Googling me... again

I repeated a previous act of narcissism by Googling myself again and this time, another relic of my past came up as the top search. Most curiously, my old (and rather limited) portfolio on Coroflot, a career site for creatives, is still around.

I remember being really into web design back then, and even got offered some freelance projects by a Singaporean design firm called odieux22. It never quite took off because I was caught up in revision for my A Levels.

In about 5 years, I'll probably be looking back on the days when I used to blog. Time sure flies.

Pardon my French

Why do the English say "pardon my French" when cussing? My consultant's said it, and so have a few nurses. Google Answers has some background information on the origins of the expression.

Tai-tai in Training

Nearly all Singaporean (and possibly Malaysian) girls dream of becoming tai-tais and leading a life in the lap of luxury. Aspiring tai-tais should look the part and slip into LocalBrand's TiT tee!

If you've graduated from being a TiT, perhaps you should be getting Prada.

del.icio.us links

I've aggregated most of the stuff I link here on del.icio.us, so if you prefer browsing links go here.

I have to gush

I remember Rafa's Valencia side coming to Anfield for a friendly some years ago and despite Houllier's team having just won the cup treble, they were completely outplayed by Valencia's intricate passing game. I wished back then that Liverpool could replicate just a fraction of Valencia's class, and move away from Houllier's one-dimensional game plan.

What I saw at Anfield today was perfection. Liverpool now plays a brand of football much like Rafa's former side; he's moulded the team into one that not only defends resolutely as a single unit but also has a midfield capable of producing some magnificent forward play.

Against Newcastle, the passing and movement off the ball were fantastic. It was incredible watching the players from above on telly because I could see all the possibilities the lads were creating for themselves with their runs. Not to mention Owen barely got a kick against Carra on his return to Anfield. Collectively, they dominated and outplayed Newcastle for the entire game.

The team still needs a good right winger, an additional central defender and budget permitting, perhaps another striker. I'm still hoping Owen returns because he belongs in the red of Liverpool. When Rafa's assembled the squad he wants, Liverpool will give Mourinho and Chelsea a run for their (considerable) money. Who knows, we may even push them to the wire this season.

Match report: Liverpool 2-0 Newcastle

Merry Christmas!

A slightly belated Merry Christmas to all! Happy holidays!

Interactive Gorillaz

Explore Kong Studios and discover where the Gorillaz live and work. Check 2D's email, listen to a mix on Noodle's Minidisk or grab some merch at the G Shop. You'll find that the shopkeeper, Cowboy Gary, has a conspicuously Scouse accent lol.

It's a beautifully illustrated interactive experience by Gorillaz co-creator Jamie Hewlett and his team at Zombie Flesh Eaters.

Bad wine

Haha, British drink is not spared ridicule either.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi sent his Swedish counterpart 24 bottles of Italian wine on Tuesday, saying it was to help him recover from having to drink British wine at a European Union summit last week.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair hosted the summit in Brussels and offered Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson and his other guests Welsh white wine and English red wine.

"(Persson) was so aghast at the English wines at the summit that I promised to send him some of our wines," Berlusconi told a group of foreign journalists, adding that he had dispatched 24 bottles of cabernet sauvignon.

"Up to 24 bottles is fine. More than that is corruption," Berlusconi joked.

Berlusconi sends wine to Swedish PM

Rejection

Not unexpectedly, my appeal to withdraw from Spanish has been rejected by the Exam Board. It seems to me little effort was made to empathise with my situation, but rather the Board set its mind on rejecting my appeal and merely reacted to every point I raised.

What can I say? There's little I can do now except make the most of the situation. Here's hoping the timetable's kinder to me after this rotation.

Send a snowflake

Send out seasonal greetings with a snowflake from Method and Form.

Kong

I watched King Kong yesterday and really enjoyed the movie. Aside from the action and special effects, at its heart is a touching tale that gets everyone on Kong's side.

And our little island gets its five minutes of fame! In the movie, Carl Denham, played by Jack Black, has everyone believing they're headed for a film shoot in Singapore when he's, in fact, leading them to Skull Island. Never knew Singapore was the film location of choice in the 1930s!

Read Roger Ebert's review of King Kong or some random Kong trivia at Wikipedia and IMDb.

Dave Brasgalla has an icon set - Kong - over at the Iconfactory and a brilliant Skull Island desktop (in widescreen too!) on his website, Pixelhuset.

Commercial medicine

McLeod Hospital in Florence, South Carolina recently webcast a laparoscopic supracervical hysterectomy live on the internet. According to this BBC article, such live webcasts are becoming increasingly common in the US as hospitals there try to gain a competitive edge by showcasing their best surgeons and the latest techniques.

I agree the operating theatre should not be the sole preserve of the medical profession and patients should be informed and educated about the procedures they undertake. However, the overt commercialism of these webcasts is disturbing.

They have marketing executives from equipment manufacturers hanging corporate logos on the walls of the operating theatre. I find such commercial exploitation morally objectionable.

While Dr David Chapman, the gynaecologist who performed the above procedure, says he does benefit directly from any of these companies, allowing these endorsements will only blur the line between commercial interest and professional responsibility.

This is another example of excessive commercialisation of healthcare provision in the US. Having a system dominated by large private corporations means healthcare providers end up catering to the needs of Big Business, not the needs of their patients. The US is the only developed nation in the world that does not guarantee affordable access to healthcare for all its citizens; those who cannot afford health insurance are left marginalised and dependent on basic emergency care.

