essential, as you can do this experiment using an empty plate, but there’s no doubt that French fries enhance the experience)
• a glass bottle of tomato ketchup” [1, page 48]

What’s not to like about that?

My favorite question was “Pasta Puzzle:” if you hold a strand of spaghetti at both ends and bend it, why will it nearly always break into three or more pieces? Audoly and Neukirch[2] made some fun-to-watch videos of their experiments. In the first phase, they did high-speed filming of spaghetti breaking. To add control to their experiments, they then held bent spaghetti while inducing a break with a pair of scissors. They eventually reduced the problem to a catapult experiment, in which they demonstrated that spaghetti can be broken by merely releasing one of its ends[2]. In their paper, they also come up with an “analytical prediction of breaking events” in “perfect spaghetti.” It should come as no surprise they earned an igNobel award.

Their conclusion:

“[T]he sudden relaxation of the curvature at the newly freed end leads to a burst of flexural waves [that] locally increase the curvature in the rod and [...] is responsible for the fragmentation of brittle rods under bending.”

Runner up would be the entire “In the bathroom” chapter. I find a lot of humor value in offering a formula quantifying the effects of fiber as observed in human, uh, “output.” One better suited for public conversation is why orange juice (and many things) taste awful after you brush your teeth. Reason: sodium lauryl sulfate is added to many toothpastes as a foaming agent to disperse the paste. It temporarily disrupts sensitivity of sweet taste buds while increasing the bitter ones.[3] (It’s unpleasant, but does not cause cancer.[4])

• [1] How to Fossilize Your Hamster (and other amazing experiments for the armchair scientist), Mick O’Hare. ISBN 9780805087703
• [2] “Fragmentation of rods by cascading cracks: why spaghetti does not break in half,” Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch. Physical Review Letters 95, 095505 (2005). Movies available here.
• [3] “Surface active taste modifiers: a comparison of the physical and psychophysical properties of gynemic acid and sodium lauryl sulfate,” John DeSimone, Gerard Heck, Linda Bartoshuk, Chemical Senses 5:317-330, 1980.
• [4] “Sodium Lauryl Sulfate and Shampoo,” Snopes.com

P(D1 = d) = log10 (1 + 1/d)

In other words, first number is much more likely going to be a 1 than it is a 9. The pretty graph to the right shows the likely occurrence of the first digit. It’s counter-intuitive, as one would assume the digits would be uniformly distributed. However, it’s been observed in a variety of areas like multiples of numbers[2], blackbody radiation, physical constants, area of rivers, population and New York Times front pages[9].

Bassam Hasan[3] notes data must meet the following criteria:

• The data must be numeric.
• There must be an underlying cause for the numbers to occur. For example, business invoice numbers would not work because the numbers are merely labels. (See the lottery question below.)
• The numbers are not restricted by maximum or minimum values. For example, human heights fall within a limited range that would skew the leading digits.
• The numbers must occur naturally, and they are not invented or assigned[7], such as telephone numbers (based on a phone switch), postal codes (a postal facility) or social security numbers (state your card was issued in).
• There must be a large sample size.

And no, lottery numbers would not be a good candidate. As Dr. Nigrini[5] explains:

“[Lottery] balls are not really numbers; they are labeled with numbers, but they could just as easily be labeled with the names of animals. The numbers they represent are uniformly distributed, every number has an equal chance”[4]

As an experiment, I did an analysis of the size of my multimedia files (mp3, wmv, mov) on another hard drive. I expected this to fail one or two tests above. Here’s the distribution:

There are three major categories of multimedia files– songs, podcasts and lectures — whose file sizes are clustered. Songs tend to be 2 - 6 minutes (Freebird, notwithstanding) since I delete stuff that’s shorter. At an average encoding of 128kb/s, this results in a lot of 4Mb - 6Mb sized fies. An informal sample of my favorite podcasts(”Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me!“, “This American Life“, and “Talking Robots“), suggests it’s common these span 10 minutes up to an hour. At the top end of the size graph are lectures. (I admire Kiri’s stamina in going the full four(!) hours.)

Next, I looked at the set of files on my computer’s primary (OS) hard disk. With a sample size of 119,708 files, this is how the first digit was distributed:

The curve is “pretty close!”

Because I had already collected the data, here’s the distribution of file sizes:

At the far right, there are two 2Gb files used by the system (pagefile.sys, hiberfile.sys). Zero-length files were ignored, obviously.

Since Benford’s law applies to the first few digits in each place, we can use it to look further at the file sizes. Here’s a table of the percentages of occurrences of the digit in each place[10]:

[I will send ten dollars to the first person who can tell me why the hell WordPress arbitrarily deletes rows and columns in tables -- and what I can do to prevent this, short of "don't use wordpress".]

Let’s apply this to the first two digits of the file sizes on my computer. The red lines are the distribution of files. The blue line is are the factors multiplied, and the green line is a logarithmic trend line of the Benford numbers, because I may have done something wrong just multiplying out.

Still, we see an interesting result:

There are a lot of files whose size is 8192 bytes!  [Edit: over 1,800 of these are regxxxxx files related to Internet Explorer 7 or Patch installs.]

Benford’s law has had a lot of traction in accounting[1,3,4,7,8,10], where it’s used as a technique to detect fraud. For example, the Department of Justice has been using this in counter-terrorism operations[7], identifying shell corporations used to funnel money. From their “Fiscal Forensics I” article, they note:

A classic example is the organization that has a disproportionate number of transactions in the eight and nine thousand dollar range since they may be structuring transactions (designed to fall below SAR and CTR levels). This fact would likely be revealed during a Benford’s Law analysis as the amount of numbers beginning with the digits 8 or 9 would exceed their expected probability of occurrence.

