YKYW - Nursing Student Blog

Things are always crazy when I come to Houston. My sister just found out she’s allergic to everything (and yes, she’s allergic to so many different things, I’m just going to say everything). No beef, gelatin, cow’s milk, cheese, cashews, sugar, chicken, turkey, mushrooms, blueberries, vinegar, malt, yeast, barley, rye, wheat, green olives … there are plenty more, but you get the idea. Isn’t that crazy? We went to Wal-Mart last night to try and see what options they had available. At 230a. Yes, we are those strange people who give stores a reason to be open 24/7. While we were looking around, my sister decided I needed a shirt that says, “I need a hug.” It worked on my nephews, so I’m not complaining!

Today, she fixated on finding me a dress. Yes, you heard me. A dress. I’m not sure how I let her talk me into these things, but I now have a lovely dress that flutters when I twirl around in it.

We also trekked out to the Apple store and found her a bright, shiny new Mac Book. I using it now, and it’s been a very interesting adventure so far. Other than configuring the wireless settings of traveling salespeople, I don’t think I’ve touched a Mac since I was in the 8th grade. What goes around, comes around, hmm?

I finally signed up at MyBlogLog and set up my sites. Now I just need to decide if I want to put the “Recent Readers” bar on my site. Since a lot of people who read my blog are real life friends, I’m not sure that adding the “Recent Readers” bar would add any value to my site. (Do any of you have a MyBlogLog account?) But, I like gadgets, so I’ll probably install it, at least for a bit, the next time I’m messing around with my blog template.

While I was reading about MyBlogLog, I came across a tutorial from Stark over at FuzzyFuture about adding MyBlogLog images to comments for Wordpress blogs.

I briefly toyed with the idea, but decided against it in the end. Gravatar offers more flexibility and are easy to implement. They also offer the commenter a greater incentive to leave a comment on my site. If the reader has to use the URL field to specify their MyBlogLog account, then they don’t have the opportunity to gain a link to their blog. While some may feel that the link to MyBlogLog can lead people to their blog, I’ve discovered that a shorter path is a better path. Our attention span is just too short to force people through a maze to finally find our home page.

Also, as someone who writes on multiple blogs, it is important to have flexibility. When I am surfing poker blogs, and want to comment, I want to have the ability to send people to my poker blog. If the blog falls under any other category, then I point to this, my personal blog.

In the end, it’s about preference. As a Gemini, I like having choices! But, for me, the choice remains Gravatar for individual images associated with comments.

**Update** Doh. I didn’t realize how it really worked. I thought I had to enter the url to my member profile (like this: http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/Jaxia) instead of just putting the URL that I registered on the site. Hmm. It’s more compelling now, but I’m still interested to see how many people have Gravatar accounts compared to MyBlogLog accounts.

Pointless Things to Ponder:

Do they call it Wii wrist these days?

SK and I went to Houston this weekend and spent some time with my nephews. They are getting so big! The youngest one will be 4 in a few days, and the oldest will be 5 in December. The birthday boy loves to go to the bowling alley, so that was our first stop. It was only the third time I’d ever been bowling, and SK’s only been a handful of times. I had a lot more fun that I thought I would! With a few strikes and spares each, we managed to get a few decent scores (although I’m sure they would have been lower if we bowled without the bumpers!). It was a quick trip, but it was nice to see them.

Thanks for all the well-wishes about my anatomy and physiology midterm. I’m pretty happy with how well I scored. I didn’t do as well as I’d hoped on my second test in statistics, but I still have a high B in there. There’s still hope! I can earn extra credit in government if I spend eight hours helping a political campaign. I need to make some phone calls to see what options are available.

As for nursing school, still no letter. I did confirm that they have the right address on file, so who knows where it went. There is probably a warm bird’s nest with lovely new wallpaper that reads ‘accepted’ or ‘rejected.’ The admissions office said that there are several people who did not get their letter yet, and now I have to wait until Nov 4th. If I still don’t have my letter by Nov 4th, they will tell me my status if I go into the office.

