I started an update last night in order to ward off the tumbleweeds that frequent this site from time to time. Then I got really tired and passed out. So here I am today, updating.

This update is significantly in that I am sitting up in the residents' lounge on my laptop, on the hospital's wireless network, blogging. This is assuming that my pager does not start to go off every 15 minutes and prevents me from finishing this entry. The senior medicine resident is sitting on a big leather couch, blogging while on call. Crazy. Hopefully the referrals I get from the emergency department today turn out to be interesting cases. Normally at this hour, I would be at church. I feel like a bit of a heathen you know, but alas work preempts worship time. Sigh.

Life as of late has been going really well. I made some major headway into research last week. This week the medical students will be coming into town for interviews. For some reason I really enjoy doing interviews for things like this. The applicants are always so smart and so keen. I remember when interviewing people applying for medical school, it always impressed me how amazing the applicants were. It made me so glad that I did not have to compete with them, since I was already in the system, and like a bad case of syphilis, they would never be able to get rid of me.

Back in October, we wrote the American Board of Internal Medicine exam, so that we could see how we were doing in terms of learning stuff. Wow, I wrote that last sentence so eloquently, haha. Anyway, we wrote this big 330 question standardized test to see how much we know.

The results not only gave us our overall percentage score, but it also gave us the average score of everyone who wrote the exam in our department. Kind of like the good old class average from undergrad days. So I guess that really is not THAT interesting. What was interesting however, was that they also listed the standard deviations for each section of the exam, and how we compared with everyone else on a percentile basis. The final cherry topper, was that we got an overall percentile score. So not only do we know what our actual score is, but where we stand compared to everyone else in the program.

Since I did one year less of medical school, am the youngest resident in the "senior" clumping, was on my ICU rotation and completely sleep deprived at the time, and the fact that I, Bryan Har, am a mouth-breathing knuckle-dragger, I was thoroughly expecting to get rocked and decimated. Praise God however, as I got a very pleasant surprise and am very happy my scores. Actually, I am foaming at the mouth, vibrating in excitement, and bouncing off the walls happy with my scores. Either that or it is the rabies setting in.

Photos / Christmas 2006 - go to section

- 17 New Photos

Photos / Junk - go to section

- 2 New Photos

I like my chocolate coated in grease.

Mars, the confectionary colossus, as opposed to the Roman god of war or the red planet, has a new avatar assembling time-waster. I would like to thank the blue thug with the anaphylaxis-inducing center for the link.

Some days are good blog days, like watching a cat and a dog living under the same roof, interrupted by a skunk, a porcupine, and a particularly feisty ferret. Those are the days when there is something potentially worthwhile for me to lift my fingers and type about as needles, animal spit, and sprays of mercaptans go flying about.

Now, as I sloth around like a sloth all day on my research block, there are very few work related epics and triumphs to write about. I am not standing up at grand rounds declaring the sixty year old smoker with the mass on his chest x-ray needs Benylin 1: all-in one to help relieve 8 different cold and flu symptoms with 1 simple solution, to the resounding applause and bravado of my peers, as my lesser colleague who had earlier suggested a work up for cancer hangs his head in shame. Nor am I ripping off my shirt and jumping out of my Ashton Martin in the middle of the highway 401 (stethoscope, reflex hammer, and tongue depressor in hand) dashing across three lanes of traffic, to wrestle from death's cruel grasp a frail old lady and a beautiful young maiden gravely injured in a horrific twenty car pile up. I am not grabbing death by his robes and throttling him into the rumble strips, while he reaches in one last desperate attempt for his scythe to strike down the damsel in distress. There is no maiden swooning in my arms as I curb stomp the ruthless reaper's face into the cold concrete. Alas, these days seem to be a little more mundane usual.

I decided that yesterday's blog entry was sub-par and unsatisfactory.

Somewhere out there, some poor fool visited this site and tried to read it. The overwhelming boredom subsequently caused their eyes to glaze and their mouths to froth like the donut and latte special at a 24-hour diner. If they were lucky, they hit their head hard on the counter and lost consciousness as they convulsed onto the grittled ground. A good solid thunking to the melon is the only way to rattle loose the memory of something so mind-numbingly humdrum from the grip of one's neurons. Anyway, I blocked and deleted the entry like one would the phone number of a bad date.

To spew the details of yesterday's mental vomit in a more projected and directed fashion, I bought a new little laptop. It is attractive, small, and light, and has the right goods, a dependable history, and enough brain power to do its job really well but not to play games. Maybe we should just get married. You can check out various pictures of it in the photo gallery.

