I have no chance

That... Is the title of my post.

Baylor is a phenomenal place BUT they invited over 30 people back for
candidate review and it seems like almost everyone has a masters.

Worst case scenario? (barring any freak accidents...) : I get a lot of
food.

I sometimes forget how awesome TMC is, but driving through this
minicity helps me re-realize.

There are skywalks four stories tall.

I would write more but my thumbs are beginning to hurt.

Yeah. This place rocks.

Test

Testing blog post from iPhone.

--

Enter a hella crazy two weeks

There is subatomic homework due in a week. Physics test in little under two weeks and Asian Lit test on the same day.

All this wouldn't be so bad except that I'm going to Houston in a few days for Candidate Review, which I'm pretty excited about. Hopefully I can borrow a camera to take a few hundred pictures. 

So what am I doing about this? Looking at Oscars fashion. Most of their dresses are pretty horrible. Especially queen latifah. Whoo. 

So...I'm still settled on Maura Tierney. yay!

One thing that's going to be a big relief is my iPhone. Even though I'll be out of city, I'll probably still respond to emails rather promptly (and a little laconically). 

If the blogger site works, I might even post. Enter the festivities!

Pictures!

After a long post like last time, I'd rather not inundate the web with more text. How about some pictures! I had this post started a couple of days ago, BUT I couldn't get my pictures off my phone (Windows Server 2003), so now I'm back to XP, with pictures.

A few weeks ago I was driving to Plano with bad traffic, so I took a picture of the culprits.

In my last post, I discussed a seminar I attended? Picture from that event.

30ft from William Jefferson Clinton! (at Hillary for Texas headquarters)

Sometimes, I have "extravagant" breakfasts. Juice from frozen concentrate + scrambled eggs (1:10 in microwave), bread with mango jam, coffee and applesauce. Total prep time: ~4 minutes. How long did it take me to consume? ~6 minutes. 60% efficiency! (6/(6+4))

100% efficiency is impossible to attain. :'(

Picture of my work station. I (occasionally) do work.

Finally, two more pictures of the messy apartment. (Those are expired eggs below). My room is considerably cleaner.

Incontingency

It takes effort to write a decent post. Material must be collected, thought about, even if I'm going to ramble the entire time. There must be some substance. Now that I've made my lame excuse, let's begin.

First off, I went back home last weekend, mostly because I just felt like it. I needed clothes.. and peanuts.. and it's always nice to go back to my bubble that is Plano, where they have grassy medians. mmmm.. grassy, curbed, medians with trees.

I was trying to get pants* when I saw 4 police cruisers in the parking lot, all surrounding a car. I thought it was medical at first (common), but there were no MICU's around, so I walked closer to my car and I saw one of the police cruisers' hood draped with clothes, and a couple of officers standing around, almost laughing, and a hispanic lady with a very shrunken face. That was interesting to see. I wonder what they were going to do with so much plundered clothing.

Some of you may not know, but one of my students was recently (3-4 months ago) diagnosed with Lupus. I'm not going to make a case study out of her or anything, but I didn't know anything about Lupus when I heard of it (I thought it was some dog disease, which.. makes sense in a way). It's a horrible disease and debilitates the body. Anyway, she asked me to pick her up from the Greyhound station so she could make it to a test in time, which wasn't a problem for me, and that's what I'd like to stress, that I didn't have a problem with that.

It wasn't "Oh I'm too tired... can't you call someone else?" or "It's too late, I'm really sleepy"**. Yes, jackass, I can and will call someone else! What's with the tiredness (a common excuse)? Suck it up and do it! I, like most people, will only make a request when absolutely necessary. So if I call you in the middle of the night for something (and it seems urgent), try not to blow me off, and if you do, begin to consider yourself an inferior human being, because I already have.

