Mexico Medical Student |

Blog Updates:
I’m happy to report all is well. The blog software is updated, making room for all the “current” plug-ins, themes, etc. and most importantly, the security fixes applied so that I don’t get h4×0r5 hijacking the site to something hideous and embarrassing like an online yarn shop. I’d never live that one down. Regarding the slick black theme: yes, it’s understated, and surprisingly, yes, it’s pretty much done. I downloaded it of course, because I can’t create much of anything, but I can always edit and tweak. (which I need to do because I want my links underlined and my blogroll subcategorized) However, I really like the minimal, clean look. Maybe in a month or two I’ll think to add a graphic here and there, but the day you see a flash ad at the top (for yarn and fabric!) is the day you know for sure I’ve been abducted. Thanks Vijay and TinyShrink MD (heh) for the shout outs.

Bags:
As I wrote on Twitter the other day, I have a serious thing for bags. I am, in fact, completely indistinguishable from a woman shopping for purses with the level of scrutiny that I investigate pockets, seams, zippers and compartments. However, the presence of my Y chromosome does mean that I must depart somewhat from my inner female in that looks and it matching anything else I have are nearly irrelevant. I don’t care if the bag looks like a freak accident that escaped the Coach genetic testing labs–I care about function,form, and feel, ONLY and in that order.

So my brother was here last week, and I saw a bag he had that I don’t recall his having this last Christmas. I asked what it was, and he said “Weren’t you the one that told me about this?” Disgustedly, I gave a look like, “You fool! Do you think I’d forget something like this?!?” as I pawed The Precious.

Here is the object of my desire. It’s different from my brother’s, but our gear needs are different. Yes I know the orange isn’t the most aesthetically pleasing color, but just look at that removable DSLR camera bag attachment. Yes, I know the whole “snake” theme is a bit odd, but that’s some sexy stuff. YeSSSSS!

Obviously, I’m not getting this anytime soon, but my current eBags laptop backback is not doing too well (in fact, it’s nearly unrecognizable from the online pictures). It’s also surprisingly heavy all by itself–something I found recently as I emptied it to have it be managed by Claudia when I was last in the hospital. “Honey, I need this because, like, you know, the next time I might be in the the hospital–what? yes, I know the doctor said all would be fine, but you never know…ok!–I’m just saying, the next time, if I have this, it won’t be as heavy for you when you have to manage it,” just isn’t very convincing. I’ll work on it.

Social Networking:
In my previous life, I was a senior-level IT person/consultant. It should come as no surprise, then, that when faced with a “SIGN UP NOW” email from a relative, friend, or annoying co-worker–it matters not–in order to see their pictures or whatever online with some proprietary service, I normally would hit “delete” without a second thought (and might even be annoyed that thanks to them, they at least have my email address). Why on earth would I want to give away my information to a business that I have nothing to do with who, upon trying to make ends meet, will be like so many others and whore their user data to the highest bidder, maybe even sinking so low as to start putting up yarn ads. (If you got that reference, you’ve read this all the way through and I thank you from the bottom of my ad-less heart)

Maybe it’s the sweltering Texas summer heat, maybe it’s having some burnable time on my hands, but I seem to be trying out new services sites like it’s going out of style. Normally meticulously recorded in SplashID on my Blackberry (encrypted of course), I have yet to keep up with all the usernames/sites I’m registering. It’s like I have Daddy’s credit card and going on a registration/shopping spree and don’t care about amounts or receipts, wadding them up and throwing them on the floor as I search the next target. There’s a ton of redundancy and overlap in these things, and I think I’ve reached the limit of what I’m willing to try. I think with each useful service, there is a “best of breed” product; that’s the one I’ll sign up with.

And what it is with the lack of vowels in these names? Flickr. Stumblr. Feedlr. Tumblr. Mastrbatr. I gotta pull back before some 21-year-old CIO in the Bay Area tweets to his other entrepreneur buddies and with all their collective information figures out the exact position of all the constellations at the time of my birth. On their iPhones.

(Medical stuff–personal and news/commentary–coming in a jiffy, I promise!)

