Yep, more exam procrastination (as opposed to procrasturbation, a new word I made up; coming to wikipedia soon...).
If anyone's interested to see my dabbles in the new back end of the blog, point your clicking fingers onto http://dragonback.com/wordpress and see what's going on.
Lorren
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Just a quick note, should anyone stumble across here, dispite being all but derelict.
I'm moving things around on the back end; DNS, servers, possibly changing blog hosts as well, depending how other things pan out.
If the site happens to be down, it doesn't mean I've abonded it, I'm just rearranging things and it'll be back up soon. Hopefully with a return to some actual bloggage, possibly some feeds, a bit of interactivity maybe. I have big exams coming up so expect some serious procrastination-induced activity ^_^
LorrenK
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Hi, me again. It's been a while, and I'm in procrastination mode (middle of finals atm) so I thought I'd dust this off and see if I remember how to write one of these things.
Like I said, I'm in the middle of final exams. 2 down 2 to go. The first two were okish. They were the OSCA exams and we were all DREADING them. This semester has been so hard and the exams sprang up so quickly because of our weird 'mid' semester break that was actually 2 weeks before the end of semester. The really mean part was that they held them on the monday AND the tuesday. EV1L!! Coupled to the fact they put them a week before the actual exam period started so we had a week less to cram made them extra stressful. You rarely see some of my friends becoming unsettled and uncomposed as happened during stuvac week.
As for myself, I was feeling under-stressed, as in not as stressed as I need to be. I was reading all my notes, mind going all different directions other than study, even tho I'd come to uni every day to study by myself in one of the med tute rooms. It wasn't until the saturday before the exams when a bunch of us went thru the practice exam q's together did I really start to feel scared and stressed. Eick!
Of course having 2 exams on consecutive days meant doing the usual all-nighter beforehand was a bad idea, but I did it anyway for the first exam which was a morning one. That wasn't too bad but I knew it was going to kill me for the next one. I'd planned to go home and crash for a few hrs and then do another all nighter, but I didn't and pushed on to about 3am before packing it in and getting some sleep, resigned to going into the exam knowing what I knew and just seeing what happened.
In the end it was ok I think. I understood most of what was being asked and didn't feel like I had completely assed everything up. Fingers crossed... There are still the 2 MCQ exams to go and they're notoriously evil in the way they ask the questions. Plenty of chances to sink or soar yet.
Apart from that not a lot has happened since my last post, all that time ago. My bday has come and gone yet again, nothing much to speak of there. Comes from having it in the middle of exam season every yr, but that suits me. I don't 'celebrate' my bday, but my friends gave me a and one of the other girls a little bday dinner and some nice pressies the monday before the first exam.
I haven't gotten anything from my parents yet. After exams we'll go out and have a dinner I suppose, but I'm not really keen for it, except as an excuse to go out and have japanese. All I really want for pressie is money to put towards my rural placement next yr, or to a laptop I'm thinking of getting, or just car stuff like rego paid for me.
Laptops, something geekchik I can talk about for a while. I've kindof fallen for one of those new macbooks. What can I say, they're sexy : ) But true to apple form, they insist on making something ALMOST perfect with at least one very annoying aspect. In the macbook's case it's that glossy screen. I'm not a fan of them, and these are exra glossy. So we'll see what they're like when I get to fondle one in real life.
Another one I'm keen on are the new Dell lattitudes. I've had this Dell lattitude X300 for nearly 5 yrs now, and it's been the best laptop EVER!! Not a glitch, not a single tanty, and I'm on my 3rd battery now. I've specced it up as far as I can, with the big 9cell battery and 1gig ram. I'm considering a bigger faster hard drive, but we'll see if I'm in a laptop buying mood in the holidays or not. The hard drive is a bugger to get to. I have to literally dismantle the whole chassis to get to it, but I've done it just to see how, and it's easily doable. I can literally say I know my laptop inside and out : )
The new dell I like are the lattitude E4200/4300 ones (12" and 13"), but omg are they expensive!! The slightly bigger E6400 is also cool, and a fair bit cheaper, but I'm too used to the small 12" light ultraportables. I'm definately staying sub-13" if I upgrade.