On the geeky side of things, Firefox has made their latest release public (Firefox 2 Release Candidate 3). I still need to install IE7. I updated my forums again. Several of you mentioned problems with the other ones — These should work much better. Check em out!

Is anyone using Blingo? Blingo is a Google-based search engine that offers random prizes to users. All we have to do is search like we normally search. Seems like a good deal to me!

You can also add Blingo to your Firefox autosearch toolbar (and other browsers), which makes it even easier to use. And, if you sign up through my link, then we can both win!

I recently looked into signing up for VoIP phone service through Vonage. I used this Vonage forum to do my preliminary research. It was nice to have one place to keep up to date on news, and the reviews and forums had a lot of good information. Traditional landline phone service had better start making moves if they want to stay competitive in this changing market. If you are curious about VoIP, it is worth doing some more research.

Since I’m currently job hunting, I need to spruce up my resume a bit. I never noticed it is stuck in a rut! I added my last job and it horribly borked my layout. I decided that I don’t really need a 2 page technical resume for an entry level clinical job, so I can remove some stuff. But, what do I remove?

‘Developing and maintaining technology operating budget and resource scheduling; fostering and facilitating relationships with hardware, software and VOIP partners; Developing and implementing a cost-saving process for issue management’ — That sounds pretty important, right?

‘Ensuring quality of calls by monitoring network alarms and initiating, directing, and coordinating troubleshooting activities in support of T1 data/voice services; testing performed using TBERD and Sage test sets; Designing, testing and installing more efficient wiring scheme from the point of demarcation throughout entire network, including installing and configuring racks, routers, patch panels, Crystal boxes, 65 UNIX servers and 150 DS3 lines’ — Wow, there are some big words in there. Maybe I should leave that?

And then it hit me. These offices won’t really care about any of this. Maybe I should just change my whole layout? I’ve seen those resumes that have a section with ‘relevant’ experience, but my problem is that I don’t really have any of that. I guess I will Google around for different resume layouts.

LikeBetter is a fun website. It’s figured out that my desk is messy, I’m right handed and several other things. I just wish it had a feature where I could look back at all the assumptions it made about me, and how many of them were right.

Are you like me?

How well do you know me?

What do they think they know about you? If you create a profile, be sure to post a link so I can take the quizzes on you!

“If at first you don’t succeed; call it version 1.0″

“If brute force doesn’t solve your problems, then you aren’t using enough.”

“Be nice to geeks when you’re in school, you might end-up working for one when you grow-up.”

“It’s a little-known fact that the Y1K problem caused the Dark Ages.”

“The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.”

“unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep”  - my daily unix command list

“… one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.” - Robert Firth

“Life would be so much easier if we only had the source code.”

“COBOL programmers understand why women hate periods.”

“I’m not anti-social; I’m just not user friendly”

“A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila”

“Better to be a geek than an idiot.”

“The only problem with troubleshooting is that sometimes trouble shoots back.”

“The Internet: where men are men, women are men, and children are FBI agents.”

“Some things Man was never meant to know. For everything else, there’s Google.”

“Hacking is like sex. You get in, you get out, and hope that you didn’t leave something that can be traced back to you.”

Myspace and Webshots users should be aware:

An online banner advertisement that ran on MySpace.com and other sites over the past week used a Windows security flaw to infect more than a million users with spyware when people merely browsed the sites with unpatched versions of Windows, …

Only a little more than half of the anti-virus programs used at anti-virus testing service AV-Test.org flagged the various programs that the Trojan tried to download as malicious or suspicious.

The ad was also spotted on Webshots.com, a popular photo-sharing site. So, if you visited either of these sites recently and your computer is acting up … this might just be the culprit.

If you are using Internet Explorer and had the latest updates installed, your computer would not be vulnerable to this Trojan. So, make sure you have the latest patches installed. Or, switch to Firefox!