Scott's Spiel

Back in April I was booked in to go on a helicopter trip over the Forth Bridges in Edinburgh. Since that was unfortunately cancelled I ended up going last Saturday. Took quite a few pictures, some of my favourites being the following.

It was quite a smooth ride overall. It went rather quick as well. Certainly felt like a small child again and I was quite lucky to get such a nice day for it. Well recommended but I’d suggest going for something a bit longer.

See the full album.

I passed!

Apparently I find out on July 1st what’s happening intercalated wise.

Forth Bridges from helicopter

Great picture! Just the kind of thing you’d see on a helicopter tour. Just like mine this morning.

Except, it was cancelled.

Apparently due to low cloud, although I’m about 30 miles away and it’s blue sky here.

Oh well, day off work to relax…and write some rubbish essay.

It’s not unusual – I go home or manage to meet up with my family. I’ll usually be presented with a “present” in the form of a cut or bruise from my brother or sister. More recently I’ve had the joy of a rash. These are generally trivial and more of a joke than any serious test of what I’ve learned.

Move up a few generations and things are a bit different. Here I have statins, B-blockers and ACE inhibitors of all sizes. I get updated on any recent changes (whether I want to know or not) and spend a bit of time trying to work out what the trade name actually is. This is fine, I’m (sadly) quite interested in this. I stop myself from making any real comments though – save maybe trying to explain what the drug does. Anything beyond that 1) I tend not to know and 2) don’t want to treat my family anyway.

Unfortunately my restraint doesn’t seem to be shared by my peers. The most recent example of this was one of my colleagues explaining to a relative the findings of a new study. The relative was told they “probably don’t need to be on it” and that it “has these new problems”. More annoyingly, my friend was planning to send the article so that it could be taken to their relatives GP who “might not have seen it”.

I have no doubt that evidence based medicine isn’t practiced as well as it possible could be but this concerns me for different reasons. Firstly, treating family members is not exactly recommended, even by those fully qualified. More than that, however, is the poor GP who is going to be presented with a BMJ article that the patient was told to bring.

It’s confusing for the patient and annoying for the GP. I don’t like it.

This isn’t an isolated incident either. I’ve heard of younger students advising about post-stroke medication for example.

Perhaps we should be taught about where our limits should be as students? I can think of a few sessions that this could fit into.

Snow - From my window

This was the view from my window today. Whilst it wasn’t particularly bad up here England seems fairly paralysed by the snow.

However, I only had 1 class on today. The problem is this happened to be PBL at the hospital, a 30 minute train trip away. That is, of course, after I get to the station which requires a 15 minute walk.

I have no real problem walking in snow and I knew the train was running so I was pleased to turn up to PBL on time. Out of the 12 of us in the group, 6 started at 9am this week and were all waiting. From the remaining 6 only 1 other was already there. We began the process, full in the knowledge that the remaining 4 almost never turned up on time (a different post!). Expecting to see them stumble in around half past I was astonished to finish (after only an hour, heh) without them either turning up or letting us know.

Who cares?

Pretty much nobody. They’ll have to explain their absence – assuming it even gets logged – but then what? If we had waited for them, we’d be giving up our time to ensure they get some benefits. If they had turned up we’d be expected to update them on what had been said – we’d still be losing time.

I’m not going to admit I attend everything perfectly but if snow is the excuse, and it probably will be, I’d be pretty annoyed. They all get transport and my 45 minute trip would probably take them closer to 20 – for free too – it just makes my effort seem pointless.

I’ve got 2 of them tomorrow for GP, will they show?

Will it snow?

We’ll see.

The time is nearing when I’ll need to decide whether to apply to study an intercalated degree next year. It comes down to weighing up the possible benefits I’ll get from this year compared to the likely disadvantages.

The down sides are pretty easy to see, the major ones include:

• Increased debt
• Delay in graduating
• Leave my current year
• Uncertainty about the career advantages

On the other hand that last disadvantage could open a world of advantages:

• Gain a bonus over other applicants when it comes to job applications
• Ability to enter an academic route (something I’d likely enjoy)
• Spend time learning a subject in detail
• Learn how to carry out research
• Possibility of publication (it happens!)

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve considered that I’ll apply regardless. The financial aspect won’t be a concern providing I have no problem in keeping my job for the next few years. Going back a year will be quite unusual but I’ll get used to it no doubt.

Glasgow offers 2 different types of intercalated – one in the medical or in the biological faculties. The medical intercalated is based on a core degree programme combined with a specialist module of my selection. My current train of thought involves the developmental medicine specialist module. I’m slightly worried that this will be quite competitive so my effort is on improving my exam results this year.

As I mentioned in my last WordPress post I’ve been working on adding documentation to the core of WordPress, specifically the formatting.php file. This is quite a big file will upwards of 2000 lines of code and around 65 functions to document. It is used extensively in the formatting of pretty much every aspect of a blog. It surprised me therefore that when I started getting involved in developing WordPress this file (with the exception of may a dozen functions) completely lacked documentation.

Over the past number of weeks I’ve been (rather slowly, it’s quite a boring process) adding inline documentation to the file. So far I’ve got around 70-80% of the file done and plan on doing as much of the rest that I can. Unfortunately some of the functions are a bit difficult for me to understand and, at the risk of writing totally incorrect documentation, I’ve been leaving these.

However there is only one other developer actively documenting the code. New code is being documented as it is written but there is a great deal of code lacking any. Hopefully the 2.7 release will see a good deal more added. My contributions have already been committed to the Subversion trunk which I’m quite happy about.

I knew it wouldn’t be impossible, just quite difficult.

However, it seems I’ve broke the battery at least. Technically the die hard mactards would probably claim the computer itself is fine (a fair point, something I’d probably say).

The problem? The battery doesn’t appear to be recognised. Apple knows about it but unfortunately none of those work to solve it.

Honestly, I think i’ll be needing a new battery (£99 from Apple!) but I plan on taking it into the Apple store tomorrow and see if there are any other options.

Apart from that, I now have grown a hatred for the MagSafe power adapter.

On the plus side, I did manage to fix our DVD recorder after my mum decided it would be a good idea to put two DVDs in at the same time…

So today I found this article which lead me to the rather excellent new facebook design. Applications seem to be back in the proper place (out of view) and I hope it stays that way.

However, this quote from the article (my emphasis), really got me wondering:

Facebook expert Tony Beresford said that the site’s revamp was a positive move.

Just how in the world do you become a Facebook expert? Answers on a postcard please. Google pointed me here which I totally agree with.

Maybe I could be a WordPress expert? Certainly a Mac expert. Perhaps I’m a Scottish culture expert?

Sigh, not going to be reading Sky News again in a hurry,

Scary, eh?

It’s all downhill from here…