First off, I had some stress inducing fun with Lapsim, a very neat virtual surgery training program. Even in a simple simulation, the pressure to succeed was absolutely enormous and I, along with pretty much everyone else who tried out the thing, would panic during any accidental tear of some vitally important tube and the blood would just gushing out like a fountain and and...oh man as the clock ticks, you try to save the guy by working faster but you just end up stabbing him in the gut with your clamps and scissors or stapling his lung to his heart or whatever. Surgeons sure do have it tough.

Next I checked out some neat MRI imaging thing. I had no clue what the rep was talking about and felt kind of stupid among all the lab-coated nodding heads, but huge pictures of spinning brains and their cross sections are always fun to look at. Then another rep came and did a presentation about 3D models of cells, DNA, and other structures. Luckily I read Genome back in 8th grade, so I at least had some idea and was generally able to play along with "yeah..telomeres."

VENDORS! Microsoft was pretty generous with the gifts. I stood there for a few seconds watching a guy explain Excel and suddenly I found my arms filled with MS branded frisbees, stress balls, an extremely nice and expensive-looking pen/pencil boxed set, and a letter opener. Google, who was set up directly at the next table, gave out post-it pads. They also ignored me and didn't say "hi" when I wandered past the table.

HP/Compaq. I hear that they have a pretty crappy reputation among the nerds on the internet. I would like to say that this is probably outdated or not true, at least for the professional line. I don't know about the home line, but at MSKCC we use HP workstations, and servicing for us has always been easy. Since I was shopping around for a tablet, I checked out what they had to offer. The newer compaqs are pretty sleek looking if you ask me, and they're not too expensive.

IBM salesmen are pretty cool. Apparently, part of their sales routine just involves them abusing the shit out of their laptops and PCs (punching, throwing, jumping on - the guy was at least 200 pounds), and then turning them on to show everything working perfectly fine. They also boasted about the cooling benefits of "oooooh titanium casing." It's probably a load of bollocks, but I found myself tempted, especially by the super small S series. The X41 tablet is also extremely sexy and now I want one. Too bad it's two grand at even the lowest configuration.

There were lots of other vendors too selling some stuff, but I forgot their names and I didn't have that much time to look around anyway. Later on I heard Apple was there too, but somehow I missed it!!! At noon I had a free pizza lunch and then returned to manning the registration tables for the afternoon crowd. Finally at the closing ceremony we raffled off a couple of prizes including two iPod Nanos donated by Apple, an XBOX donated by Microsoft, a DVD burner and graphing calculator donated by HP, and some Symantec software. IS employees aren't supposed to participate in the raffle so I just watched on the sidelines while stuffing myself silly with cookies. After everything was cleaned up, the rest of the expo staff went out drinking, while I, being my poor under-21 self, rushed back to NYU to attend my IAG meeting.

Today's stock was ETLT.