We'll Build A Tunnel From My Window To Yours

So, I've been away for a while, but with the semester at school wrapping up and working full time, I didn't have a whole lot of free time. Classes are done, I did well, and the GPA is so far pretty stellar. So I've got some catching up to do, so here goes:

Apple is running a promotion right now to try and get me to spend money. When you buy any Apple (I personally want just the simplest, low-end iBook) you get a free iPod mini. Not that I need another mp3 player (I've got an iPod Shuffle which I love and a 40gb Creative Nomad which is great for long trips) but a $180 mp3 player for free for buying a $950 computer I want anyway, that seems like a sweet deal. Deal lasts through mid-September, but we'll see if I can scrounge up the dough till then. My POS Dell Inspiron 1100 just recently got a new HD, and it's running a lot more reliably now. Though I still hate it. With the new HD came the begrudged return of XP, albeit dually booted with Ubuntu. Man, I freaking hate Windows.

So with all the new-found free time I've found, and the fact that Sprint finally jacked up our DSL bandwidth up to 3mbps, I decided to get back into downloading older TV shows - catching up on stuff I've missed due to work or whatever. First up was Scrubs, and after watching all four seasons I've got to say I love the shit out of that show. Following Scrubs, I watched all 9 episodes (short season, eh?) of the first season of Grey's Anatomy, an ABC show about surgical interns. Following that, I'm currently halfway through the first season of Fox's show House MD, which details the workings of a crotchety old asshole doctor at Princeton who happens to be a diagnostic genius. Watching all these medical shows, while entertaining (because I understand a lot more what's going on now) also serves another purpose for me in that it shows what life is like in different branches of medicine and also helps point me in the path I want to take. Grey's Anatomy details the life of a surgeon, the one who swoops in and does the life-saving surgery. House details the diagnosing physician, who figures out what's wrong with the patient and saves them. Scrubs makes fun of everybody. In the end, I don't know what I'll do, but these shows sure are an interesting diversion till then. All three shows are highly recommended by yours truly.

We all have those websites that we frequent to waste time. Usually pretty entertaining (or why else would you go there so often?) these sites are the ones you just keep coming back to day after day. What are those sites for me?

Fark, Slashdot, Google News, and Digg.

One show I used to love to watch back in college was The Screen Savers back on TechTV. One of the former hosts, Kevin Rose, has found a new career after leaving the hideous G4-TechTV hybrid. Instead of broadcast-based media, he's big into internet-based media, with three new shows that you can download and watch anywhere:

Systm is a tech show, where Kevin and Dan Huard pick one project each episode (for instance, building and setting up a MythTV box - a homemade TiVo) and show you in-depth how to get it all put together and configured. Completely free and pretty humorous, it's something you should watch.

TheBroken is also a tech show, but Kevin and Dan show things that are a little on the shady side of the law. In one episode they show you how to blow up a laptop with some thermite. Neat stuff.

DiggNation is Kevin and fellow former TSS host Alex Albrecht's weekly podcast (in video form) of the week's top stories on the aforementioned Digg.com. An amusing romp through some of the week's most interesting stories, usually tech/nerd related. Stuff that if you're reading this, you'd probably be interested in.

One such site mentioned on a recent DiggNation: One man's paper on the "Why I Will Never Have A Girlfriend (Statistical Analysis)". Shit like that is priceless - like Alex said on the show "Dude get out of your house. Go to a bar. Actually talk to a WOMAN."

I actually watched preseason football last night, Bears versus Dolphins. Yes, I miss football that much. At least the game turned out to be a pretty good one.

One reason I've got more free time was that I've gotten sick. Last week my arm swelled up and had to be cut open and drained. Cultures of the fluid were sent off (it takes a few days to get results back) but the doc suspects MRSA, a bacterial "superbug" that is resistant to most conventional antibiotic treatment. So I've been taking some fairly strong stuff (Levaquin, Septra DS, Rocephin, Vanc) to get the infection completely out of my system. MRSA is very commonly picked up among healthcare providers and has been making the rounds here locally. My healthcare provider says they see 5-6 cases a day, which is pretty terrible. Though I'm always careful to wash my hands, MRSA can be spread far too easily. It usually lives harmlessly on the skin, but in my case it managed to get into an open wound and infect. Result? Pain. Since I work in a hospital, I have to sit out for a week and have to be medically cleared to return. Great. How am I supposed to work all those extra hours to buy my iBook?

Oh, and I watched Alien vs. Predator last night. TERRIBLE. I expected it to be terrible but HOLY SHIT that movie was just trash. Absolute trash.