Tonight I plan to upgrade this site to Wordpress 2.5.x. I’ll also be applying a new theme, though I’m not 100% sure which one it will be. I can say, however, that it will NOT be a completed task anytime soon. I’m not a web designer and I don’t want to waste time making things purty. I care more about functionality and such and will be adding a few new plugins as well. So, if there are a few glitches y’all notice over the next 24-48h or so, please PLEASE let me know. Letting me know what you think of the new semi-temporary look and feel as well would make me verrry happy.

I may yet continue as a Mexican medical student at another school, so I haven’t given up the domain yet, but it’s time for some serious housecleaning around here. If your blog is not on my sidebar and we’ve commented/emailed in the past, let me know–it’s just on oversight on my part. OK, time for me to start scrubbin’!

One of the things I love to do in my free time is photography and video. I don’t claim to have any special talent for either, but given enough time and footage, I can make something pretty cool video-wise. For our IRS “stimulus check,” (which, thanks to my working last year for those months I earned one) we did our patriotic duty to help piss in the ocean invigorate the economy and bought a high-def camcorder. Given our financial situation, this was a rather extravagant purchase (and I bought it for way cheap as a refurb, so I think I did pretty well) but our 5-year-old camcorder was ailing so badly, I’d rarely break it out; consequently, I missed filming many moments of our little one.

Here’s the funny part: there is no HDTV in any of our family members to be found. Oh sure, the computer monitor can serve that purpose, but who wants to watch a movie on a 20″ monitor? After the firesale we had in Mexico to move back, the only TV we have is this bargain basement 21″ Magnavox which does a shitty job of showing standard definition without problems much less HD. So why bother with HD at all? Simple: futureproofing. I have yet to see my daughter’s 2nd birthday last month in its full HD video glory, but it’s on digital tape (HDV format) whenever that time comes…

…which leads me to another quandary: this whole process has underscored how much I need to upgrade my computer system. Handling HD video is seriously CPU/GPU intensive. The raw video (1920×1080) doesn’t even fit on the computer screen. The disk space requirements are enormous as well: going from HDV->Apple Intermediate Codec will cost almost 75gigs/hr of hard drive space. Ouch. Now I need a RAID array as well, because I sure as hell ain’t going to trust a single drive to be slammed with that much I/O, project after project, and survive for long.

But what a cool camera. In truth, I can record in HD and export in downsampled SD DV like any other tape-based consumer camcorder. The difference is that 1) I have the original footage in HDV format on tape for future re-import, and 2) the image quality is STILL a product of a superior CMOS image sensor and all the functionality the camera provides leveraged to make a much better video product. I’m still learning everything, and I’m scared that the more I learn, the more I discover things like “if I had this kit to use a 35mm lens adapter, imagine what depth of field control I could have!”

I am not a filmmaker, and I have no plans to change careers to become a cinematographer or movie editor. I think I am drawn to this new (and inevitably expensive) hobby because it channels the dormant parts of myself that are creative, that do yearn to create something brand new, or at the very least, transform the ordinary into something special. Just as a picture can be worth a thousand words, a visual story can be worth a thousand pictures.

This should be fun.

I got broadband again! YAY!! No more having to go to the school library or Starbucks (unless I really want to) to do anything more bandwidth-intensive than quickly check email via Gmail’s You’d be surprised how long even Gmail’s web interface which appears text-only takes to load. All that Javascript/AJAX code and the 10-15 cookie/status/God-knows-what-else checks take up a surprising amount of time. Loading a Youtube video or a sizeable attachment? Fergedaboudit.

Speaking of Starbucks (yes, they have quite a few here), they actually have holiday cups and some Christmas decorations, as well as their “Holiday Blend” coffee. However, gone are any real holiday flavors–no gingerbread latte, pumpkin pie spice or other seasonal favorites–just a lame vanilla and/or toffee something-or-other. That’s not a special–those syrups are there all the time! I actually hardly ever get the “candy-in-a-cup”-type drinks, preferring straight-up coffee. During the holidays, though, I do indulge a few times with a beverage treat that only comes this time of year. Too bad it’s not here.

Compared to the tin-can-and-string technology I’ve been using for the last week to get online, not having a flavored coffee is nothing.

