As timeworn cliché headlines go, this one needed a timely update. In the past four weeks, PADV has revolutionized our concept of office efficiency. We tripled the speed of each of our workstations, 4 Macs and 2 PCs, by adding a little memory and throwing out our hard drives.

Let’s start with hard drives. They spin. They seek. They read. They retrieve. They stop. They report. They return. They repeat. They do this over and over until you gather all the information you need, and then they spin and wait for the next command. Unless, of course, you have other programs open, whereupon then they spin, seek, read, retrieve, stop, report, return, and repeat times two… or three, or four… or times however many program or files you have open. Unless of course you actually doing work, and then have to add “write” to their already long list of tasks.

So, we replaced our hard drives with solid-state drives (SSDs). They don’t spin. They don’t stop, return or repeat. There is no spinning platter, no mechanical arm to read and write data; there’s no moving parts at all. They seek, find, display and wait for your next command. That’s it. It’s kind of like your flash drive, only bigger and faster. So fast, you can almost hear it tapping it’s foot waiting for you to do something.

Let’s put this in perspective. The fastest hard drives, and I mean seriously fast ones, claim read write times of 150 Mb per second. A decent SSD (let’s say a $230, 480 Gb model) averages around 500 Mb/s, and that’s without any “overhead” of seek times. You give it a command, and by the time you blink, it’s done. More simply put – It makes your computer work they way you dreamed it would work.

Which brings me to plumbing. Not so much the copper or stainless steel kind, but rather of the vascular persuasion. Some background, In February of last year I was riding my bike into the office, when a nasty crash sent me to the emergency room. To see if I had any broken bones, they did a full-torso CT scan to see if I had any broken bones. Good news, No broken bones, bad news they found a couple of iliac aneurysms… and they were Triple A rated! Or rather, they were actually AAA aneurysms, or Abdominal Aortic Aneurysms. So, somewhat less funny, and in our family, we take aneurysms seriously.

This month, after a year of less than stellar, single-aneurysm repair attempts, a USC Keck vascular surgeon, implanted a device to repair both of then at once with a single device.  Now both of my iliac aneurysms are sealed, and the long-term prognosis is excellent. A return to full activity within a month, and with the aneurysm danger eliminated, as a bonus I get the increased endurance and stamina I need to return to my beloved, long-distance (and safe) biking. All good news.

However, if my health decisions were determined by my classic marketing yardsticks, this operation might never have happened. Can we talk about the name of the device… The Gore^® Excluder^® AAA Endoprosthesis? Gore? Really? As I suspected, the name came from the developer, W. L. Gore & Associates. However the name gore excluder has, you should pardon the pun, less than sanguine interpretations for the end user.

Luckily my surgeon was a down-to-earth, no-nonsense professional who laughed at my devout cowardice (good on him), and told me that he had had over a decade of success with this device and that after the “procedure” (never an “Operation”), I would definitely be Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger…

Or words to that effect.

No matter how you say it, we have upgraded our PADV technology inside and out. Don’t blink. We’re revved up and racing, pedal to the metal.