The Dell Mini9 has been pointed out, but its TOO small and underpowered. But then I hear about a Mini 12. Hmmm... Now there's an interesting option. Small, light, CHEAP! Well, relatively speaking. Compared to all of the above it is, I'm guessing about half of what a base spec E4300 is. Or less. Not as powerful as the macbook or lattitudes, but probly more then what my X300 is and really, even 5 yrs old there's nothing I need that it can't do. I even did some video editing and rendering on it a few weeks ago and it coped fine (once the 1gb ram went in which adobe premier needs to run).
But really, I don't NEED to upgrade my laptop. I love her to bits, and we've been thru so much together, and travelled so far. She's scuffed and marked from years of being stuffed in a uni bag, the keys are shiny in places from constant use, and the right menu and crtl key still have a sticky action from when coke was spilt on the keyboard about 3 yrs ago. She's my faithful and ever-present sidekick : )
We'll see. Exams first, holiday shopping second.
Speaking of the holidays, I don't really have any plans. I might head up to Yandina in QLD to see an old froend from school who's had a baby. I'll definitely be going to Cooly to see dad and lil sister Emma who's 1 tomorrow!! (EEEE!) They're coming down for chrissie anyway, but I'd still like to get up there to see them and see the house and some old school friends.
I'd also like to get over to Liberec but I don't think that's likely. Money's an issue mainly, but it'll also be a short holiday for us; 3rd year start at the end of Jan, not the begining of March like the rest of uni. But that's ok. I get bored after more than a few weeks' holiday anyway. Looking forward to next year anyway. It's hard to believe we're almost half way thru med already... That's gone scarey fast.
The beach, shopping days with my uni friends, possibly a few trecks to sydney. Catch up on my tennis, do some horse riding, violin lessons, writing (hopefully!), maybe even do some flying. Bring on the holidays!!
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The usual thing. at uni nice and early, kicking back with a white mocha (awesome!) and a couple of $1 hashbrowns, no one's bothering to talk to me on msn so I'm updating a blog no one reads.
How long's it been.. a month-ish? anyway some quick updates to kick things off;
I can't remember if I mentioned, but 1st semester exams were all passed, so yay me! and onto semester 2: Endocrinology, Neurology and Psychiatry. All fun stuff... or so I thought. I can definitely say I have one more specialty crossed off my list; Endocrine. That was just boring, but to be fair actually was quite interesting.
Neuro on the other hand... what can I say? OMG there's SO MUCH of the stuff!! Just the anatomy itself is giving my brain overload much less the physiology, pathophysiology and pathology.
Got a case od the mid-semester blues recently, when I realised that the semester was half gone and I still didn't know anything. All my promises and plans for a grand new study reigime have all flopped into a disappointing mess and evaporated. *sigh* oh well, it's looking like another sleepless stuvac in a couple of months for me.
In brighter news, a bunch of us went and saw the musical Wicked in Melbourne, which was an awesome show, and one of the best days all around.
Started out at 4am on a sunday morning (not the best time to get up after going to bed around 12-30) to meet up with a couple of the others for the drive out to the airport. Plane left newcastle at 6-10 for the 1hr and a bit flight to melb. That's quicker than the drive to syd.
On arrival we piled into a cab to southern cross station and after a bit of wandering around finally found a ticket booth for the trams. $2.90 for the entire day, as many trams as we liked. Not bad at all. Try getting around sydney as much as we did in mel that easily and for that much...
We ended up in St Kilda around 8ish and wandered up and down the main street looking into cake shops and cafes deciding where to have breakky and picked out a few shops we'd have a look in once they opened.
Breakky in Ricoco's, then we wandered around st kilda for a little while doing a little light shopping before jumping on the trams to get to... the city? wherever the Regent theatre is.
The show is amazing. If you ever see it somewhere near you, go see it! It juuuuuuust knocked Miss Saigon off the 'my favorite musical' pedestal.
Wicked in 50 words or less: It's a prequel story to Wizard of Oz, centred around Glinda and Elpheba and how they become the Good Witch of the North and Wicked Witch of the West, and how their story and relationship changes everything you thought you knew about the characters and story of the Wizard of OZ you saw when you were little when set against this background.
After the show we did some proper shopping (and spending :( ) around the cbd and some of the shops we discovered when we were here for AMSA. Pair of shoes, a dress, 2 stockings, a top and a belt... *sigh*
For dinner we went back to st kilda and Ricoco's coz it was so good. and then for desert we went to San Churro Chocoleteria, which topped off the day. It was the best dessert I've ever had. Go there. Now.
