New Stylish Blog

Well I just put in a couple hours on this blog template and I like what I've done! I made the "alphageek" logo on a pretty cool website: typoGenerator. You just type in a word and it randomly generates a logo. Another cool site I found was ACME Label Maker which allows you to make labels from a bunch of nice fonts. I think the best find of the day, however, was the Mandarin Design page which is full of amazing CSS tricks. People who change their blog templates every other week (Dana) should definately check this site out!

In other news, I am having a great time at work lately. Although this is the exact same research position as last summer, I seem to be much more relaxed and carefree this time around. I think its a combination of being more comfortable with the lab equipment and staff, as well as not being in the process of applying for med school and not wanting to screw up letters of recommendation :)

...in other news
I am having a great time
at work lately...

Either way, I'm having a great time in the lab: getting lots of experiments done while still being able to chat and crack jokes with my co-workers. Our lab is investigating the cell-signalling involved in the FliC (a protein from E. coli which makes up its flagella/tail) and human TLR5 (a cell receptor in the gut which recognizes the tails of bacteria and then causes inflammation) interaction. I get to play with all sorts of cool equipment including fully mechanized fluorescence microscopes, digital cameras which cost 1/4 million dollars, -80 degree freezers, tons and tons of E. coli, human cancer cell lines, insect cell lines, and all of the protein/DNA purification you can shake a hat at.

Well thats all for now, hopefully it will stop raining soon!

Long Time No Post

Wow, it's been a while since I last posted. Lots of things happened... I'm trying to think about which ones to write about....

Well first off, the reason I haven't posted in a while is that the Med2008 website went down. This website has been my source of photos which I've been posting on this blog. So I just kept telling myself that I would post again as soon as some photos came back online, because I know there are some good pics out there. Alas, the photos are still not back online, so I'll just have to describe events with my remedial english/journalism skillz.

In summary, I finished off my first year of med school concluding with a nephrology (kidney) exam, a thorax anatomy bell-ringer exam, and a couple of practical patient-interview exams. All went well. I think...

The day of the last exam (also known as my birthday!) was awesome. Quite a sense of relief.

...I find it
incredibly difficult to not
discuss exams...

Immediately after finishing the exam (in fact while some of my friends were still writing), a bunch of us went out for lunch at Earl's. I find it incredibly difficult to not discuss exams after I'm finished writing them. I find myself constantly asking people what they put for question 27, how many "C"s did they put on their answer sheet!? But now that classes are pass/fail I should stop stressing myself out like that.

After lunch I went and bought a "victory cigar" with a couple of buddies. From there we went down to a local park where a med barbeque was happening, where we were able to fill up on free food and play some soccer with the boys (the girls played in net, with approximately 11 goalies per team).

From there, Zac, Ryan, and I drove around getting fancied up for the evenings. While at Ryan's place his mom fed us, so we stayed for a while sipping red wine and watching a bizarro animated film: Waking Life. This film is basically a series of lucid dreams in which the main character discusses a variety of philosophies of the mind with the people he runs into. The animation was amazing! Very dream-like. They filmed the whole thing live action and then painted over every single frame. Be warned though, its a very abstract movie.

After this was the bar scene. The meds had arranged to all meet up at Halo downtown Edmonton, which was the strangest bar atmosphere I've ever been to. The music was somewhat random, including: The Beatles, Elvis, Sublime, various Punk. It seemed like somebodies random MP3 player playlist, not much of a club scene at all. The people hanging out at this club were all of the "alternative" type. Dressed all grunge/punk style and not interested in dancing (hence the non-dancefloor areas were absolutely packed).

From there the night becomes a bit hazy in my mind, but basically involved taking off to a different club (with a tip that there were tons of med students there), only to find a couple of med students there making out in the corner. So the 3 other people I was with just danced the night away with me until the place closed and we wandered home.

Ok this post is too long. I'm stopping now.