What's even more sad is that most of these people are going to be parents, and some, doctors. If you can't get past your desires (and stubbornness), then you'll make horrible parents/doctors/people. I don't mind making midnight drop-offs if someone needs a book, or stay an extra hour if someone needs help, because in the long run, it won't affect me a bit. Even in the short run, I'll be fine. 10 minutes or an hour is irrelevant! And I'm sure the other party appreciates it.

I suppose this is what Medicine is all about. I was at a talk/presentation/meeting about "Depression among Asian-American females". A speaker talked about how in the end, she had to call 911, as they were the only people that ultimately provided medical/psychological attention. People always talk about a fabric of society and "things that keep us together". Well, you should be able to infer what that is by now. It's not physicists, or mathematicians, or IT (dime a dozen these days) or businessmen, or really people in any other field besides Medicine. People need to be healthy to enjoy life, to make decisions, to live, to fight and argue, to vote and be voted on.

When I see an ambulance, it's comforting, not because I know someone is injured, but that something is being done about it. Life happens because there are people who will wake up in the middle of the night to see a patient, drive a friend home, perform a surgery or tend to a crying child.

So is it a burden that I get called upon? Absolutely not. It's more of a reminder of the awesomeness I hope to step into some day, and become that thread.

*: 30x32 is impossible to find. Too many people are short and fat these days. I'm going to start ordering this size online.
**: Actual responses from friends, not strangers.

Rasterbator - piotrr style

I'm a man of many quirks. It was a Saturday afternoon, I mailed off my alignment and I was looking for things to do besides work on my subatomic homework or read for lit class or study for Monday's Japanese test.

That means I'm on digg.com, where I find this article. Blue reduces appetite. Maybe it's my subconscious anorexia, but I suddenly wanted a blue wallpaper (not only for my desktop, but a real blue wallpaper would be pretty cool too). I've also been looking for things to decorate my wall with, nothing artistic, just something stare at.

I thought about buying a blue poster, but $10 for something I'll probably just throw away at the end of the year seems like a waste. I need a rasterizing program - Rasterbator.

I also need a big picture, something reflective of myself, while also being cool. An open heart? Nah, too much red (not enough blue). How about oceans?

Perfect. I found an image of a space shuttle against a blue ocean, peppered with clouds, ready for my wall. Here I come ECE Labs! They'll probably hate me for this, but I've spooled almost a gigabyte of data into their color laser printer trying to get all 15 pages of my image out. My quota is down 150 pages, but I never use it all anyway, so meh.



Once the proctor went up and looked at one of the pages and shrugged his shoulders and went back to working, probably confused by the 8.5"x11" page full of clouds.


Note that one of the pages on the right side is pure blue.

I think I'm losing weight already.

Ahn Titch Em

That's the title of my post - it means "I like you" in Vietnamese, a line I was going to use on barrel-o-monkeys, but somehow it didn't work out. Don't worry. I'm perfectly fine. Better than fine, actually.

Anyway. I went to this Vietnamese culture festival. Originally I thought it was a semi-formal event, so I was feeling underdressed going there with just slacks and a dress shirt. Apparently, high schools in austin suck (surprise surprise! I hate this city.), so instead of theater seating, they had plastic chairs. Oh and I was overdressed. I swear I heard gunshots a couple of times. I even met one of my students there. Man, it's great to stand around and have people come up and be like HEY DON'T I KNOW YOU.

(I sometimes forget I have a new toy to help me in my online journalism.)

I have a criticism though. Traditional Vietnamese dresses look awesome (like almost all traditional Asian dresses) - cf. "Ao dai". Sometimes I wish this culture was celebrated more than the degrading 6th street bullshit VSA exemplifies.

Afterwards, I went to dinner with a friend and two other people who had been raised in the rough of Houston. As they recanted stories of blood and gore, I actually found myself strangely attracted to them. Nothing serious, of course, but I reasoned that I'd been around weak women for so long, it was refreshing to meet a pair of Amazonians.

I had become used to women being so needy and insecure with themselves that I've actually opened myself up to being vulnerable to the 'damsel in distress' type. I suppose that fits in nicely with the God Complex.

Pathetic, I know.