And that was a fitting end to our day out. We headed back to southern cross stationa and a cab back to the airport and left for home. All in all a great day out with some friends.
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Kay, well I'm at uni early for a change and back in the good ol' AIC cyber cafe with a nice (well, not really) hot mocha and an hour to kill. So why not...?
The short and sweet of it is "Semester 2 is HARD!!" omg! It's no longer a case of 'its not hard per se there's just lots of it' now it's "its a LOT harder AND there's lots and lots of it" On the menu for this semester are the ever-nommy Endocrinology, followed by a combined main course of Neurology and neuroanatomy (ouch!) followed with a dessert of Psychiatry.
But it's been fun as always thus far. I have a good pbl/tutor group this sem which is good, and the tutor is really good.
Apart from uni, life is going ok. There's been a whole raft of birthdays, even a couple 21st's in july and aug so it's been a little bit expensive : ( But totally worth it for my friends. We'd been doing dinners, cafe brunches, and just lazy hangouts.
Best week ever? Probly not, but it definitely ranks right up there as events I'll remember forever.
AMSA convention is basically a big med student convention, this year held in Melbourne. Not a city I've been a big fan of (or even a little one) but I must confess last week changed my mind about the place. I could easily see myself perhaps living there some time in the future. OMG the shopping!! but I'll get back to that in a bit.
There's so much to write about amsa that I'm going to break it up into daily chunks. All in due course...
First off, Convention is a medical student convention, as I mentioned, consisting of an acedemic program during the day with seminars, workshops, field trips, and a 'sports day' consisting of an inter-uni emergency medicine challenge, tug-o-war and the Cascade Cup, which is a big boat race. (Boat race being aussie-speak for a beer-skulling game a bit like a relay)
The nights kick off the social events, with the theme being "Conviki Tour". This entailed a different destination theme for each night and venue including AMSAdam (eurotrash), Thai Bucket, Tokyo Drift, Doing it Downunder, Victoria's Secret, Havana Nights, and the farewell ball Winter Wonderland.
Between the late AM finishes of the parties and the 9am starts for the acedemic sessions, there was very little time for sleep, and even less if you're spending the night with someone you picked up at the party. And yes, even I managed to score at amsa ^_^
Watch this space...
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Another semester has drawn to a spectacularly manic close in a flurry of cramming and exams, punctuated with almost as many birthdays.
And what a semester! Why I wasted all those years NOT doing med I'll never know, nor ever get back, but I definitely want to be here now. (Naturally I don't regret ALL the time I've spent doing other things, namely the flying and the motorsport. If nothing else (literally) they've given me some cool stories to tell).
Following on from last year's Intro to This and Basic That, year 2 has definitely been "Real" medicine, and the exams represented that. Overall tho I think I did pretty well, considering the amount of study I did during the semester (next to none) and during stuvac (all of it!). I turned into the proverbial wombat for 3 whole weeks, hiding in my dark room, coming out occasionally to eat.
As to actually passing or not, we'll have to see. It's not a matter of simply getting more than 50%, it's all distribution-spread evaluation where the bottom 10% are given the chop, so the actual pass mark could theoretically be anywhere from 30 to 60%. We don't know, and we're generally not even told. We shall see...
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Ok, after writing 4 successive partial blogs that I'll probly never post, I'm forcing myself to at least post SOMETHING today.
I'm just sitting in the library killing a couple of hours before I have a gp placement (kinda like work experience I guess) and there's something I've discovered. I hate the Huxley Library. I've never really spent any time in here before today; I'm normally in the Auchmuty library on the other side of campus; and it really is rubbish. the study corrale things are crap and crowded, the seats suck, there's no powerpoints for laptops anywhere, and the little reading lounge has no wireless reception.
But I'm stuck here for a while today, coz the auchmuty is a good 20 mins walk from here, and I'm parked on this side of campus and I'd have to walk all the way back again in the rain.
I think the uni is trying to move the med school over to this side, and I don't like it. no one does. this is the arts-y hippy side of uni, and there's NOTHING over this side. Gloria Genes, Rafters, HUB Cafe, the noodle shop, AIC, Cyber bytes, and even the post office, book shop and day spa are over the other side, not to mention the medical reserve section of the library. Over here there's... a lolly shop, a mediocre coffee shop and a decent but limited cafe. and that's it. I hate the hunter building.