Since my last post was “Meltdown,” I guess that’s an apropos title, since everything is back up and running. The final diagnosis for the desktop: simple drive corruption. Thankfully, I don’t have to buy a new drive! I have no idea how it got corrupted, since as it was going south, I was in front of it doing nothing special, but I ran several utilities that stressed the hell out of the drive (writing 1s and 0s randomly in all sorts of patterns covering the disk multiple times) and nary an error was reported.

Unfortunately, I was not able to recover all the data. Between data recovery efforts and backups, I got more than 80-90% of everything, and I’d say that almost everything that was important (since I backup that stuff more often) is still with me. It was a classic case of diminishing returns: the first day of full-on effort yielded by far the most data, the second day a bit more stuff but at far greater time and effort, and by Day 3, I had to just chalk the remainder up as a loss. I had a HUGE project at work that required me to work almost all day this last Sunday (another reason I hadn’t updated), so I didn’t have oodles of time to burn with my system in lala land.

The laptop was obviously fine from the start after I wiped it clean since its problems were always more superficial and was a result of my being overcautious than anything. It was “home base” for everything and turned out to be a trooper. What was massively cool is that my MPB has an 80G drive–adequate but small by laptop standards nowadays. It has one Firewire port which was connected to my desktop, which has two physical internal drives. The freaking awesome cool thing I had never tried in target mode is hot-connecting more physical drives to the slave machine. In this case, I added two more external FW drives to the G5, so my wittle bitty Macbook now had 5 physical drives mounted for a total of 880G of total raw space at its disposal!! Mwahahaha!

Ok, enough geekery, I promise. I just wanted to post a quick update before the posts that are about to go up because I got some comments (thank you) and wanted to bring the minimelodrama full circle.

I have had a complete and total computer meltdown today.  I finally got my hands on the new version of MacOS X 10.5, “Leopard.”  Since I’m overly-cautious, I decided to put it on my MacBook Pro since it has very little “unique” data that was easy to back up first.  The update hosed it.  My usernames were gone and other esoteric problems had myself spending way too much time in single-user mode.  I doubt I would have had any semblance of a system left if it weren’t for my existing UNIX-y skillz.

To make this part of the long story short, I got it working…sort-of.  It’s the same in medicine–you know something is wrong, but all the labs say things are fine–except in medicine you can’t say, “OK, we’re going to just erase you and start from scratch.” LOL!  I was reading articles online on my desktop to help w/the laptop situation, and then–after the laptop is pretty much behaving oddly enough to say “screw it, I’m wiping it,”–my desktop started chunking. There was no noise, but the fan started revving and the CPU seemed pegged.  It took seconds just to switch windows, probably a minute to switch to a different app, and just general badness. When I looked at the system logs, all I saw was “I/O error” over and over, and it corresponded to my boot disk–you know, the one that has a bunch of important stuff on it.

Booting from install CDs to run disk utilities was an exercise in futility. 2 out of 3 times, I couldn’t get the disk to even be recognized.  It was then that I had my “Oh shit!” moment: thanks to the laptop fiasco I realized I had no working computer to fall back on.  The cruel irony that sadistically played out in my head over and over was that I intentionally left my G5 alone, pristine because information on it was too important until Leopard proved its spots.  My karmic fortune makes me wonder if I clubbed harbor seals in a former life.  

Besides sharing my woe (and on the 31st, no less), the other important update is that I had no less than 5 blog drafts >90% completed to post.  One of them was on MRSA, another was on emergency medicine….it sucks that I lost all that work, but that’s still not even the worst of it.  I am still trying some voodoo to see if I can at least salvage some recent data, if I can even get the sucker to mount. (don’t mind the goat skull on my CPU and the salt circle on the floor)  I do have backups, but my iTunes library alone is >40G, so it gets kinda hard sometimes.  I might have lost everything in the last 7-10 days in terms of documents, collected data, bits and pieces, etc., but I have a 2nd internal drive which stores most of my multimedia (Aperture for digital photos, some video movie projects, etc.).

So as to not lie on the bed crying like a girl, I remind myself that I’m not a graphic designer that lost his entire portfolio and will affect his financial future; this was not a case where my groundbreaking research into blah-blah went up in digital smoke.  I have a reasonable collection of backups across different external drives, but it’s going to be a major pain in the ass to figure out how to put Humpty Dumpty together again (and where to get another sATA drive of any decent size down here w/o paying practically double price).  

