Action Figures: When the girls were little, I had them convinced that my wife Susan and I had our own action figures. I had a Commander Riker doll (still do, see photo), the one from the episode where the radiation on the planet they are orbiting causes them to age rapidly, and Number One has grey hair. The Riker doll was "Daddy Doll" and the Counselor Troi doll was "Mommy Doll." One year for Halloween I wore a turtleneck and another tunic over it to resemble the costume, and I died my hair to more closely match the appearance.

The Star Trek School of Management: As an engineer, I am more like Montgomery Scott than like Geordi LaForge. I try to follow the adage "Under Promise, Over Deliver" and I think that sums up how Scotty handled the requests from the bridge for "more power" or "we need warp speed NOW." He would always start out being non-committal, then Kirk would give him a deadline, and he would always come through, so he looked like a hero. On the TNG episode "Relics" where they find Scotty preserved inside a transporter set to "loop" indefinitely, he explains his management philosophy to Geordi. Scotty asks "When the captain asks you how long something is going to take, what do you tell him?" Geordi answers "I tell him how long it will take." Scotty replies "No, laddie! You tell him it will take twice as long as you think it will take. Then when you get it done in half the time, everybody will think you are a miracle worker." Geordi just shakes his head, as I recall.

Memory Alpha is a very kewl web site. And Wikipedia has a number of episode summaries.

Beam Me Down Scotty: Whenever I start a new project as an IT consultant (software developer) I think of it as another "beam me down Scotty" situation. You get dropped in the middle of a strange situation and you have to hit the ground running and figure out what to do, often entirely on your own. There are numerous examples of this in the original series and the Next Generation. Like that episode in the original series called "The Paradise Syndrome" when Spock goes into the monolith and after studying the alien symbols, based on his extensive knowledge of computer systems from multiple planets, has to select which of the buttons on the panel is the "restart" button. With only seconds to spare, he "reboots" the planet's defense system activating a laser beam that destroys an incoming asteroid on a collision course. Or the episode "The Ensigns of Command" of the Next Generation when Data beams down solo in the middle of a complex political situation and has to rely on what he has learned about human behavior and emotion to get the fighting parties to reach a consensus.

There is no translation for "hyperonic" in Russian: Back in the 1990s in graduate school I had a lot of friends who recently emigrated from Russia. They were all math and science majors like I was, so I presumed that they must like Star Trek. But no, as they explained, they could not watch TNG that was on television at that time. Why not? Because they were all trying to learn to speak English, and if they watched Star Trek, all the dialog was mumbo-jumbo. That's when I realized that even a universal translator would be no help to someone who was trying to learn a foreign language for the first time.