The med sciences building is being renovated, so we've all been displaced. Fair enough, but the rumours say they might just leave us here which would severely bite nuts.
*deep breaths*
As you may have worked out from my little tanty, the holidays are over and uni's back. One weird thing they've done is offset the medschool holidays by a week, so we're back but everyone else is still on holidays for a week (we started a week earlier). It's great not having to fight for a parking spot in the mornings, and it's nice and quiet. and I love the morning traffic in the mornings when it's still school holidays.
The holidays were ok, nothing special. Most of the first week was spent doing my 'outer' GP placement, which was reasonably fun. The second week, apart for tues afternoon I had nothing on, and likewise did nothing at all. Just stayed home, or at Kim's place (hopefully when her bf wasn't around so I didn't have to listen to them having sex all day and leaving me to entertain myself with the playstation). Didn't get ANY study (much less any sex) done which I'm quite upset at myself about.
It was all a bit lonely really. All my uni friends disappeared for the holidays after our big dinner the last day of uni, and our planned study/games nights never happened. It was pretty much just me and my pillow for company for the whole 2 weeks.
I'm glad uni's back, but I still haven't seen any of my friends yet, coz mon and tues are just tutorial groups and we're all at different times. Tomorrow we'll all have a 3 hr break to fill between lecs and we'll hang out and catch up on all the goss and I'll be able to live vicariously through them for a while : )
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I'm running out of ramblings now.
Oh, sailing has finished for the season now, which is sad. I don't know what I'm going to do with my saturdays now. [I don't know... study??]. I might have to start getting an actual life. Won't that be a shock.
I might even have something to blog about occasionally...
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There's not really much going on right now, hence the slack blogging the last couple of weeks, so I'm just going to bs on for a while and see what happens.
[2 hrs later]
Well that didn't work...
Uni's rolling on, the work piling up and the procrastination in full swing. This year is really full on. It's not 1st yr any more, as they say. on top of all the tutorials and usual lectures, this semester we have our clinical practice umm, pracs, venepuncture certification (got my cert on tuesday), a couple of haematology labs (mmm, pipettes) and 8 gp placements. But it's all fun.
Haven't been able to play as much tennis as I'd like. Our monday night group we had going the last few yrs has petered out, and I'm only filling in for the wed night comp. Might check out the tennis at uni, that was pretty good stuff way back when, during my last degree.
Sailing it going good. We were leading the 2nd half of the season, but we've had a few crew issues and missed last week's race and possibly this weeks coz we're short of ppl.
A friend of ours in med performs in a musical called Urinetown. We went out one night to see it and have a night out. If you hear about it, go see it. Absolutely. The name sounds a bit off-putting, but it really is a good production. Very funny, good songs, even a cool story holding it all up.
We had planned to have ice cream after the show, but baskin and robbins was closed and the cold rock were just packing up and wouldn't let us in, despite a bunch of girls staring in thru the glass doors, which was probly a bit freaky for them. In the end, after much debate, we just went back to someone's house which was nearby, stopping off at a shop and just buying a couple of tubs of icecream, some chocolates and cookie dough, as well as a few bottle of various drinks (mainly of the vodka variety) and sat around talking and messing about eating cookie dough icecream. Much better than just having a cone each.
Rach-watch: All's quiet. No alerts. She's in Manchester right now visiting clients and being taken for corporate dinners and shows and put up in all kinds of cool hotels. Mirri (Mireijeu) is in the opposite direction in the states doing the rounds of auditions and face-time, trying to get some stage work over there for the summer season.
Speaking of performing (tho in a less talented way) I've been doing a little secret project for the last couple of months and making a demo cd. It's been a fun experience, and the results are surprisingly un-crap. More the recording guys then me, I can assure you. Anyway, there's some cool stuff on there. I've stuck a couple of old old recordings of me on it, including a score demo someone was trying to sell to a studio that I did a voice track for that sounds awful, but served it's purpose of putting words to the music, which was what he was actually trying to demo.
A few of you know the one I'm talking about. I think I put it in a blog post here at the time.
It was just a bit of fun I got talked into giving a pseudo-serious attempt, and they actually ended up putting a fair bit of effort into it. Of course now I'm back at uni, as are they in their respective courses / jobs, so I don't know if we'll ever finish it but what's done it pretty decent. Stay tuned...
That's enough mindmusing for now. I need to go have dinner and do some work. Atherosclerosis and Ischemia await.....
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