Last night, I finished the complete Hyperion series by Dan Simmons.  Amazing.  I'm ashamed it took me this many years to get around to it.  They are the best of far-future fiction (circa 2800-3200).  The four book series Hyperion, Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and Rise of Endymion are best read in order, ala Lord of the Rings, as one giant experience.  I throughly enjoyed them and recommend them highly. 

My next fiction book is Ender's Game.

Fantastic!  So, because I was an early user of the GlucoWatch, Cygnus has sent me a

GlucoWatch G2!  The G2 is a refinement of the GlucoWatch, and actually gets closer to my initial expectations. 

I was disappointed with the original GlucoWatch because it skipped records often. Even though it tried to deliver blood sugar results every 20 minutes, when you factored in skipped records (for whatever reasons, sweat, temperature, etc), you'd be lucky to get 1 or 2 an hour.  Also, the original GlucoWatch had a nearly 3 hour warmup period and would operate for 12 hours.  Often it would give up around hour 7 or 8 and be done for that period. 

The GlucoWatch G2 Biographer's most notable enhancements over the first-generation GlucoWatch Biographer include the following:

• It measures and displays glucose levels automatically and stores readings up to every 10 minutes – twice as frequently as the first-generation product.
• It provides readings for up to 13 hours a day – up from 12 hours in the first version.
• It also creates an "electronic diary," storing up to 8,500 glucose values – compared to 4,000 in the first version – that can be reviewed, or uploaded into a software program, helping detect trends and track patterns in glucose levels.

Getting results every 10 minutes almost makes diabetes bearable.  (Almost)  It's amazing to watch my blood sugar over a 3 or 4 hour period after a meal go up, then back down again.  We're talking about 20-30 readings.  That's just not possible with a finger stick (I'd run out of fingers!)

Conclusion: The G2 is the watch the original GlucoWatch should have been.

Great article by Robert W. Lucky in IEEE Spectrum:

Engineering today feels like that window seat on the airplane. Those can't be real transistors and wires down there, can they? Watching the simulations on my computer monitor is like watching the movie on the airplane—an unreality wrapped in another unreality. I feel that I have lost touch with Edison's world of electricity—a world of black Bakelite meters, whirring motors, acrid chemical smells, and heated conductors. I miss Heathkits and the smell of molten solder and burning insulation—the sensual aspects of engineering that have been replaced for many of us by the antiseptic, ubiquitous, and impersonal CRTs.

I have a deeper worry that math itself is slipping away into the wispy clouds of software that surround us. I walk down the aisles of laboratories, and I see engineers staring vacantly into monitors, their desks piled high with anachronistic paper detritus. Is anyone doing math by hand any longer, I wonder? Do they miss the cerebral nourishment of solving equations? Perhaps math in the future will be the exclusive province of a cult of priests that embeds its capability in shrink-wrapped, encrypted software.