Warning: Put your nerd glasses on for this post. Or bust out a pillow if you start dozing off from the lack of photos.
Today I got to meet 
Kim Herrera  an Adobe Certified Expert Photoshop CS CTT+ Trainer.  Wow that sure is a  long title!  Long explanation short, she is a "color specialist".
There are a couple monitors at work that are not consistent in color  so we called her in to calibrate and set up color profiles for our  monitors. She is not only extremely knowledgeable and friendly, but  really good at explaining things in simple english.  I love it when  techy people are able to break things down in layman's terms.  That's  when you know that they really know their shiet and do not need to  impress you with technical jargon.
Two hours later we have perfectly calibrated monitors and she  educated me on maintenance.  Here are some nerdy highlights from our  meeting:
She introduced me to this amazing Pantone reading hand held device called the 
Pantone Color Cue
.   We had a yellow tshirt lying nearby and she picked it up, placed the  device on the fabric, pushed a button and magically a PMS color number  displayed on the LCD screen along with the RGB and CMYK conversions.   Another useful tool that I haven't seen since college was the 
Pantone Color Bridge set
.  This was useful because if you didn't want to buy the handheld device  you can manually compare the colors by using the Pantone "flash cards"  as I like to call them. Buying them separately is expensive so if you  want to make the investment I recommend buying the two in the 
Pantone Plus Series Set
.  
Overall it was a very informative session, I was very pleased to  learn how to maintain color calibration on our monitors and also  re-introduced to using Pantone colors for accurate color reference.  Kim  has some useful video tutorials introducing some tips and tricks of  Photoshop that I found very helpful. I hope our paths cross again and  for sure I will subscribe to her YouTube channel.  Check out her blog  out at 
Xone10.com.