Archive for August, 2004
Entry #1
August 1st, 2004Welcome to amirschricker.org.
I moved my webpage from the CSUA serves so that I could redesign the site completely without having having first to take down the old pages. You’ll find the same old content here as well as new stuff…like weblogs (made possible by Movable Type) and larger photo albums (using Gallery). Bear with me as I play around with all of these programs and try to get them to look right.
Back for Round 2
August 2nd, 2004After a brief summer vacation, which included my incredible 6-week trip to Thailand and India, the second year of med school began today…and it felt as if we didn’t even have a break. Summer vacation was so short (eight weeks of summer is hardly a “vacation”) that when returning to the lecture hall today and seeing everyone again, it seemed as if it was only a long weekend separating last year and this year. Same people, same ICM groups, same lectures halls (almost…by moving up in the seniority, we’ve moved down one floor!)
And what do they do to welcome us back from vacation? Nothing — except give us the most boring 2-hour microanatomy lecture that had people walking out just 15 minutes into the lecture. After half an hour, I then fell asleep…some things will definitely never change.
Kid’s Play
August 5th, 2004In our lecture on blood flow today, we learned what flows, pressures, and resistances were, and also how they’re related to each other according to physics law called Poiseuille’s law. Our professor was spending forever trying to detail step-by-step what this equation and all its variables meant.
And the whole time I was thinking — in addition to how SLOW this guy was teaching — that this topic sounds very familiar. I then realized that I had taught this very same material back at Hopkins to the freshmen in the BME department, for the Models for Life class. Pouiseuille’s Law, pressures, flows, diameters, fourth powers, tubes, viscosity, all that good stuff…and now here I am having it taught back to me. How sad and funny.
Just goes to show you a little something about the minds of medical students and how if you even mention the concept of a math variable, they freak out and need to be spoon fed. It’s pretty strange considering pre-med requirements included a year of calculus and a year of physics. I guess if learning something new doesn’t involve pure memorization, most med students can’t handle it. That’s it…
My First Apple!
August 7th, 2004
I bought my first Apple computer ever today…a 12-inch iBook with a 1GHz G4 processor! Having bought PC’s my entire life (and also having said in the past that I’d never be a Mac person), this is serious news here.
I’ve played around with Mac OS X in the past and have already been impressed by its features and performance, more than I’ve ever been with Windows. So when it came time for me to buy a laptop, I figured this was my chance…and it’s definitely been worth it so far.
Attention has been paid to every detail of the laptop (as expected with Apple), with my favorite being the slot-loading CD/DVD player that is located on the side of the machine. And OS X is even cooler than I originally thought. It’s easy to use, it looks slick, it makes customizations very intuitive, everything (including wireless networking) worked right out of the box, and it has tons of built-in applications. My favorites applications/utilities so far are:
- Expose — a utility that with a single keystroke either minimizes all windows, brightens all the active windows while dimming the inactive ones, or shrinks all open windows to miniature sizes so you can see all of them at once. It sounds boring, but if you try it you’ll be amazed too.
- Terminal — nothing like a terminal window to make working more efficient (remember that OS X is based on FreeBSD).
- Sherlock — the greatest application to seamlessly use the internet to retrieve information. If you need to check out movie times, look up someone’s address or number, search the net for an image, look up the definition of a word, check up on stocks, or anything else…just start Sherlock. This single application makes all these tasks super easy.
That’s about it for now…I’ll post updates when I figure out more. Till then, I gotta go get all my documents from my PC…damn, I sound like I should be on one of those Apple “switch” commercials.
P.S. I also bought an iPod too (a 4th generation one with a 20GB drive), taking advantage of a $200 rebate Apple offers to people buying laptops and iPods at the same time. Once I open that, I’ll write about that too. I hear they’re cool.
Damn Domino Damselfish
August 8th, 2004After months of watching this chubby black damselfish terrorize all the other fish, scare away the other fish during eating time, and practically chew up another fish in the tank, I finally caught this fat bastard and removed him from the tank.You gotta realize that this was no small feat…I’ve tried this once a few months and went close to insane after I nearly emptied the tank and spent hours trying to lure him into my small net. I had to give up that time because Ricky felt my (mental) health would have been in jeopardy if I wasted any more time hunting down the fish.