Photos / New Laptop - go to section

- New Computer!

Alright everyone, it is time for a patented Bryan Har late night blog entry. Do you know what this means? Of course you all do! It means that I will make a potentially embarrassing or amusing post, or both! Tangential subject matter will be a given.

So anyway, I am sitting in front of my very clean desk right now basking in the sensation of decimating a number of items off of my task list. Some of the items were small things that I had been left for varying amounts of time. Others were giant elephants, peering over my shoulder, tapping me with their trunks from time to time, reminding me of large mountains of turd they keep depositing on my life. The elephant herd is now gone, and I feel a large load off my back. There is still some stuff I need to get done by the end of the month, but big game has all been hunted. The air no long reeks of the festering stench of procrastination. It feels so good.

Oddly enough, my roommate Mike is still awake as well. He is working studiously on some essay or paper. Mike is on his research block too, so we walk the earth at strange hours these days. I am glad my roommate is a good guy, smarter than I am, and offers good advice in life. All my life, I have ended up becoming friends with people smarter than I am. I still remember in undergrad, trying to keep up with Evan, Bronwen, and Aleksandra. Evan was an intellectual monster, eating everyone in the faculty of science alive. The man had a triple major in mathematics, physics, and chemistry, yet had a GPA higher than everyone who was applying for medical school (we all know because he won the award for the highest grades in the entire faculty of science). The best part was that he had no interest in applying for medical school. Eventually I did catch up to my smart friends on some stuff, but they always kept pushing me to be better. I enjoy having friends that also serve as benchmarks and people to learn from.

Earlier today, or more precisely, yesterday night, we went for some all you can eat sushi. I had a great time and reacquainted myself with friends that I have not seen for a while. The best part as well, the conversation very seldom had the bitter taste of medicine. Maybe all mercury settling into my brain is continuing to annihilate my remaining neurons? I am very full and satisfied now, with a veritable aquarium swimming about in my stomach.

Photos / Junk - go to section

- A photo of part of my room in London

Yesterday I turned more than a quarter decade old. This places my age somewhere between 25 and 27. Call me soylent green I suppose. Speaking of food, I am feeling a touch famished right now. As we speak, I am starving myself for some all-you-can eat Japanese food to celebrate the fact that somehow, I have yet to be gobbled by a larger animal or drove, flock, or other aggregate of more intelligent smaller animals. Take that Darwin.

As of tomorrow, my research block with be 25% complete. This begs the question, is my research 25% complete? That depends on how you frame scope of my research, but in terms of what I can and should get done during the two month block, the answer is yes. And I am quite proud of it. In terms of what needs to be done eventually, the answer is definitely no. I might as well apply for a master's degree so I can justify some additional procrastination.

Let us get back to talking about being old. So I had all these goals back when I was younger. The most recent set included being married by 24, and at 26, being done residency and being a dad. Though I could potentially be married and a dad by the end of the year, things might feel a bit rushed. I also chose a sub-specialty instead of family medicine, so instead of being done June 2007, I am now not sure when residency will come to an end. I get a lot of "you're still young" comments, but that can only go on for so long.

So what shall be my new goals? What unrealistic expectations shall I have for 30? Okay, so at 30, I want to be done my core cardiology or intensive care fellowship. I want to be married, maybe a kid too. I also want to own property, have a second car, and be the dictator of a small backwater coutnry by then. Oh, and not become fat. That last one is oh so important. What else do I want to add to my list? Hmm.

Photos / Hong Kong 2006 - go to section

- 35 New Photos

Patrick and Carol got married this past weekend! You know you two, it was about time! I stole the picture for this update from Ervin's website. Cool unique wedding rings designed by Patrick, in an unconventional wedding pose of course.

So today, we rigged up an X-Box 360 onto a 60 inch HD television. We played some games that were okay, like Need for Speed Carbon. There were other games that were mediocre like NHL 2K7 (which was actually not as good as EA Sport's NHL 2007 on the old Xbox).

Then there was Fight Night, which was simply amazing. Fight Night is a boxing game, or perhaps, a boxing simulator. Having played the game on the old Xbox, and then playing it on the X-Box 360 really makes one appreciate what the new console can do. It had a very simplistic and intuitive control scheme, yet allowed for a lot of control. We would play round after round, and you can see the boxers start to limp, their faces cut and swollen, the sweating rolling off their brows. With every crunching exchange, the game engine translated the pugilistic punishment quite vividly on screen and through the speakers. Every heavy blow that connected, we would all cringe and cheer in response. Every knockout, in slow motion close-up, so carefully documented in high-resolution just so that we could feel the pain first hand. Even the girls went head to head for a few rounds against each other.

