jason partin fishing - catfish frog

The War on Drugs

I’m not sure who’s responsible for me being a casualty of the War on Drugs. It could have been the new president, Ronald Reagan. In 1980 he promised the Evangelical Christian groups that financed his presidential campaign that he’d fight, and end, America’s drug problem. Or, it could have been my dad, who had earned enough money growing marijuana to buy remote land in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, where he grew even more marijuana. Either way, I at a lot ketchup in the early 80’s.

Read more

Play Celebrity Jeopardy! to learn the European Medical Device Regulation

I grouped celebrities who share a common medical treatment and ask you to classify the device using the new European Union Medical Device Regulation rules. I give the answers, you respond in the form of a question.

Read more

My DHF, Version 2.1

I suggest that you stop reading. This is boring. I’m not saying that as a way to interest someone into reading more, I truly believe that this would be boring to most people.

Read more

Bid Daddy and Jimmy Hoffa

1940’s – 1972

What Big Daddy and Uncle Doug had done in Woodville Mississippi was being repeated on a larger scale nationally. Crime and labor unions were unifying in the prosperity and opportunities that followed WWII. Politicians and presidents and gangsters were promising to make every man a king. One of those people was James “Jimmy” Hoffa, president of the national Teamsters union.

Read more
Gumbo in Auntie Lo's fancy gumbo bowls

Wendy’s Family

1955-1972

In the 1950’s, my grandmother was a young woman, living a comfortable life in Richmond Hill Canada, a neighborhood of Toronto. She was petite, barely 5 feet 1 inches tall. Or, as Canadians say, she was a’boot 1.5 meters tall, ‘eh. Her wrists were so thin that her watch would barely fit around the wrist of an average eight year old girl, but her hands were big enough to hold a cocktail glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She enjoyed life.

Read more

How to retire early

This article is how to retire early, based on personal experiences.

Read more

My DHF, Version 2.1

I suggest that you stop reading. This is boring. I’m not saying that as a way to interest someone into reading more, I truly believe that this would be boring to most people.

Read more

How to meditate

This article is how to meditate and reduce suffering from chronic pain.

Read more

Use design controls for innovation

In the movie Wolf of Wall Street, Leonardo DeCaprio challenged his team to “sell me this pen,” implying that a good salesperson could sell anything.

This article helps teams “design a pen” using design controls in a way that sparks innovation. I wrote it for the biotech or medical device industries but the concepts apply to any company that must share work among a team. We go from defining user needs to transferring design into manufacturing.

Medical Device Design Controls

This article provides an overview of FDA design controls and lists resources to help understand and apply them.
This is in a “dry” format, necessary for repeating definitions. See my blog for versions that use case-studies or are related to pop culture.

5 minute read.

Read more