It has arrived!

After waiting for the past couple of months (very impatiently), since the day they officially announced the iPhone, mine finally arrived in St. Maarten! I don't know that there's ever been a package that I've anticipated so much! If you don't know by now, I am a bit of an apple fanatic, but the iPhone is the most amazing piece of technology that I have ever held in my hands. If you have touched one, then you may know what I'm talking about. However, if you've only seen it in pictures or heard about it, you have no idea of it's greatness! it really is somewhat magical when you use it.

In any case, it took me about 3 hours to unlock because of the painfully slow internet connection at school. However, the actual unlock process only took less than 1/2 hour! As soon as the unlock program had completed its thing, I stuck in a Chippie SIM card (the local cell provider) and it worked immediately, with full service. The only thing that obviously doesn't work is the EDGE network and visual voicemail, which are both dependent on AT&T's network. However, everything else works perfectly! Thank you soooo much to my dad for getting it for me! If you want one of your own, I can tell you how to unlock it, it's really pretty simple.

Really?

OOOH...maybe all jews should wear a star too! Isn't that right, Nazis? I'm afraid this is the 25% of America that support Bush.

Cartoon

click to make larger

Shark Dive

On Friday, I went on the shark awareness dive with Dive Safaris. There were about 10 of us on the dive, but all the others were from the Royal Caribbean cruise ship or tourists staying in a hotel. I was really surprised that not more people from AUC wanted to go, but I guess there aren't that many that are both certified and have been diving in the last two years. John just finished his certification though this past Saturday and wants to go, so i guess at least he will next time.

In any case, the dive was definitely worth doing. It only costs $55 since they give students the local discount. It's about a 15 minute boat ride out to the dive site and then after a briefing, they get you underwater pretty quick. You descend down a line to just under 60 feet and then make your way over to the feeding area. They have been doing this for about 8 years now, so by the time I got over to where they do the feeding, 3 or 4 sharks had already started swimming around the area.

They have everyone lay down behind a bunch of cinderblocks which you can hold on to. Unfortunately, but for other divers' safety, we're not allowed to touch the sharks. So, you just lay there for about 30 minutes while the guy in the center feeds them. You can, of course, take pictures though...you don't just sit there and do nothing the whole time. The sharks do get very close though! You could easily reach out and touch them and one of them almost took off my goggles when I wasn't paying attention!

The two largest sharks which come around (Big Mama and Spot) both showed up, as did 5 others. They ranged in size from about 3-7 feet. A lot of people said I was crazy for diving with sharks, but it's really not unsafe at all. In 8 years, they haven't had a single incident, and this is with one of the top 20 most dangerous shark species in the world (reef shark) out of over 300 species! They really act more like dogs than anything. They just swim around and at most, when they get a little fiesty, nudge at you or swim between your legs or something. Even when they were fighting the feeder guy to get at the shark food though, they never bit, just nudged.

You can find many more pictures from the day at my flickr link to the right. All of these are pictures from the dive, not fake as some people have suggested!!!

Recent News:

- We had a pretty decent storm last night...thunder, lightning, lots of wind, and torrential rain! Apparently, it was the remnants of hurricane someone or other.

- The internet went out (again). But, I suppose that's to be expected. Thinking too hard about internet is enough to make it go out, so I suppose any moisture would could do it as well.

- We got a ridiculous amount of cranial anatomy to learn today! Very good thing that we don't have anatomy tomorrow, because we've easily got two days worth of stuff!!!

- I think I'm going to join Marcy's Mega Gym in Simpson Bay...anyone know anything about the place? I visited it last night and it seemed to be one of the nicer gyms around. It certainly put AUC's gym to shame!

- The Spouse's Club!!! They sure do know how to make a breakfast burrito, delicious cookies, and rice krispy treats! They sold them yesterday, but they were selling the left overs today. The day-old burritos were just as good the second day :) mmmmmmm....spouse's club breakfast burritos.

- Yesterday was also shawarma wednesday. They were delicious, as well. It was nice, didn't have to leave campus at all yesterday for good food!

-Speaking of good food by campus, the pizza guy next to the coffee shop makes awesome pizza. I hear the student special, complete with honey, is very good, but I don't know if I'm quite ready for honey on my pizza yet.

-Shark diving tomorrow!!!

