Sparsely Critical

I started a new job this summer working as a Pharmacy Intern. So for it has been awesome. I really like all the people that I work with, and they have been very helpful in getting me trained. The pharmacists have also been great resources to me, and seem to happily answer my many questions. I’m starting to recognize what drugs do based on their name, and some of the ‘memorized’ top 200 drugs are finally being remembered.

My internship mentor, one of the pharmacists, gives me random assignments to have done by the next time I come to work. These are basically things I need to look up and understand, such as how calcium channel blockers work, what they are used for, the different drugs available, and side effects. I started to use my wiki page to record my findings, but may build something better suited to the task. I can’t wait to get back to work tomorrow.

Also, I bought a SlingBox Tuner and attached it to the network to stream tv to my computers while I’m either here, or anywhere else in the world. It’s pretty sweet and works great. Also, I upgraded the router that runs our home network to a newer model that supports DHCP reservations. I finally don’t have to determine which device is at which ip address. Plus, it just keeps everything more organized and makes it easy assign public ports to individual devices. That’s all I can think of for now.

As of yesterday morning at 9:45am, I was finished with my finals for this semester. I have no complaints in that department, but something was on my mind and had been for a few days prior.

You see, I haven’t been able to backup my iMac onto my 400gig firewire HD. This had me really stressing, because I have a lot of irreplaceable pictures that, in the event of a hard drive failure, would be lost forever. The problem was, that every time I tried to back up a large amount of data, it would fail and the Mac would return “Error -36″, which means that read/write communication between the HD and the computer was failing.

Finally, last evening I decided to connect the drive up via USB, as it is a dual connective drive. On USB, the drive performed flawlessly, and I was able to backup my ‘Home’ folder without a problem. The HD is somewhere in the range of a year or two old, and out of warranty. It seems to be working just fine on USB, but I really don’t want to risk a HD failure. Plus, Firewire is faster (arguably), and I’d prefer to use it that way. The dilemma I have is whether or not to replace the unit which would cost money, or risk catastrophe.

One should note that catastrophe would be if the Mac HD failed and the external failed as well, defeating the purpose of backing up.

Why do I feel my blog is becoming focused on external hard drives? Perhaps that should be added as a category. Ugh.

So I have two finals down and two more to go. I have my pharmcare
final tomorrow morning at 8, and my biotech final on Saturday morning
at 9. I’m hopeful that I’ll do well. The pharmcare final should be
pretty straight forward, as all the previous exams have been.
Hopefully biotech will be similar. I guess it’s back to studying for
me.