Loblogomy

Well, it’s been a pleasant (and clean air-enriched) two week respite, but it’s time to go back to work for the last year of my nine year med school experience. In addition to catching up on some much needed sleep during this break, I managed to stay busy in various ways. I had a long list of things I wanted to do and ended up doing about half, which isn’t too bad for a procrastinator like myself. I still have untold amounts of shit I NEED to do, though. On the less important end of the list, I had planned to start blogging more, but didn’t. Not sure why. I found lots of interesting things to post, but many times, I just wasn’t inclined to write the post to fill in the white space around the link. To lower my threshold for posting random finds, I’m thinking about adding a miniblog on the sidebar (as many others have these days) where I can list some of the inanities I encounter on my web travails so that you too can wonder why the hell some people have so much time on their hands. I’m looking at using del.icio.us and just need to find a way to integrate it into Wordpress. So far, I haven’t found any solutions that work the way I want.

During the past two weeks, I managed to not pick up a medical text the entire time, which, for better or worse, was a needed break. Rather, I spent a lot of time doing some leisure reading—something I don’t do often enough. I also spent some time just goofing off. Last week, I went out to Oakland to visit Eric, and by lucky chance ended up hearing a very interesting presentation about plenoptic photography from one of Eric’s friends. Also, earlier this week, I finally made my way out to Cupertino to visit Gallant at the Apple campus (where, yes, I took a few boring photos of the outside of the building like every other mac addict who visits the mothership). I was hoping to find some trendy Apple swag in the company store, but what I mostly found were cheesy T-shirts (ie—I came. I saw. I compiled. WWDC.) which I deemed unworthy of my dinero. (Those shirts made me laugh, though, because I actually attended a WWDC many, many years ago—1996, maybe—when it was a dinky little conference. Now, Steve Jobs uses it to drop major bombs like the imminent migration of Mac computers to Intel microprocessors.) I did come away with OS X Tiger at employee price (50% off), though, so I can’t complain too much about the lack of reasons to give Apple more money. Actually, at 50% off I only saved $4 compared to what I would have paid at the Apple store for education price. Praise be to Allah Apple for still giving students a break on software and hardware (it’s easily saved me more than $1000 over my 11 years as an Apple customer).

Among the things I wanted to do but didn’t get done during my break was to indulge myself in some quality photography time. I ended up taking only a few photos, but I got a nice couple of shots the other night over in Berkeley. Here’s a random gimmish of recent shots: (Photos)