One step at a time….more soon…    BACK UP YOUR IMPORTANT DATA! 

I was reading this article about a PHP developer’s love affair with Ruby, an increasingly popular scripting language. Like “love affair” implies, it was intense, passionate, difficult, but ultimately ended. Ruby’s greatest asset is that it was developed from the ground up to be strictly object-oriented (that’s way too huge a topic to go into here) in the face of “bastard” scripting languages like Perl and PHP that borrow from several “standard” languages (making them more flexible, IMO). Ruby has received the most exposure via a Ruby-based web-creation framework called Rails, and people swear it’s the best thing since man invented fire. Whatever–I know better and I’m not drinking the Kool-Aid.

Ok, background done–I mentioned all the above so you can make complete sense of what follows. My main point is that the author listed several lessons learned in his torrid language love affair, and this one really stuck out:

#7 - PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES ARE LIKE GIRLFRIENDS: THE NEW ONE IS BETTER BECAUSE YOU ARE BETTER

Rails was an amazing teacher. I loved it’s “do exactly as I say” paint-by-numbers framework that taught me some great guidelines.

I love Ruby for making me really understand OOP [object-oriented programming]. God, Ruby is so beautiful. I love you, Ruby.

But the main reason that any programmer learning any new language thinks the new language is SO much better than the old one is because he’s a better programmer now! You look back at your old ugly PHP code, compared to your new beautiful Ruby code, and think, “God that PHP is ugly!” But don’t forget you wrote that PHP years ago and are unfairly discriminating against it now.

It’s not the language (entirely). It’s you, dude. You’re better now. Give yourself some credit.

Programming and geekiness aside, I thought that point was very insightful. How many things in our lives do we come back to something, full-circle, and have a vastly different view? By definition, when this happens we have a greater experience base to draw from, and the “time-out” we took allowed us a perspective that would have been otherwise impossible. I think of my impending return back to school and bet that this will factor in somehow.

We all need to experience something different, something that jars us from our current point of view. I’m not suggesting a real torrid love affair (at least not for the married/committed people) to gain perspective or do anything irresponsible, but there is something special in losing oneself in a different activity or interest, pushing boundaries, challenging one’s views, and coming back “home” a better person for it.

I just upgraded my blog to Wordpress 2.3 from 2.2.1 (yes, I skipped 2.2.2). I kinda like things not to be broken, so I don’t run the “bleeding edge” builds (betas, RCs, etc.) but I did start using Subversion to manage the source tree so that I could do updates way easier. I am a dyed-in-the-wool user of CVS (no, that’s not the pharmacy chain) and using Subversion took a lot less getting used to than I thought, certainly from a client-only POV. The main thing I’m looking forward to in this release is native tagging. Yes, I know there have been plugins to do this, but I am glad I procrastinated, because now it’s something I don’t have to worry about converting. (who says procrastination doesn’t pay?!)

So, if things don’t work for whatever reason, let me know. Otherwise, things should be exactly how they were. I will be changing themes soon, mainly to take advantage of the new tagging and sidebar widget features. I’ve had this one for over a year and a half, and the reason you’ve seen it nowhere else but here is because it’s a horribly hacked copy of another theme. I’m a techno-geek, not a designer, so when I start blindly experimenting with CSS, black clouds loom overhead, birds fly out of the treetops, and that ominous foreboding of what visual havoc I may wreak fills the ether.

Luckily for all, I do all my tinkering on a dummy instance of Wordpress on my own computer. The disfigured alignments, twisted typefaces and ghastly graphics of my CSS carnage never leave my workstation. (Halloween is coming up–I’m just getting in the mood…heh.)

Here are some recent, helpful Wordpress links until my next post:

• Updating Wordpress with Subversion
• Template hierarchy (really useful if you edit your theme)
• Template tags (using WP functions to display dynamically-generated data on your pages)
• Retrofitting your “old” theme to use the new tagging system

One of my recent projects was coming up with some audio/music to use for my daughter’s sleep. White noise is ideal to block out unwanted din, especially living here in Mexico in a closed off gated community (coto) where everybody insists on living their lives outside. You can’t really tell the neighborhood to “shut up,” when it’s 8:00pm. In addition, most houses have no insulation of any kind, so just general noise from the outside such as cars driving by, a short honk, a delivery truck, etc. all have the potential to rouse our little Energizer bunny from the sleep that she naturally fights.

