Never thought I’d say that! I had sushi for lunch yesterday and it was terrible. Typical Australian sushi is so different than I am used to. It’s dry, not very tasteful and has weird things in it. They really shy away from the raw stuff, but then have weird stuff instead. They put tuna in their rolls. Ok… sounds normal, but I’m talking mashed up cooked tuna and mayonnaise, like a tuna salad sandwich. With tofu. It comes in a roll about 5 inches long, uncut. People just bite pieces off like it’s a churro or something. To top it all off, they make it all in the morning and let it sit there for hours till you walk along and submit yourself to eating the crap they hand out since there’s nothing better. 🙁
Oh well… I’ll have some of the good stuff at the end of the year. 🙂
Last night we played footy again, but had a flat out terrible performance. It’s probably reflective of a couple weeks spent sitting behind the desk for all of us. A few of our players didn’t even come out because they were (purportedly) still behind their desk. So we got cranked, 10:1. I don’t know what those other guys have been doing to stay in shape… Anyways, this morning I am a bit stiff. I spent most of the weekend behind my desk and at least in my apartment. It’s basically time to do nothing but that until the June exam. Last week was a bit of cardio stuff, with our patient having an MI. I am a little lost still on the EKG stuff, and I don’t really have my head around the way the machine works, let alone what it’s readouts mean. That will be probably pretty odd to read in a few years, since it will hopefully become second nature. This week I have cheated and looked ahead. Our patient will be having acute renal failure. It’s starting to come together a bit, and at least I am getting used to the paradigm of school again, and the particulars of this one. Hopefully I’m able to focus appropriately to execute this exam the way it should be done.
So, after all the good I said about the new Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04, it turns out that it has been slightly harmful. A Pretty Killer. It has been turning on and off my harddrive very fast while running it. This behaviour ended up making a clicking noise on my shiny new Dell M1530 laptop. For fairness sake I will put that info here, and say that Windows used to do it too, and that there is a way to fix it. I noticed it in January, and thought it would go away with the newest version, which didn’t happen. I actually found out about it at the link above and followed the links to make the fix as well, so it is no longer happening. The details of the fix are behind the link for my own record of what I needed to do. [Read more →]
This last weekend we had May Ball. It’s basically Medicine’s excuse to get dressed up and party. It was like a wedding, where nobody got married and we all knew each other. I have a few shots from around the tables.
I’m just having a coffee in the kitchen and reading the news, as I do from time to time. An article popped out at me and I thought I would put it here. People sometimes don’t really understand why I don’t like Microsoft, so this is a little tidbit of stuff that makes me think that way.
The context is, last night I booted to Linux on my laptop and clicked the update button, to update to the new Ubuntu I talked about here. I kinda tossed and turned thinking I might be risking my working install of everything else. It probably took a couple hours to do, but thats only because it would have taken that long to download the 750 MB of stuff it needed to update. In the morning, I woke up to one dialogue box saying click to reboot and finish update. It worked perfectly. Wireless card works now, everything, and all my customizations from the other install remain. Perfect.
Not so perfect for M$ business customers who found that updates that were forced on their systems automatically CORRUPTED their business data. Good luck getting that back, I hope it doesn’t cost you too much time, money and productivity! It’s called work for a reason! Thanks Redmond.
Read the article here. That’s a little bit why I don’t like M$. Who needs that? [Read more →]
Our apartment is perfectly positioned, according to me. It runs east and west, with our bedrooms on the east side, with large windows and sliding glass doors and separate balconies. Then on the west side is our kitchen and living room, and another balcony. It’s here that we get to spend the evening and watch the sunset every night. Some are quite flashy, and some are just a little bit of hazy yellow in a perfectly clear sky before the sun drops away over the outback. The best of them make me wish I had captured them, so I have actually tried a couple times. It’s hard to know when they’re going to really light up, but this one is alright. It’s a lot longer than the sunset itself, but I thought the time lapse of the people running about was interesting too.
I have a new way of showing images here, and I just want to give it a test. I have grabbed a few really old photos from my trip to Hawaii in 2003.
It’s a gorgeous Saturday afternoon here. It feels a lot like a summer day at the lake, it’s quite dry and sunny. You can smell the hot pine trees in the sun and the grass is a little dry and crunchy. The clouds are like cotton balls and constantly changing. I have a little taste of it for everyone below:
This was shot from my balcony today. I feel pretty fortunate to be living in a place like this, all the while there has been a mass exodus of my belongings at my house, with great thanks to my friends.
The latest version of Ubuntu Linux was released last night. I hopped on the download band[width]wagon right away, as I usually do for Ubuntu, every six months. They put out new editions every April and October. This new one is called Hardy Heron, and is numbered 8.04 which really just corresponds to the 4th month of ’08.
The previous edition was 7.10 and called Gutsy Gibbon. The developers of the distribution have taken some very impressive large strides towards usability recently. The big step in Gutsy was the ability to natively read and write to NTFS partitions. Not really something you’d think about until it was a problem. Gutsy was great, but on my new laptop it didn’t take full advantage of the hardware. Specifically the WIFI didn’t work properly out of the box. It would connect easily enough to open wifi hotspots but not at all to encrypted ones. The issue was the chipset (Intel 4965AGN) was just a bit too new for the driver to make it into the kernel, the core part of the linux OS when Gutsy was released. There was a way to monkey around and get it to work by adapting the available windows driver, but I haven’t had the time or patience to do it this year. This time however the driver is there and works with no fuss at all. The other big difference is a better utilization of my graphics card and system resources. A small but significant unexpected improvement is that my extra mouse buttons now work, making web surfing a lot easier, and the transfer back and forth from Winblows easier.
These few small changes could make Linux my main desktop, only switching to M$ for minor unsupported things. I don’t have time to do a harddrive install right now though. It will probably be June before that happens. It only takes 15 minutes, so I do have the time, but I don’t have time for any unforseen complications! So I will wait and see. Right now I will have to suffice with the LiveCD. If anyone wants to check it out you can download it and burn it for free. Just go to www.ubuntu.com and grab it. Throw it in the cd drive and get ready to experience OS freedom! It doesn’t change anything on your system unless you actually install it. Please be careful though. I have found that if you are aware of a viable option, it’s way easier to hate the ways of Redmond.
Just studying a little here, it’s grey and cloudy. It rained this morning but hopefully it will dry out over the day because I play footy tonight… We’re not very good but we do have fun and it’s good to run around a bit. Despite thinking I was going to die the first time I played, I now could go for a bit longer games, I just start getting into it and it’s over.
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