I-House Year End Formal

Here's another pic from the Formal last night. To finish off the story: there was a buffet dinner, speeches, presentations from each floor (my floor re-enacted the prank Monica and I pulled on Sara when we faked her eviction notice), and then a dance. The DJs at the dance sucked really really bad. They had over $15,000 in Numark DJ equiptment yet still couldn't manage to beat match a single track.

After a couple of hours of dancing we moved the party back to I-House,

...shots of Blue Poweraid
and Jack Daniels...

where I DJed in the kitchen for the rest of the night to compensate for the crap music we heard all night. We played drinking card games until about 4 (5am with the time change). One of the guys drinking with us lives down the hall, and I hadn't seen him in the kitchen ALL YEAR. I've only seen the guy about 4 times in the halls. This guy (a Korean named Ram) drinks like crazy. Despite our large array of fine liquors including Malibu, Disarono, flavoured vodkas, and a variety of mixes, the ONLY THING this guy would drink were shots of Blue Poweraid and Jack Daniels!! What the hell?

I-House Year End Formal 2

Last night was the year end formal which was a lot of fun. It included a really good buffet dinner, followed by a ton of speeches about living in an "international community" with "global awareness" and building our "global citizenship". Then the students of I-House were invited up to the microphone to share stories of their "increased global awareness". The stories people told were horrible!! It was soooo funny. The big wigs were all expecting heart warming stories about how living in I-House has changed our lives, but all they got were story after story about "Well it started after campus security dropped us off for being too drunk, and then Jules went and....", or "and then our porn videos from the lounge all went missing", etc.

The representatives looked absolutely horrified and now probably think we are awful people. I on the other hand thought these types of stories actually prove what a success I-House was. Yes there are obvious differences between members of different cultures, but there are many more similarities. We don't spend an ENTIRE YEAR exploring these differences. All exchange students just fit right in and I-House operates just like any other residence on campus. The differences between me and an Egyptian exchange student are much less than the differences between me and many "Canadians". At I-House we all live together, have classes together, eat together, watch the same TV. I don't think we are as different from one another as the founders of I-House had hoped.

FLOOD and FIRE at I-House

There was a fair amount of excitement in the building I live in this weekend. Late Thursday night the fire alarm went off (a common occurrence as we have about 3 drills a semester). I wandered back to my room to lock my door and on the way a girl came running out of the stair well soaked from head to toe. At this point I realized that there might actually be a real fire -- so I hurried up a little bit and told people I saw that this wasn't a drill.

We evacuated the building to the back and rumor was passed around that this wasn't a fire, instead some girl on the 5th floor had hung something on her sprinkler in her room, and had apparently broken off her sprinkler head, triggering the alarm and busting open a 1 inch water main in her ceiling. Ooopsy!

We went back instead when we were convinced it wasn't a fire to check out the damage. Water was literally gushing out from under the perpetrator's door and flowing down the hallway. Girls were screaming at people to go get towels to try to sop up the water (which is pretty funny when you think about it because a towel would do absolutely nothing).

The firemen soon showed up and told us to get the hell out of the building, so I went to a nearby building and played some foosball and piano for about an hour. Finally when we heard the alarms stop we went back inside, only to have the alarms go off again. We were told to vacate once again, and to meet in the meeting room at which point an out of breath fire chief told us "OK everything is now undercontrol guys, we just put out the fire on the 2nd floor"!!!!! Some idiot had left their dinner on the burner on full blast in the kitchen for the last hour.

To summerize there is extensive water damage to about 20 rooms including rooms on every single floor beneath the 5th. There is also smoke damage on the 2nd and 3rd floors.

Lucky me I'm on the 6th floor!! This made for an exciting day, but it must be pretty crappy for the people that had to move out (with it being final exam season and all). Especially for those few people that had water damage to ALL of their stuff.

P.S. I feel bad now because as soon as I saw the damage to the 5th floor that night, I ran down to the 4th floor and banged on peoples doors to tell them to move all of their stuff. I asked one girl if she wanted my help moving all of her electronics out of her room. She insisted they would be fine where they were. I insisted back that I totally disagreed with her and that water will soon be pooring from her ceiling. I'm not sure if she ever did move her stuff... Oh well.