Another video

I'm not trying to turn this into an atheist blog or anything, but I saw this today, and thought it was funny!

glumbert - The Atheist Delusion

A note to all the religious people out there: In the likely event that you did not pick up on it, this video is not actually true! It's a little something called satire. ;)

Don't tell mom you're an atheist!

glumbert - Don't tell Mom you're an atheist

This video is hilarious, amazing, frightening, and maddening, all at the same time!

That bible-thumping, rubbish spewing, curiousity of evolution, Ted Haggard, would be proud!

Scott - 1, Block exams - 0

We got the results back today and mine were very good!! I wound up honoring MCB and histo, and was one question away from honoring anatomy (89%). I'm kinda pissed because I definitely made some stupid mistakes on the anatomy written. One in particular, I even knew the answer...but I debated whether it was the obvious answer and a trick, or the answer that I thought was right. I stupidly decided to go with the answer that fell right into their trick (which is sort of a BS thing for them to do) and got that one wrong, instead of going with what I knew was right. Oh well...I still did very well for the first exam (from what I hear, only 9 others honored MCB for this exam) and I'm off to a very good start in honoring all 3 classes!

So what did I do to study? I think the biggest thing was that I studied on my own! Everyone seems to study in groups, and that just seems like a huge waste of time to me. I tried the group thing one day last week and realized in the first 5 minutes that I could learn it a lot faster on my own. I think groups may be valuable for testing yourself after you study, but they just slow you down when you're actually studying. Personally, I don't even see the need to have anyone test you after you study. You either know it or you don't and it should be pretty obvious which is the case for you.

Someone said that I did well because I study all the time. This is not the case at all though. I took a couple of days almost completely off from studying and I usually study somewhere around 5 hours a day. Sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less.

One down, a bunch more to go

Today was our first block exam of med school! I don't want to jinx myself as we don't get our scores until tomorrow, but I think that I did well. I think I was honestly expecting it to be a bit harder than it was. Some people that I talked to, however, did not feel the same way at all. So, maybe that just means that I did a good job studying! But, then again, I still haven't gotten any scores, so maybe I didn't study that well.

When it was done, we all walked through the Rotunda (it's sorta on the way back to the dorms). I assumed that they just wanted us to walk through there so that we wouldn't see the couple of people who still needed to take the anatomy practical (upper semesters who failed last semester), but that was not the reason at all. When we walked in, a bunch of the upper semesters and faculty and staff were yelling and clapping for us and had a bunch of snacks. This went on for quite a while since we've got a very large class (too big, if you ask me). A video of the whole thing can be found here. There were actually more people there than it looks in the video. It honestly did catch me by surprise, and it was a nice surprise :)

Done Studying!!!!

Well, until Tuesday afternoon, at least.

The first block exam is tomorrow morning at 8am and at the advice of all the faculty and upper class students, I'm going to stop studying now and get a good night's rest. At this point, I know everything I'm going to know by tomorrow morning and staying up trying to learn anything else would just make me exhausted and not think straight while i'm taking the exam. Besides, I think I've got a pretty good grasp on everything. The only thing that worries me is that we've covered a huge amount of information in the past couple of weeks and I have no idea what they'll ask or how they'll ask it. In any case, by Tuesday, I'll know better how to study and how much I really know! No sense in worrying about it now! So.....no more thinking about school for the night!!!

You may have noticed the large red "A" that now resides in the sidebar of my blog. In case you were wondering, it's the scarlet letter of atheism, linked to "The Out Campaign," begun by Richard Dawkins. Of course, this is referring to being out with atheist beliefs...no other nonsense that you may be thinking!! While I don't put too much atheist stuff on here, I am certainly an atheist and think you ought to be too (if you're not already). You'll see things pop up now and then that are related (see Sept. 11th post below).

Sweet...NetStar just dropped the internet connection...again! Fortunately, it was short lived this time and I didn't lose the stuff written above. Speaking of NetStar, they have very possibly the worst customer service in the history of companies. I call occasionally when the internet goes down, which is about once a day or so. Every time I call, I'm put on the phone with some "tech support" dude (i use the term very losely) who is nearly impossible to understand. He insists nearly every time that it is a problem on my side, although it clearly isn't. Then, he tells me that it's working now, so don't worry about it. No explanation, just "don't worry about it." I suppose that's pretty much status quo for the island though. Oh well..... time to rest up for tomorrow!