Georgia Tech Professor Ted Hill proved Benford’s law applies to numbers in other bases[11]. An amusing trick he applies to his classes is asking his students to either (1) flip a coin 200 times, recording the pattern of heads or tails, or (2) make the data up. The next day, he points out most of the made-up data. [4] He notes that a sequence of 200 flips will have a high likelihood of six of the same side in a row. People faking their data rarely apply this.[11]

Benford’s law does have some limitations. For example, on tax forms rounding occurs. Also, it’s a very common, annoying, and effective marketing strategy to price things ending in “95″ or “99.” Finally, sales people have tendency to shave expenses. As Dr. Mark J. Nigrini[5] explains:

”People who travel on business often have to submit receipts for any meal costing $25 or more, so they put in lots of claims for $24.90, just under the limit. That’s why we see so many 24’s.”[4]

• [0] “Statistics Hacks,” Bruce Frey
• [1] “Looking Out For Number One,” Jon Walthoe, Robert Hunt and Mike Pearson.
• [2] Significant Figure Generator, William Fawcett
• [3] Bassam Hasan, Ph.D., “Assessing Data Authenticity with Benford’s Law.”
• [4] Malcolm Browne, “Following Benford’s Law, Or Looking out for No. 1,” New York Times, August 4, 1998.
• [5] Mark J. Nigrini, Ph.D.
• [6] Steven W. Smith, Ph.D. “Chapter 34: Explaining Bedford’s Law,” The Scientist and Engineer’s Guide to Digital Signal Processing
• [7] “Financial Forensics” Part 1, 2; US Attorney’s Bulletin, Volume 53, Number 2 (March 2005), Number 3 (May 2005)
• [8] Charlie Kyd, “Use Benford’s Law with Excel to Improve Business Planning“
• [9] Benford’s Law, Wolfram.
• [10] Durtschi, Hillison and Pacini, “Effective Use of Benford’s Law to Assist in Detecting Fraud in Accounting Data,” Journal of Forensic Accounting, 2004.
• [11] “Sorry, Wrong Number,” Georgia Tech Research Horizons, September 2000.

The American Academy of Family Physicians[1] has six classifications for their recommendations of common “clinical preventive services:”

• SR - Strongly recommended: there’s a net gain, it’s cost effective. Vaccines top the list: MMR[4] (despite the anti-vaccination lunacy), tetanus booster, and diptheria/pertussis. Blood pressure is always/easily checked. Since I’m over 35, they want to check lipids (cholesterol and triglycerides). Anticipating this, I fasted prior to the appointment. It’s logistically unfortunate they don’t do the tests and process the results before the doctor visit, because I would like the option of asking what the numbers mean.
• R - Recommended: moderate benefit or moderate evidence. There were a lot of these. Rather than sifting through the conditionals (e.g., “for women over 65 years of age”), it was easier to consult the male[2]- or female[2]-specific charts.
• NR - No recommendation: there are only four of these in the 15 page list. The only one I’d heard of was screening for chlamydia in pregnant women over 26 years old.
• RA - Recommended against. I wasn’t entirely surprised they recommend against taking beta-carotene supplements. However, one that did turn my head was the recommendation against routine screening for testicular cancer[6], especially with the Lance Armstrong awareness campaigns[5].
• I - Insufficient evidence to make a recommendation either way. This was one area I was surprised: prostate[7] and skin cancer[8] screening fall into this category.
• HB - Healthy behavior that’s desirable, but a physician’s advice and counseling might not effective. For example, physical activity is recognized as beneficial.

Like the physical I had a few years go, this was easy:

1. Multiple verification of my name and birth date, despite electronification of medical records for the last three years.
2. Nurse measures my height, weight and blood pressure. The only amusing part was the wall-mounted ruler was done incorrectly. Or I shrunk 2 1/2 inches since last year and just didn’t notice.
3. Doctor (re)introduces himself and went through the scant electronic record as I watched over his shoulder, attempting to offer helpful commentary. Then he scanned the form and asked some ice-breaker questions. I had him laughing pretty hard. (And I still had my clothes on!)
4. The doctor looked in my ears, mouth. Yay, no ear wax buildup!
5. He listened to internals. This was probably not a good time to get him laughing again.
6. Turn my head and cough. (I maintain this is far preferable to the stirrups.)
7. Quiz time! (My favorite part.) I think he remembered me from last time when he spotted my list of questions. (I have his attention, I’m going to ask.) At the top of the list was the one about snapping, crackling and popping. Answer: “There really hasn’t been much research done. As long as it doesn’t cause pain, you probably shouldn’t need to worry about it.” Second question about general random achiness. Answer: “It’s normal for your age. You’ll get used to it.”

Pending normal results of the various standard blood tests, I’m hale. I do sense a market opportunity for minty, chewable aspirin.

• [1] Summary of Recommendations for Clinical Preventive Services, revision 6.4. American Academy of Family Physicians.
• [2] AAFP Age Chart for men, women
• [3] Recommended Adult Immunization Schedule, American Academy of Family Physicians.
• [4] Vaccines and Autism, Center for Disease Control
• [5] Testicular Cancer Information and Support
• [6] Screening Testicular Cancer, Agency for Healthcare and Research Quality (AHRQ), Department of Health and Human Services (DHS)
• [7] Prostate Cancer Screening, AHRQ.
• [8] Skin Cancer Screening, AHRQ.