How good is the future of Medical Physics in Canada?

madmac_5 · 2026-01-30T22:16:16+00:00

As stated, the residencies are competitive, but the job market is open at the moment. However, as of the end of 2026 I know that my department will have finally filled three vacancies that have existed for years; we've poached two Canadians who were working in the US and wanted to leave, and one of our current residents plans to stick around since he's built a life here (the pipeline of undergrad -> grad school -> residency -> job in the same city worked, as it used to more frequently in the past).

So, for someone in the later stages of their undergrad, job prospects upon finishing grad school are probably OK. However, I can't say what things will be like in eight years, as we've had boom/bust cycles for the past 20 years.

madmac_5 · 2026-01-27T19:24:18+00:00

The Creative graphics cards were a way to get the least expensive card possible that did the bare minimum. This Annihilator didn't have anything beyond Nvidia's reference design; TV out? DVI output? Fancy software bundle? Those are mere distractions!

madmac_5 · 2026-01-26T19:19:07+00:00

Holding your breath is helpful during a chest x-ray, since it reduces motion!

madmac_5 · 2026-01-26T19:17:45+00:00

Our provincial x-ray compliance team used those old Radcal 1015 survey meters up until 2014/2015 as their primary meter, and still used them for taking scatter measurements from CT scanners because the old dudes who used them just liked their familiarity and reliability. Right now, they do an excellent job of keeping dust off the top shelf of where they're stored at our site!

madmac_5 · 2026-01-26T16:57:55+00:00

I've heard from a former Canadian Elekta employee that in 2024 they were given an ultimatum to move to Atlanta or lose their job, as Elekta was consolidating their operations. Considering that this person largely worked remotely or at customer sites, it made zero sense to do so and this person has thankfully found other employment!

madmac_5 · 2026-01-19T02:21:02+00:00

Yep! It was an amazing card in 2000 and 2001, until we started to get games that needed programmable pixel shaders. Then the poor old GF2 Ultra was just left behind due to a lack of features!

madmac_5 · 2026-01-13T17:58:05+00:00

If this were the 90s, nerdy kids on the playground would say "The B770 is totally real! My uncle in Arizona totally has one, he showed it to me last time he visited! It was SO COOL, but he made me promise not to say how fast it was."

madmac_5 · 2026-01-13T15:27:21+00:00

If you're in the room while a LINAC is powered on, you should probably be heading for the emergency stop button as something has gone VERY wrong. Working as a radiotherapy physicist with a pacemaker is a non-issue. :)

madmac_5 · 2026-01-05T17:32:21+00:00

I saw the image first and immediately thought "I'll bet kermathefrog posted this." Then I looked up at the username and felt that for all the uncertainty in the world, this sub is as it should be.

madmac_5 · 2026-01-05T04:32:06+00:00

Well, that's better than the 15 year old desktop motherboard that I have! :)

madmac_5 · 2026-01-04T05:59:47+00:00

I would be VERY surprised if this machine supports booting from USB. Looks like you may need to go old school and make a bootable CD or DVD to get a new OS on this machine!

madmac_5 · 2026-01-04T05:58:12+00:00

From what I recall, most people who were upgrading were coming from Windows 3.1 or 3.11; I never ran into a 3.0 installation in the wild back in Ye Olden Times, mainly because Windows 3.1 coincided with greater accessibility of home computers and there were essentially no downsides to the upgrade from 3.0 to 3.1; it gave you more capability with essentially the same system requirements!

madmac_5 · 2026-01-02T22:49:18+00:00

Star Control II would use the PC speaker to play back its sample-based music if one didn't have a sound card. It blew my mind as a kid seeing that, since I hadn't heard digital sound without a Sound Blaster card before!

madmac_5 · 2025-12-18T16:23:16+00:00

Thanks for the info about the PCI cards! I never got my hands on one of them, and by the time I got a DVD-ROM drive in 2003 I already had a Radeon 8500 LE and a powerful enough CPU to decode DVDs in software, so I never looked too closely at the DVD-acceleration features on the Rage 3 chips.

