meehawl

Post-pre-med, day 4 has come and gone. Tuesday was administrivia for the most part, Wednesday was more of the same with some explanations of faculty structure and an intro to the surprisingly secure medical school IT facilities. Today was some stuff about international courses and then an introduction to infectious diseases and needle stick management. Still no Hepatitis C vaccine or treatment, damn. Then I got to poke someone with a needle and draw her blood, and she did the same to me. I was surprised at the intensity of the “flash” as the blood begins to pump from the vein… of course, it’s a negative pressure collecting vial. Still, I was reminded of CSI and its obsession with plotting “arterial spray”, looking for “voids”

Played soccer for a bit, then dodgeball. The playing of amateur games outside a competitive environment is some sort of UCSD tradition, even to the level that Vernor Vinge notes it his wonderful Rainbows End. Tomorrow is the “White Coat Ceremony“, which is some sort of pseudo-graduation thing for people that haven’t actually begun to study medicine. Blame Columbia!

Tags: San Diego, UCSD, blood, medical school, phlebotomy by mike
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Today was the first day of the “pre-term” session, which mainly consists of starting by telling everyone how wonderful they are to be becoming doctors and to have been selected and all that stuff, and ends by scaring them by telling them how expensive it is to become a doctor. There is the inevitable “Latte Lecture”, which tries to explain the time value of money and compounding interest using repetitive latte purchases to illustrate the folly of living beyond one’s means. Nevertheless, I suspect many people will continue to purchase undue numbers of Mint Chocolate Chip Blended Crème Frappuccino. Later there was a trip down to the UCSD beach to watch the sun go down behind the surfers, beach volleyballers, pizza eaters and, later, huddle around a beach fire. A huge moon rose (there is a total lunar eclipse later tonight) and shone through the palms, the whole imposter sensation began to fade, and I finally, tentatively, began to accept that I am in fact about to begin studying medicine in UC San Diego. As long as its all smores and beach bonfires I should do fine.

Tags: San Diego, UCSD, la jolla, medical school by mike
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Well things have been busy. I moved me and a bunch of crap from the east coast to the west coast of the United States of America. When I got my driving groove on, I managed to pass through a different time zone each day, which was pretty funky. And I finally managed to update the damn creaky Blogger content to WordPress. This was no trivial task – in the early days the Blogger account I had did not allow titles. So I had a bunch of H3 tags that had to be stripped and truncated into titles. Then I found that Blogger’s export sucks. And along the way, during its years of frequent server crashes, it seems to have managed to corrupt many entries, replacing plain ASCII text with non-Latin crap. Because my comments were done in an ancient “dotcomments” format, I had to import both Blogger and the comments into Movable Type (because the dotcomments guy wrote a workable dotcomments->MT import script). Needless to say, MT chokes on spurious characters. Then when that was done, I had to export from MT so that WordPress could import, because MT is so last year. I did all this on a server that has been moved and is no longer set up. Then when I set up the MySQL database on the remote 1and1 machine, I find that WordPress’s export function has silently truncated its data (I suspect a php timeout, as usual). Luckily I had also taken a MySQL dump of the entire schema, so with a bit of editing I was able to FTP that over and import it, re-creating the original
MySQL WordPress. So I think that, finally, all my posts and comments are here. Until I figure out how the anti-spam thing works, I have turned off commenting.

Tomorrow I start the first day of medical school indoctrination (that is, pre-term). We’ll see how that goes…

Tags: Uncategorized by mike
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