Living in a hall can be fun, or it can suck.
usually it lies in between the thwo extremes, but tends to swing to the sucky side a bit too much for my liking.

One of the things you can't control is the people you live with.

Just at dinner today, the guy living in the room next to me runs out and asks me to help him remove a bug in his room.

picture this, a guy in his early 20s, needing help to remove a bug, an insect not even a quarter of a tenth of a hundreth his size.

turned out the bug wasn't even poisonous, just a leafhopper that got in by mistake (to a room on the 5th floor! no less, must have been a really high jump for a leafhopper)

oh, did i mention he was studying environmental science?
and that he mentioned that he did a vivisection of a grasshopper just the day before?

forget women, i'll never even understand men......

seriously.

wow, 3 months just flew by.

i haven't been committed to updating this blog, hence the dearth of posts.
it's not that i have nothing to blog about, rather i have too much to feel, too much to think about, but not enough resolution to put finger to keyboard to document my thoughts.
what a loss for posterity huh?


speaking of resolution, youtube now supports HD uploads of videos, and it just so happens i joined a TV club that makes movies.
we don't have the equipment to shoot in HD yet (come on, student outfit what)
but animation is another story altogether.

this is an animation i spent about 20 hours on, it's our opening credits, kinda like the ones you see whenever you see a film by 20th century fox or dreamworks.
yet for all the time i put in (20 hours, i'll be mentioning this figure for some time to come)
the final product is only 30 seconds long.

20 hours=30 seconds.
how does that even equate?

so anyway, bringing up that point about youtube being able to display HD videos now, i uploaded it to youtube for your viewing pleasure!
in HD!
remember to watch in HD, doesn't look good in low resolution.


please tell me what you think in the comments.


btw
this is a good indication of what i'm doing with my time for those of you interested in such things.

I recently got a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS4.

It would be a good idea not to ask where or how i got it.

Anyway, just having a copy of Photoshop isn't good enough.

You have to learn to navigate the maze that is photoshop's user interface.

I suppose for long time users, the interface comes as second nature, but to the beginner it is really really really intimidating.

Anyway, the best way to learn something new is to just jump in headlong and learn stuff as you go along, right?

That's a first effort, so yeah, it kinda fails in certain departments, creativity for one.

It's a poster I had to prepare for RCTV, an audio visual club in my hall, which I may go into more detail at a later date.

Right

Onto the tutorial!

For those of you who choose to stubbornly trudge on with the bloated, antiquated, sluggish beast that is Internet Explorer for your forays in cyberspace, let me first say that i pity you.

Truly, I do pity you.

However, for those of you stuck with it, for whatever reason, here's some news that you might want to hear.

There has been news of a security breach of Microsoft's vaunted IE, which could, I quote

"Users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer are being urged by experts to switch to a rival until a serious security flaw has been fixed.

The flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer could allow criminals to take control of people's computers and steal their passwords, internet experts say."

You can tell I quoted it because it's in between those two squiggly lines.

Full article can be found here.

Fortunately (for you), there is a solution.

To prevent any further loss in market share, Microsoft had to be quick to release a security patch, which I recommend you download, post haste, lest you are a masochist, and enjoy living with the knowledge that sooner or later, someone will steal something from you.

Again I quote

"Security experts advised users to stay off Internet Explorer due to a serious security exploit in all versions of IE, and a third-party developer even pushed out an unofficial temporary fix, but you can now go grab the official patch straight from the source. The patches are available in several different downloads depending on what version of IE you're using and what OS you're running, and not all of the downloads are pointing to existing pages yet, but they should hopefully all be rolled out sometime today.

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-078 - Critical [Microsoft]"

via Lifehacker.com

Or, you could save yourself some hair-pulling, and switch to any number of popular free alternatives to IE, such as Firefox 3, Google Chrome, or even Opera 9 (soon to be 10).

It's really simple really, not only is IE inherently unstable, with many holes for hackers to slip through, there are also a lot, and I mean a lot, like literally 70% or more of all computers surfing the Internet use IE. It's just economics, by cracking IE once, hackers gain access to the secrets of a greater percentage of the web browsing community.

It's the same analogy why Mac users don't "have" virus problems, it's simply not worth it to write a virus that targets such a small subset of the community.

What are you waiting for. Go update now!

And also contemplate the switch to a free OS, such as Ubuntu, which means you pay less money on the OS, and more money to souping up your hardware.

That's all for now.

what my room looks like on laundry day.

costs $4 per load >0<

just me looking like a complete fool for the camera

i'm much more yeng in real life

yeah

see what i mean

where i spend most of my time

too lazy to write more, and i'm getting sick of how idiotically difficult it is to upload images with blogger. may consider moving the whole thing to another platform.

oh the 'well built' guy below is the vice chancellor. yay

exhaustion

it's been a long time since i last wrote here, and i wonder how many of you still watch this space?

just got back from my first disecction of a cadever, obviously we don't get fresh bodies, the cadevers we get are mostly old, homeless people that died in the hospital and have not been claimed. so basically for each group of 6 you get 1 cadever.

the first thing you notice is the smell, because obviously they had to fix the body with formalin to preserve it, and we'll be using the same body for 1 year, and we'll be sharing it with the year 2 students.

this is definitely one of the things i don't want to happen to my earthly remains when i finally quit this world, about 200 years from now (wishful thinking never hurt anyone).

so for the first session, we only had to remove the skin from the thoraic region.

this was done by making a very shallow (just cutting the superficial fascia) incision in a sagittal line stretching from the suprasternal notch above the manubrium to the xiphoid process.

then we cut along the clavicle to the acromion and finally make a round cut around the arm. 

the skin was removed, and then the subcutaneous adipose tissue (fat, ugh), and my cadever had the most adipose tissue in the whole lab, as in almost 1-1.5 centimetres thick.

after peeling the skin off, making a sort of windowlike sturcture, then we cut off the skin from the body completely by cutting along the midaxiallary line.

so now we get a clear view of the pectoralis major, the serratus anterior, and part of the deltoid.

and in the deltopectoral triangle (the groove between the deltoid and the superior end of the pectoralis major) we could see the cephalic vein.

basically that's it. and we're leaving it for the year 2s who are going to dissect the muscles.

general impressions:

it's hard to feel afraid of dead bodies in a well lit lab, with over 100 students in it

penises look gross after treating them with formalin, the scrotal sac looks worse, probably going to have nightmares.

ugh

zombie penises......... disgusting

formalin smells bad.

most of the cadevers are really thin, subcutaneous fat almost absent, it's just my luck to get the fat one, which entails the most work.

poor homeless people, at least your bodies will benefit science.

bye, got to go puke now =)

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=4JK472N6

hmm?

i don't know what this is, hmm

seems to be a new album

i don't know

and since i don't know, no one can sue me

but i reccommend it

and you'll thank me