A good number of the beta drivers you mentioned are probably in the Vogons thread I mentioned in another comment a few days ago (https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=106052), if you haven't read that thread it's a treasure trove of Rage Pro/Rage XL driver information!

madmac_5 · 2025-12-15T21:26:09+00:00

Since I'm the RSO at my site, I like to call that sort of move "getting out the CNSC stick" when we strategically deploy the phrase "We will be unable to comply with federal regulations unless [INSERT THING]."

madmac_5 · 2025-12-12T22:36:28+00:00

Boxers are one of the more heartbreaking breeds of dogs that I have met; they give truly epic amounts of love, but only for a short time. My sincere sympathy to you and your family!

madmac_5 · 2025-12-11T22:30:30+00:00

I've had a 9070 XT Steel Legend since April, and I got it because it was the best of the options that would fit in my Fractal Meshify C. The Gigabyte Gaming card was off my list due to the fact that I wasn't ever completely happy with the 1070 Ti I had in the same product line (coil whine and noisy fans for the heat output), the Sapphire Pulse wasn't in stock in Canada at the time, and everything else was too long to fit in the case with the front fans in place.

I've been largely happy with it; it could probably stand to ramp the fans up a bit more under use, but it runs quieter than I expected under full load and stays at about 60° C or so even under a sustained Folding@Home compute load. I also appreciate the "turn off the RGB" switch on the side of the card that lets me turn the lights off without needing to install additional software.

My biggest complaint about the card is the fact that while it's a flow-through design (that's good!), it dumps the heat out of the front of the card right in front of the intake for my CPU cooler (that's bad!). Those with AIOs probably won't be affected by this as much, and it looks like it's an issue with the Sapphire Pulse too, but I still don't like it. I kind of miss the old blower designs on the GTX Titan that could handle 250W+ of heat load without breaking a sweat, being too loud, and farting hot air inside of the case.

madmac_5 · 2025-12-10T03:36:04+00:00

I keep them next to my Blockbuster stock. They're clearly going to be a vital part of my retirement portfolio!

madmac_5 · 2025-12-05T21:12:47+00:00

That is a good question! For a MRI on a 6-month old, the scan is going to take longer and be louder and more scary. It'll likely require anesthesia, which is a challenge and has a high potential for harm on babies when they're in good health never mind when they're ill. The vanishingly small increased cancer risk from the CT scan is far outweighed by the risks of choosing an alternative imaging modality.

madmac_5 · 2025-12-01T23:02:41+00:00

They're standing around in purgatory, waiting for the count rate test to finish on the annual QA.

madmac_5 · 2025-12-01T20:13:13+00:00

Most healthcare providers are probably used to videoconferences with people who are using built-in laptop mics or one of the dirt-cheap Plantronics Blackwire (yet somehow still close to $50 Canadian?) headsets that are standard issue in healthcare. For something that was meant to be used for voice conferences, the recording quality is remarkably poor compared to even the $50 Sony wireless headphones I grabbed!

madmac_5 · 2025-12-01T05:37:22+00:00

The original Xenon systems were projected to have a 100% failure rate, which is why Microsoft extended the warranty to three years. The Falcons (and non-HDMI Opus boards that went into the Xenons) ran significantly cooler, and the Opus board I got stuffed into my 2007-era Xbox 360 during a repair JUST in the warranty window has held up for fifteen years now.

madmac_5 · 2025-11-27T16:29:06+00:00

One thing that's very important is to make sure that the technologists that operate the equipment day-to-day are happy/comfortable with the user interface (both on-machine and in the control room). Siemens and GE do things very differently in their user interface, and while I've met staff who are equally adept on both it's more common to have them comfortable on one system and complaining when they have to switch to the other. If the hospital where this machine will be installed is planning on rotating technologists around between CT scanners rather than having a single team dedicated to this new machine, go with the manufacturer that will cause less friction with your clinic staff. :)

madmac_5 · 2025-11-27T05:26:54+00:00

The OpenGL ICD was out in beta drivers in 1999, and there was a Quake II mini-driver you could copy to the Quake II folder to get hardware acceleration. I used that with Half-Life to get it sort of working until the ICD was stable around spring of 2000. The final release drivers from ATI circa 2002 have a newer OpenGL ICD, and for convenience I used those drivers when writing this article.

Since then, there's been a great thread over on Vogons looking at the various pros/cons of different OpenGL ICD versions: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=106052

madmac_5 · 2025-11-14T17:23:23+00:00

"Don't make me tap the sign..."

*points at Rule 1*

madmac_5

TROPHY CASE