Sparsely Critical

After a wonderful summer of working in WI, I’m back at to school in lovely Indianapolis. I do enjoy the city when I can, but school often has me stuck in my room frantically studying for quizzes and examinations.

With a new school year, I’m hoping to make a fresh start in a new direction. Over the summer I got on a fitness kick and logged about 60 miles of running. As I never ran before, this was a major accomplishment for me. I certainly don’t want anyone to think I enjoy running. I used to hate it more than anything, until I discovered the runner’s high. It is a bit addictive, and I got sucked in over the summer. However, running just wasn’t the right fit for me. I had to go back to my roots.

I got back on campus, ran 3 miles in 90 degree weather, as was cured of my new found joy. Instead, knowing I needed to get regular cardio in, I jumped in the pool and got back into swimming. It’s been over a year and a half since I left the Butler swim team, but luckily I didn’t forget how to swim. To keep me motivated, I set a goal this semester of 100,000 yards. That’s roughly 56.82 miles, but who’s counting? As of this evening, I’ve logged 41,600 yard (~23.64 miles). I think I’ll make the 100k without a problem.

I’d also like to start lifting weights. I’d like to find someone to go with me for the first time, and then I’ll be fine going on my own. I suppose I could go alone, but I need someone to help motivate me.

In recent news, my G4 20gig iPod died. It happened the day of the new iPod announcements. Convenient timing, but I assure you I didn’t harm my iPod intentionally. It just doesn’t communicate with the computer for more then several seconds, and iTunes can’t restore it. I’ve given up, and now have the dilemma of what iPod model to replace it with. I really want a touch, but the storage is low and the campus WiFi isn’t supported by it, so my best option is probably the iPod Classic. I know I want it in Black, but I’m stuck between 80gigs and 160gigs. I’ll most likely go with the 80gig because it’s thinner and should provide adequate storage. The only catch is that the 160gig gets better battery life. I suppose I could charge it.

I’ll leave that decision until after cluster exams. Indeed I should probably be studying now instead of blogging, but what fun would that be. I have exams next week Tuesday through Thursday. Gotta love pharmacy school.

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.