But not tonight. The past few days, I’ve noticed that this chubby punk (named Blackie) was being more of a bully than usual, and when I saw another one of my poor fish almost chewed to deah (half his blue scales were ripped off and his fins were all eaten away) because of Blackie, it was time to finish him off. I drained half of the tank water, removed half of the live rock, and spent the next hour with both hands in the tank luring him with one hand into a net held by the other…and finally caught him.
What to do with him now? I was so ready during the long fight to squeeze him in my hand or feed him to one of our dogs or fry him up in a pan with oil, but in the end I couldn’t even bring myself to flushing him down the toilet. Ricky got me feeling too guilty, and I started feeling a little bad were he to be flushed down the toilet and end up exploding because of the fresh water (osmosis and stuff). So…reluctantly…I kept him. In a one-gallon milk bottle. Trying to decide what to do next with him. And I haven’t decided yet.
But something funny happened while I was refilling the tank with water. I poured so much water that it started overflowing out the top…and some dribbled down the back and poured onto the surge protector supplying electricity to all the electrical equipment in the tank. I didn’t realize until the tank lights blew out — and then I smelled smoke. After investigating, I noticed no equipment had really blown out, except for the surge protector itself. I guess it did its job, and saved the equipment, electricity, and our lives.
Stupid chubby black fish…it tries to kill other fish, so I try to kill it, and end up almost killing myself.
Dead Domino Damselfish
August 9th, 2004It looks like I won’t need to make a decision over what to do with this damselfish imprisoned in the milk container…he decided to die. So now I have a fat domino damselfish floating upside-down in a milk container. That’s the end of that, I guess.
Stripper, M.D.
August 10th, 2004For today’s ICM workshop, which was on “Surface Anatomy”, they brought in artist models (models that normally pose for artists) to help us out. ..by getting topless and letting us touch them as much as we needed. We got to palpate, percuss, and auscultate as much as we wanted, and actually I still don’t really know the difference between percussing and palpating . We also were told to draw all over them, outlining the general locations of organs such as the lungs and heart.
It was definitely not an ordinary day at school, since they demonstrated to us in the lecture hall first what we would be doing…and one of the younger female models stripped right in front of us. And that’s about as hot as this story gets, since our group ended up getting assigned an older man, who was helpful. It was actually a pretty valuable learning experience. Damn it…this entry wasn’t as exciting as I thought it would be.
Bend it Like Aloo Gobi
August 17th, 2004I was browing the bonus material on the Bend it Like Beckham DVD recently (good movie, go watch it) and found a cool unexpected bonus: a recipe for my favorite Indian dish, aloo gobi. During this short 10-minute clip, the director of the movie (a British Indian woman) prepared the dish for us just like a cooking show. I prepared it, and it actually tasted very good…not bad for a recipe found on a DVD. Anyway here it is for everyone…
- Several tablespoons vegetable oil
- 1 medium onion, all chopped up
- Bunch of fresh cilantro (keep stalks and leaves)
- 2-3 small chilis, chopped
- 1 large cauliflower, leaves removed and cut evenly into medium-sized pieces
- 2-3 medium potatoes, cut into small pieces
- 1 can of chopped tomatoes
- Chopped garlic
- Fresh ginger, shreded
- 1-2 teaspoon cumin seeds
- 2 teaspoons turmeric
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1-2 teaspoons garam masala
- Heat vegetable oil in a large saucepan.
- Add the chopped onion and one tablespoon of cumin seeds to the oil. Stir together and cook until onions become golden.
- Add chopped coriander stalks, two teaspoons of turmeric, and one teaspoon of salt. Add chopped chilis (according to taste).
- Stir tomatoes into onion mixture. Add ginger and garlic; mix thoroughly. Add potatoes and cauliflower to the sauce plus a few teaspoons of water, ensuring that the mixture doesn’t stick to the saucepan. Make sure that the potatoes and cauliflower are coated with the curry sauce.
- Cover and allow to simmer for twenty minutes (or until potatoes are cooked).
- Add two teaspoons of garam masala and stir. Sprinkle chopped coriander leaves on top of the curry. Turn off the heat, cover, and leave for as long as possible before serving.
Enjoy.