Scott Hanselman

I've been using the GlucoWatch for a week now. 

I've received some very good information from the GlucoWatch, but not without some pain. You perform some initial steps to prepare the inside of your forearm for the watch. You alcohol swab your arm, put the GlucoWatch AutoSensor on the back of the watch, and stick the whole assembly to your arm. There is a 3 hour "warm up period" during which you get no feedback. There is a slight tingly feeling while the watch is collecting Glucose. The slight voltage pulls the Glucose out of your arm and into the Collector pads. I find this tingly feeling a bit uncomfortable. According to support people at Cygnus (the GlucoWatch company) this is normal, and depends on how fair skinned and sensitive your skin is. I'll probably only use the GlucoWatch once a week because I find this tingling uncomfortable enough to deter me from using it daily. Also, after you wear the watch for the full 12 hours (it shuts off after 12 hours) you're (At least, I am) left with two red rashy marks that look like mosquito bites. These took a full week to fade, and are still slighly visible. I'm using Cortosone (sp?) to treat the rash.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Overheard
"Here's an interesting fact that you may not have realized: today was the longest, dullest day in the history of mankind. Early reports have today's 8:30-5:00 time period lasting no fewer than 34.5 hours, breaking the previous record of 33.7 set sometime during my junior high school years.

During the day not a single interesting thing was heard, seen, or done, and it is believed that for a brief period all color was drained from the Earth, replaced by varying shades of gray. Also a first: at around 3:30, during a brief conversation about international shipping requirements and case quantities, time actually stopped and then went backwards, a process only halted when I started slapping myself in the face."
(overheard here)

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I've been a diabetic for almost 9 years now.  It just randomly happened when I was 20.  Got the flu, next thing I knew I was thirsty all the time, lost a pile of weight, and was baiscally death warmed over. 

Back then, my regimen was up to 6 shots of Insulin a day.  I manually mixed the shots with 3 different kinds of insulin for the optimal effect.  I pricked my fingers up to 10 times a day, dripping blood onto a "Test Strip" inserted into a blood sugar meter.  Forty-five agonizing seconds later, the meter would display my blood sugar.  I kept a manual log each day of my carbohydrate intake, my insulin usage, and my blood sugar.  I'd sleep, rinse, and repeat. 

But now, the GlucoWatch has come out.  It's to be yet another device in my BatBelt of Diabetes tools. 

Today I use a FastTake meter to check my sugars.  It gives me results in 5 seconds.  I'm plugged into a pager-sized Insulin Pump that acts as an external pancreas.  I replenish its insulin supply every 3 to 4 days.  I check my blood sugar, and enter the values into my PalmPilot in an application I wrote called GlucoPilot.  It provides charts and graphs and reports to help me make the right decision about how much insulin to take.  There's no way to make that decision for me.  I have to collect the data and make a judgement call, about 6 times a day.  But now, I don't have to take a shot, I just enter the values into the pump and it delivers the insulin for me into a tube connected to me all the time.  Believe me, it's WAY better than shots. 

Tommorow, I'll be getting a GlucoWatch.  It measures the level of glucose (blood sugar) in my blood through my skin!  I'll wear it 12 hours a day, like a watch.  It will interact with a replacable conduit patch stuck to my skin to collect glucose.  I'll be using it in conjunction with my finger sticks as they are still more accurate.  The promise of nearly continuous blood sugar readings is just too exciting.

As an engineering-type personality I need as much data as possible to make a decision.  Every day, many times a day, I have to take these things into consideration before I eat, work out, sleep, etc:

• Current Blood Sugar Level
• Predicted level of Exercise in the next 3 hours
• Exercise performed in the last 3 hours
• Grams of Carbos, Proteins I'm about to eat
• Level of Personal Hydration
• Do I have a cold? Flu? Any virus?
• Current average speed of digestion

It sounds melodramatic, but it's not.  I always feel like I just guess.  What the GlucoWatch will give me that I don't have today is TREND information.  It's one thing to know my blood sugar is 100 right now.  But if it was 200 an hour ago, I take one action, while if it were 50 an hour ago, I'd take different action.  The GlucoWatch will show my blood sugar every 20 minutes continuously for 12 hours. 

It will be a good day when I'm done with Diabetes.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I'm writing a pile of C# lately.  Mostly I've been working on a project for school in my spare time.  (I'm in the 11th year of my 4 year degree at www.oit.edu)  I'm working on a virtual CPU and OS in C#.  It was (is being) written for an Operating Systems Class.  As a process, it's single threaded, because it's meant to teach one how OS's schedule processes and provide services.  It has 36 "opcodes" for things like MOV, PUSHI, etc...It differentiates between process memory, addressable memory and physical memory. It supports virtual memory, swapping 16 byte pages to XML (kind of silly, but fun). 

What's interesting about it, IMHO, is that in the process of writing it I've used nearly all the features of C#, and a few neat ones of the .NET Framework like serialization:

Like:

OS Feature          à  C#, DOTNET Feature

VirtualMemory       à XML Serialization, System.IO
RunningProcesses    à System.Collections
PhysicalMemory      à "fixed", "unsafe"
ProcessScheduling   à ArrayList, IComparable
InstructionParsing  à System.RegEx
Memory Protection   à Operating Overloading

And about a dozen more.  More on this soon, or you may see it posted on a C# code site.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Well, it's up.  After screwing with FTP permissions on and off for a week, my weblog is up.  Sigh, I'm blogging.  We'll see how long it lasts.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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