The highlight of the night though was definitely Gears of War. After I adjusted to moving around, I was still having troubles aiming accurately. Playing first person shooters with two analog sticks takes some getting used to. We played a few head to head death match rounds, and then jumped into the cooperative split-screen campaign. The graphics, as everyone by now has seen in the commercials, really showed off what a second gen 360 game is like. Speaking of the commercials, the song, Mad World by Gary Jules is now number one on the iTunes charts. If I had money to waste, I would get an Xbox 360 just for Gears of War. The story and the scenes are very well designed. It was a non-stop onslaught of a variety of experiences, from "check that out" to "we are all going to die a very horrible death". Like the first berserker that is invincible against all your regular weapons and tracks you by smell and sound, charging through everything to rip you apart. Crazy stuff. We have come a long way from when we played Doom on the school computers in junior high.

The great Ando Momofuku, born Wu Bai-fu, 1910 in Taiwan, the inventor of instant noodles, has passed away. His brilliant idea has fed me, and countless other students quickly, cheaply, and very tastily over the years. Rest in Peace. (Read More)

Does anyone else ever have moments, days, or perhaps even entire weeks where you feel as though your entire brain has shut down? Do you go about your daily business and try to get work done, but you struggle with the more complex tasks? You shift into third gear only to realize that third gear fell out of the bottom of your car? The wheel starts spinning but the hamster is dead?

This past week, I have had a few evenings like that, usually after a full day of working on some research project. I try to work on anything at all, be it blogging, more research, or putting food on the table, and it is a struggle. Last night I tried to write a blog entry, and despite the fact that I had a sense of what I wanted to write, I just could not put it express it in comprehensible sentences. This evening, the same issue arose. After eating dinner, I reached the point where I just could not think. Luckily, after spending some time talking on the telephone, I think my brain has rebooted itself and I can at least make some sense of my surroundings right now.

I suppose for everyone to reply to this, I would need a commenting feature or a forum of some sort again. I have been thinking of setting up a forum for some time now, and while past experiences with Power Board and phpBB have been adequate, I have been really eyeing up vBulletin. The only problem is that vBulletin has a licensing fee, and well, I am a cheap bastard.

So between this paragraph and the last, I just spent an hour doing some research on my forum dilemma, and in consultation with Ervin, I have decided to go for phpBB since it is free, and if traffic ever gets big, I can import things into a licensed version of VBulletin.

Happy New Year and welcome to 2007.

Inevitably, this time of year is filled with little chronological nuggets of flashbacks, resolutions, and things to watch for.

For those with pangs of retrospective hunger, the rather aptly named Time magazine has released their 25 Top Ten Lists for 2006.

Rather fascinating for many, aside from myself, is how quickly time spirals forward as we get older. Time rushes by like a gale of atmosphere during free fall. In the upper stratosphere, we are born mid-flight and begin our journey through blue skies, accelerating at an ever increasing velocity towards that certain shared destination. Some folks live life with little resistance to the fall, diving down head first into life. I prefer to spread myself out a little and take in the ever changing perspective, seeing as much as possible.

Through the bright blue atmosphere, the crimson skies when the sun plays hide-and seek with the horizon, and the moonlit starry heavens, we encounter other folks in their travels - friends, families, lovers, adversaries. I was tempted, and perhaps still tempted to look back myself about the events of the past year. However, I must resist the temptation to keep my neck turned backwards for too long, lest I start missing out on the beautiful visions immediately in my surroundings and just coming into sight. There's no point in straining and fixating on things long past.

Every now and then, we land right in the middle of a big black electrical nimbostratus of suck. The people that reach out to pull us back into clear skies are the people worth holding on to.

My only question at this point, is do we ever reach some sort of a terminal velocity? Does the quickening of the perception of days flying by ever reach a peak before we hit our nadir?

I finished Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures. Again, I greatly enjoyed reading the book. I highly recommend it to anyone in the medical profession. I do not really recommend it for the folks who only like to read happy and clean things. There are vast stores of dark humor and pleasant fates are not poured out to many of the characters.

(Left) I finally caught up with Janet again, in Hong Kong of all places!

To all my readers, have a great New Year and let's enjoy the view together.

Photos / Hong Kong 2006 - go to section

- 10 New Photos