“No problem,” I thought to myself. I just needed a tool to “normalize” the audio so that the mostly classical music doesn’t have the all the dynamic range of the natural louds and softs. Right now, a median volume would mean that soft passages would be unhearable and louder passages (though musically appropriate) would potentially wake her up. Then, I thought, “Wait–I can’t be the only person to have needed this. Let me Google this…”

I could have sworn what I was going to use was a tool/plugin that does “normalization.” After beating my head against that wall for a few days with no good results, I found that what I was looking for is what’s called dynamic compression. “Compression” seemed totally the wrong word to me, because to compress is to remove redundant data to fit a smaller space (and “decompression” would fill it back in). But NOOOO–some crazy group of audio engineers decided to call a limiting of dynamic range–that narrowing the gap between the difference of louds and the softs–”compression.” That’s what radio stations have been doing for years so you can hear everything in car w/o having to ride the volume control, as well as giving extra “punch” to certain audio frequencies so you think one station sounds better even though they play the same recordings.

Jacking with the dynamic range of the latest “Arcade Fire” track is one thing, doing it to a symphony or a string quartet is something different. Classical music is the domain of serious audiophile engineers analyzing acoustics in concert halls, obsessing over the minutiae of different polymer tiles, their placement, etc. all to provide the best aural experience for a live performance. When recording, mics are placed strategically to capture the ambience of the hall, but also throughout the stage. You want to hear the crispness of a freshly rosined bow on a string, the collective breath before a horn section’s opening, the higher frequencies in the “blat” of a low-brass instrument. Trying to dampen these subtleties is blasphemy.

“Baby Einstien” sells 22 minutes of toybox-synthesized classical lullaby crap for $10 on iTunes Music Store. That’s a serious cash-cow; even pop CDs are at least 50 minutes or so. Even if I bought both volumes, that’s not even 45 minutes of non-repetitive music. It is, however, homogenous in terms of timbre and volume, which, along with clever marketing, is why it sells. I’d rather have my daughter listen to the real thing, but I also have a practical need here as well. So imagine my own self-loathing when I subjected many wonderful pieces to a transmogrifying audio laboratory like a Maestro Mengele, removing the artistry, audio quality, and individuality to make a homogenous, similar, and ultimately inferior final product.

I’ll give an example: the “Adagietto” movement from Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. People in the know will gasp, “You’re putting her to sleep with Mahler!??” because Mahler is known for wide variations in dynamic expression, extremely long symphonies (>100 minutes), very busy and thick scoring (over 120 members in the orchestra, plus a choir at times), and did I mention long symphonies? Relax–this is a slow movement that is scored simply for strings and harp. I even have the relevant excerpt from the score here to follow along for those that want to for the musical sections below:

Note all the instructions Gus has provided above; the score is full of details, all about to be lost. This is the final 18 or so measures of the movement before heading into the buckle-your-seatbelts finale that comes immediately after. In this excerpt, 8 minutes into the movement, we go from quiet yearning to a final gushing emotional outpouring, to a complete fade to nothing. Gorgeous, heart-tugging, and although sublime, completely unworkable to put a child to sleep. Here is a picture of the original waveform in the audio editor (Apple Soundtrack Pro) and the playable excerpt below it:

Now, the bastardized, compressed audio. Note that there is a lot of artifact bringing up the volume from the low-amplitude sections, which you can visually see in the following graphic. This is the price one pays:

Upon finishing compressing 2h of music selections, they were transferred to a minidisc set on “Repeat,” and applied that night. I happy to report it was an unqualified success. I met the dual objective of both blocking out more external noise and giving daughter something to listen to that she can carry with her, even if only subconsciously, as she grows older to appreciate it more. Part of me feels bad for blasphemy I’ve wrought (ok, I’m being a bit facetious here), but Claudia and I certainly get more quality time as daughter gets more sleep, so too bad.

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P.S. Once unleashed, the compression monster can level anything in its path, rendering even unthinkably inappropriate selections even and unwavering. I’ve always joked to everyone I was going to inflict Soviet composers, such as Shostakovich, on her as soon as possible. I may do some personality damage if I start too early with things like this. LOL!