Author: Dave

R Rated

I have been watching with a combination or amusement and concern as this blog has gone to the dogs, and descended into smut.

OK. So it isn’t quite that bad, but given that when I started writing this blog I made a point of keeping it family friendly, and populating it with benign general interest stories and G rated anecdotes from my daily life, it has been a little interesting to watch my journalistic integrity wane and the morals relax, so that now I find myself writing about accidentally adult oriented signage and fetishes and perversions, with no doubt bigger and badder things slipping in in the future. Perhaps I need to create an editorial oversight panel or something…. (Simone has already offered her services here, but if I actually did want oversight it should probably be someone a little more separated and impartial)

Don’t eat the funny coloured mushrooms

It’s been raining quite a bit recently (for brisbane in April at least), and today as I was walking out to hang out the laundry (which reminds me of another story I may regail you with later*) and I noticed that there were all these blue mushrooms growing around the clothes line. Having not previously seen blue mushrooms I began wondering what they were and what caused them to have their peculiar color. Perhaps, being underneath the washing line, they were benefiting from drips containing some of the stuff that makes up the little blue granules that you see in washing powder (apparently blue makes whites look whiter..?..??….(Although presumably this would mean that the mushrooms should be an iridescent white, rather than blue)). Just a theory anyway (even if it is a patently silly one).

Then on the way back into the house later in the day, I noticed that there were some yellow mushrooms growing near our front room, and I don’t even want to think about what could have given them their color…

* Simone was commenting the other day that she couldn’t remember the last time she had done laundry. Obviously I’ve been being a good little house bitch (and presumably a correspondingly a bad little med student).

Delamination

I remember in the early days of writable CDs, and all the doom mongers in the computer magazines going on about how writable CDs would be an unstable and unreliable form of data storage, and that they would crack and warp and loose data and… well the list went on ad nauesum.

Well at the time, and in the intervening years, I maintained my skepticism on the issue, having never really had any data loss or CD problems that could be attributed to anything other than user stupidity (I’ve had several CDs scratched to the point of unusability, lost several, and accidentally thrown a couple out). This changed today however, when I opened one of my CD wallets and found that one of the CDs which I hadn’t looked at in probably a year, had essentially delaminated. It was really weird. The top level had basically lifted off the disk.

Doesn’t really matter though, as the stuff on the CD was just an old backup, but it was still interesting to see this theory in practice.

Still doing the right thing…

Three year on from the whole boat people thing, NZ today granted full citizenship to 76 of the refugees from the Tampa, while australia still has people locked up in detention.

“We came to the conclusion that people couldn’t sit on the deck of a boat in the Indian Ocean forever,” Ms Clark said of her decision to take the refugees in 2001.

“Something that began as a tragedy has ended up with us accepting many new Kiwis that are going to contribute all their talents and their energy and their culture and their ideas to our country.”

I wonder why australia’s politicians are still so reticent to also accept some new aussies, and benefit from their diversity and vitality?

In my defence

This insanity is not all my own doing. In my defence I was put onto this by someone else (Carolyn, if you’re reading this I’m not implying that you’re crazy, honest…). Anyway, as some of you will already know after I emailed you excerpts from it, I was introduced to a new web comic this afternoon. Bloody funny, go look it up.

Wet and …. cold?

Woke up this morning to find it grey and raining outside (on our washing too… Grrr). Cool, I thought, I can wear my jacket, but It became readily apparent that actually I probably couldn’t, because while it was wet, it wasn’t cold, and if I were to step outside in my “I’ll need this big goretex jacket in Queensland because it’s wet there” jacket (I may have been extensively mis-informed about Queensland when I made that particular purchase before arriving for med) I would stay dry from the rain but become saturated from perspiration pretty quickly. I miss the good old days of New Zealand cold and wet (sometimes…).

Brains Igor, BRAINS!!!

Saw my first brain surgery today. Not nearly as exciting as I had been led to believe. Hard to see anything, and it all looks the same, and everything bleeds lots (which contributes considerably to the previous problems of not being able to see anything and it all looking the same).

Suppose I can scratch neurosurgeon from the list too. It’d be OK at a push as a career (they do get to play with some really pretty cool technology) but I wasn’t sufficiently inspired by the procedural stuff, and many the outcomes for the patients I’ve seen on the wards would require you to have either a really thick skin or a huge daily dose of Zoloft.