Blue Coat, White Coat...

One Vet, Two Vets.

The entrance to veterinary school was marked by a ceremony in which students were given blue lab coats. And today the transition from class work to clinical work was marked by the 'white coat' ceremony, during which the students were given, well, white lab coats.


Now, some people may argue that moving from the third year to the fourth year of vet school isn't really such a momentous occasion as to be worthy of all the pomp and circumstance of a graduation style ceremony, but I don't think the vet school would particularly care about the opinions of those people. And apparently med schools do this too. I guess the equivalent in physics would be passing the prelim exam; but while we may not get a fancy lab coat, we do get a slight raise for that.

In fact, the ceremony was well done and we were stunned by how many families came to watch.

-Tim

Logic 101

As a soon-to-be 4th year veterinary student, my life is facing many changes. Perhaps the most significant (or at least the most expensive...so far) is the purchase of a U of I parking pass. You've probably heard stories about the cost of U of I parking. Indeed. $162 for 3 1/2 months. But that's not the point of this story.

When I arrived at the parking office, I asked to see a map of the campus - to determine the name of the lot that I wanted. It's "F27," by the way - a big green patch on the map. (According to the key, green means "student lot.") So I handed the lady my credit card and asked to purchase a summer space in lot F27. "Did you have a space in the Spring?" she asked. "Are you on the F27 waitlist?" "No," I answered, " but there are always open spaces in the summer." So she explained that according to their policy, students are only guaranteed a fall space if they've also purchased a space in the summer. (Talk about a money-making scheme!) I already knew this, so I responded that with 100+ graduating seniors, there have to be some summer spaces not claimed. "Yes, you're right," she said. "But those spaces are reserved for waitlisted students - and we don't check the waitlist until the fall."

"So what you're telling me is that you have parking spaces that you're not making money off of, which I want to pay you money for, but you won't sell it to me." (At this point I waved my credit card around again for good measure.) "YES," she said. ! "Aren't you supposed to want my money?" "Not that much," she answered (and with a straight face, no less). !!

She tried to explain. "This lot follows different rules than the others, because it's a faculty lot." Ok, now I know I've caught her. The map she'd shown me a few minutes before showed (in careful green marking) that this is a student lot. She responded - "The reason that the map shows it as a student lot is because that map is old and hasn't been updated... That lot has never been a student lot." !!!

So 20 minutes and $162 later, I have my parking pass - on the side of Lincoln Ave - I get to walk every day through an empty parking lot to reach the hospital. I swear that as I left the building, I noticed a giant glowing red eye hovering over the top of it.

-Tamara

p.s. I wanted to give you a link to the campus parking map (which even online has F27 marked carefully in green) - but it crashed my browser. Twice.

School's out for Tamara

Well, for one more weekend at least.

This past Monday saw Tamara's last classroom final exam! And this next Monday she officially starts her fourth year of vet school. Her first rotation is 'food animal' but apparently that does not mean we'll be eating steak every night.

-Tim

Possum Update

Unfortunately, the wildlife clinic at the vet school needed to put the possum down. It had been hit by a car, and was suffering from more than twelve broken bones and losing about half of its teeth.

-Tim

Temporary Armistice

The beta version of Ubuntu 6 - Dapper Drake was posted last week and, fool that I am, I couldn't resist trying it. At first, I just tried updating with the built in update-manager and it actually went pretty smoothly except that it left me without network access (this is on the desktop connected via wireless). Overall, I wasn't too surprised by that, but I was surprised that my second attempt--trying to install the new beta from the disc--was even worse.

I realize that GUIs are all the rage and everything, but having to boot up into the live cd just to get to the installer was a pain. Plus, the live cd limited my screen's resolution to 640x480 and the installer screens were bigger than that! I had to constantly move the window around to either read the text or make sure I was clicking the correct buttons. And to add insult to injury, the installer failed to detect my wireless internet and the whole thing failed anyway while trying to install the bootloader.

I reinstalled from the ubuntu 5.10 disc, which had no problem connecting to my wireless network (encryption was turned off for the install, but I did eventually get it all working with WPA), and then, being a masochist, I tried to upgrade again. Predictably it borked the net again, but this time I was sure I was ready.

At this point, I still don't know what went wrong. But my computer and I have reached a temporary arrangement; it'll connect wirelessly, with WPA encryption--but only if I enter the command manually.

Hmm, I guess I really don't have any impressions of the actual operating system yet. :P

-Tim

Playing Possum

Well we finally pulled the lawnmower out for the first time this summer. You could hear mowers running all around the neighborhood all week, so we must have been near to last.

After mowing the lawn I discovered a possum curled up asleep in the shade of the north end of the house. I called Tamara out to take a look at it and her first reaction was to go ahead and poke at it with a stick. Three years of vet school, I guess the never cover this. Anyway, eventually the possum crawled around to sit on the front door step and we decided that we needed to get rid of it.

The wildlife clinic told us to throw a towel over it and use a broom to push it into a cardboard box. We had a towel, but had to substitute a mop and an empty kitty litter bucket for the other items. It went into the bucket without too much fuss, and was pretty quiet overall--even for the whole trip down to the vet school.

Lots of fun.
-Tim

Let's see that again...

Tamara and I have always appreciated bad action movies, but one stunt from Transporter 2 was so over the top that it required an immediate second viewing. In fact, it was so outlandish that I decided I needed to post it here.

Our hero has just discovered that there's a bomb attatched to the bottom of the car he's driving--a bomb that the evil bad guys are mere seconds from detonating...

It'd make a great car commercial, wouldn't it?
-Tim

Blowin' in the Wind

Last week's storm didn't do much damage around our house, but it did manage to take out our shed.

Along with everything inside it, of course.

We had actually wanted to move the shed anyway, it had always seemed a little strange to have it sitting out by itself so far from the house. So we decided to go ahead and try to move it ourselves. We spent a few hours digging up dirt from the back of the yard (from where the shed had stood) and moving it up next to the house to try to level the ground. Then I used some two by fours to slide the shed towards the house.

After that, Tamara spent some more time digging, trying to fill in the sunken garden in the middle of our "orchard". She got pretty far along before we lost the rest of the daylight. Our backyard still has a lot of uneven ground and dead patches, but it's slowly getting better.

-Tim

The Terminator

Two great stories from Physorg.com:

Professor Predicts Human Time Travel This Century from PhysOrg.com

With a brilliant idea and equations based on Einstein’s relativity theories, Ronald Mallett from the University of Connecticut has devised an experiment to observe a time traveling neutron in a circulating light beam. While his team still needs funding for the project, Mallett calculates that the possibility of time travel using this method could be verified within a decade.
[...]

Disabled Japanese to scale Swiss mountain aided by 'robot suits' from PhysOrg.com

Two disabled Japanese are planning to scale the 4,164-meter (13,661-foot) Breithorn peak in the Swiss Alps aided by mountaineers wearing futuristic robotic walking suits, project members said Monday.
[...]

We'll have time traveling human-robot hybrid warriors before you know it! But wait, if we are going to discover time travel, wouldn't those future warriors already be here now? Hmm, I'd better alert the authorities...

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