Mexico Medical Student |

We’re about to leave back to the states for 10 days or so. I meant to write sooner, but I had a physio test on Friday, then I was going to take Sat to relax and pack like a sane person, when Friday late night my desktop computer died. I finally narrowed it down to a corrputed main hard disk, but the hassle of dealing with that all day Saturday, if only to get the most basic of files off the system for the trip (something you just kinda take for granted), backup what I could, etc. I’ll just have to deal with it when I get back (I’m writing from my laptop).

I got little sleep the night before the exam, got woken up early by the God-forsaken trash men with their infernal bells (more on that in the near future as I put together an “Annoyances” page), and now I’ve slept zero. Zilch. With a 12-13 hr drive ahead of me, I’m going to be very unpleasant until tomorrow morning. Provided that I stress I am not to be bothered for any reason whatsoever to my parental units, I should be a lot better by Monday morning. It’s between now and then that I worry about.

Until late Monday or Tuesday, depending…

It is now 01:02:03 on 04/05/06.  Enjoy the next 99.99999% of your millenium. 

Sorry to my friends that I’ve already emailed this to, but I can’t stop watching this video, so I have to inflict it on the rest of the world. Hilarious!

It happened before, it’s happened again–Amazon.com needs to start hacking away at the dead wood that obviously draws a salary despite any semblance of best practices. This arrived in my inbox this morning:

From: Amazon.com To: enrico@blahblah.com
Date: 3 Apr 2006 07:49:17 -0700
Subject: [placeholder for winning team] Wins the NCAA Tournament!

[placeholder for winning team] Wins the NCAA Tournament!

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

Congratulations, [placeholder for winning team]! As someone who has purchased sports products from Amazon.com, we thought you should be the first to see our selection of NCAA championship products.

NCAA Championship Cap
Check out our championship hats, tees, and hooded sweatshirts in our NCAA Fan Shop.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/ref=pe_sg_ncaa06champ_ftr?node=3386071

Available only while supplies last.

Obviously, this is in reference to tonight’s NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship game between UCLA and Florida. The operative word is tonight, as in future, meaning DON’T SEND THE FRICKIN’ EMAIL YET! (and when you do, you might want to replace “[placeholder]…”)

Bozos.

What follows is the God’s-honest truth regarding my current iTunes data. Like that old ad campaign when iPods first came out, it says a lot about someone about what’s on it; unfortunately, as you’ll see, my music library is WAAAY too big for my 20G iPod. Here’s the damage:

(^**Data is consistent given books would have a much better compression and hence smaller files for the same time duration)

So there you have it: if I click “Library” and just press “Play,” as of the date of this writing, it would be until May 5th before my library finished!! There’s about a 2G discrepancy with the total from what’s listed, and that’s exactly those orphaned/perhaps repeated files that I’m trying to fix. In case you were wondering, I have 3 160G drives connected to my G5 (2 internal, 1 external) so space isn’t the issue. However, this is getting WAY too big to manage. iTunes organizing everything for me is great, but it’s an all-or-nothing problem. Either I keep everything in one folder (which I don’t–those things which are long backed-up already are in a separate folder outside my home directory) or I have to manually manage names/etc outside of iTunes. I would like something more “smart,” allowing me to place files where I want them yet be able to manage them easily from iTunes, both in a playlist way and also have at least an indirect way of accessing the filesystem (disk) from within iTunes so I can manage filenames/locations and have iTunes update intelligently rather than it go, “Duh…Where did the file go, duh….” like it does now.

So there’s a good news and bad news situation I now face: the good news is finally finished acquiring the “Great Pianists of the 20th Century” series–all 200 CDs. (we won’t discuss exactly how…*drums fingertips together in evil fashion*) The bad news is, well, with 17G of files (not my decision to encode in 320bit MP3!) and many files which need massive ID tag editing, what’s the best way to go about it so that I 1) have access to these files from iTunes (and therefore my iPod), 2) don’t overwhelm my home folder, 3) don’t intermix these files (which already are backed up to DVD-R) with my other music, and so on. Don’t worry, it’s nothing I’m going to solve tonight or this week, even.

I’m not learning much endocrine physiology or neoplastic cellular signaling (for pathology) dealing with these things, but I am who I am, and this is quintessentially me.

Today’s been a near-wasted study day. I hate the Spring daylight savings time change. It’s made even worse by the fact that there’s not a single advertisement or reminder anywhere that lets you know it’s happening. In the States, just about any broadcast channel will say, “Remember to set your clocks forward/back,” and have it emblazoned on the weekend paper, work reminds you, whatever. Here? It’s not like people are on time anyway, so what’s the big deal anyway, right? So I woke up this morning at 7:30, and figured I could roll over and give myself a bit more because it was a Sunday morning. I also decided we should watch a movie this morning after breakfast, figuring I’d start studying at around 11:30-12:00, giving at least part of the day for “couple” time. This was great, except that it was really 8:30, when I got up and 1:10pm when I realized that the time change had occurred. Shit, fuck, fire.

Add to all the above the last two days where my head feels like it’s at 100psi due to horrific allergies. In pre-clinics, we were learning physical exams for cranial nerves (basic stuff, not anything one would learn on a neurology rotation), and for CNI (smell) the first thing we had to do was test nasal permeability (which is oh-so-fun if your patient blows a wad of snot on your finger if they have a bad cold) before introducing any “test odors,” since you can’t really determine smell if you can’t breathe through your nose. Duh. “Good luck,” I told my partner, since you’d need an air compressor to blow through my plugged nostrils. This condition also came in handy for CN VII because I was hardly able to taste anything, either. I have taken 10mg of loratadine and about 60mg of pseudoephedrine, both bid, as well as either diphenhydramine or chlorpheneramine at night and I’m barely getting by. Allegra and other “name brand” non-sedating antihistamines are well over $1/pill here, in some cases approaching $2/pill; it’s insane. I get the loratadine in the States because it’s about 1/3 the price as here, but it’s not cutting it, either because of they type of allergens (1st time in the spring season here, to be fair) or my body is already used to the cheap stuff and needs to switch for its own sake. All I know is that I’ve had a non-stop headache and “floaty” feeling, and it sucks.

Then I’ll look outside at the bright-ass sun at 8:00pm and I know my days will be more rotten soon with the increased sun and heat. At over a mile high, these sun rays are potent. I moved from Texas, where it’s hot and humid, to here where it’s almost as hot and about as bright as a thermonuclear explosion. (Which if you think about it in a science geek way is precisely what the sun actually is, but you get my point) There is a special misery to having bad cold/allergy symptoms and sweating with heat, shielding your eyes from the glaring sun. People who come to school here from northern states just LOVE the warm, sunny weather. Whatever.

I really am OK people, I just needed to vent. (and sneeze, and blow my nose…)