I am personally in favour of a more socialist system of healthcare such as in the UK and to a lesser extent in Singapore. Healthcare should be fully or partially funded by the state, and supplemented by private practitioners.

In a way, the commercial nature of US healthcare is anathema to the spirit of the NHS. Granted waiting times are longer in a public healthcare system but here, good quality healthcare is made available to all, even those who can least afford it.

BBC News: Surgery goes live on the net
McLeod Health: Replay of Laparoscopic Supracervical Hysterectomy
Read about healthcare in the US and publicly funded medicine.

Homer says it best

The week is over and I'll be home in Singapore soon! This deserves a right ol' Homer WOOHOO!



The Homer Simpson Sound Page

Wtf?

If at became '@', those at Typophile mull over what wtf would look like in the future.

Defining a Jew

Does being a Jew mean one belongs to a religion or to an ethnic group? Interestingly, there's a small community of Black Hebrews who reside in Dimona, Israel.

In a nightmare

Every fortnight, my life turns into an utter nightmare. Clerking a urology patient into the evening on Tuesday, having to wake up at 6.45am on Wednesday for urology theatres before Spanish into the evening and to top it all off, having to go on call on Thursday.

Why the damn school won't help me out by letting me drop Spanish is beyond me.

French wonder

The Millau viaduct in southern France is both an engineering marvel and a stunning work of art. Norman Foster is truly a creator of architectural masterpieces.

Creative Zen Vision:M

As much as I want a home-grown company to succeed on the world stage, I have to say Creative's newest player is just positively ugly. It looks like an imitation of the iPod gone awry. There's too much plastic and it's massive.

When will they realise that how the player looks and feels is as important to the consumer as its technical specifications? This is so quintessentially Singaporean! "We've FM radio, longer battery life and support for multiple formats, what more do they want?!"

Jack Black on TRL

Darn lights, that's all I could catch of Jack Black last night. He was on TRL at MTV's studio in Leicester Square. The cast of King Kong were in town for the movie's London premiere.

Heartbeats

The beautiful music that accompanies the multitude of colourful balls bouncing down the streets of San Francisco in that Sony BRAVIA commercial is Heartbeats by José González. Have a listen.

Difficult patients

Medical students often delve right into the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine (or 'Cheese & Onion') and unfortunately miss the insightful commentary found in its opening pages. Here is one such piece I've particularly enjoyed.

"'Unless both the doctor and the patient become a problem to each other, no solution is found.'¹

Jung's aphorism is untrue for half our waking lives: for an anaesthetist, eg there is no need for the patient to become a problem in order for the anaesthetic to work. But, as with all the best aphorisms, being untrue is the least of their problems. Great aphorisms signify because they unsettle. Our settled and smug satisfaction at finishing a period of duty without any problems is so often a sign of failure. We have kept the chaos at bay, whereas, if we were greater men or women, we would have embraced it. Half our waking professional lives we spend as if asleep, on automatic, following protocols or guidelines to some trite destination - or else we are dreaming of what we could do if we had more time, proper resources, and perhaps a different set of colleagues. But if we had Jung in our pockets he would be shaking us awake, derailing our guidelines, and saluting our attempts to risk greater interactions with our patients, however much of a mess we make of it, and however much pain we cause and receive. (Pain, after all, is the inevitable companion to lives led authentically.²) To the unreflective doctor, and to all average minds, this interaction is anathema, to be avoided at all costs, because it leads us away from anaesthesia, to the unpredictable, and to destinations which are unknown.

So, every so often, try being pleased to have difficult patients: those who question us, those who do not respond to our treatments, or who complain when these treatments do work. Very often, it will seem that whatever you say is wrong: misunderstood, misquoted, and mangled by the mind you are confronting - perhaps because of fear, loneliness or past experiences which you can only guess at. If this is happening, shut up - but don't give up. Stick with your patient. Listen to what he or she is saying and not saying. And when you have understood your patient a bit more, negotiate, cajole, and even argue - but don't bully or blackmail ('If you do not let your daughter have the operation she needs, I'll tell her just what sort of a mother you are...'). When you find yourself turning to walk away from your patient, turn back and say 'This is not going very well, is it? Can we start again?' And don't hesitate to call in your colleagues' help: not to win by force of numbers, but to see if a different approach might bear fruit. By this process, you and your patient may grow in stature. You may even end up with a truly satisfied patient. And a satisfied patient is worth a thousand protocols."

² 'Some say that the world is a vale of tears, I say it is a place of soul making' - John Keats

Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine p20, 6th edn, M Longmore, IB Wilkinson and S Rajagopalan, Oxford University Press

Barber surgeons

Surgeons in the UK are referred to as "Mister" because they were once barbers without formal qualifications!

Lamp

Sailboards Rotterdam has some interesting Flash work including Lamp, a program that lets you use your monitor as a lamp.

A poor start to December

Well, the past two days haven't been too kind on me. Urology theatres on Wednesday were followed immediately by Spanish, which lasted into the late evening. Incidentally, I'm hoping to withdraw from Spanish because the clinical timetable is leaving me drained and the least I need is a language taking up time and effort over the long term.

Most dreadfully, my birthday was spent in an A&E theatre witnessing an elderly gentleman struggling to survive an abdominal aortic aneurysm. A triple A is a rare occurence but I hardly think being in theatre till 10 is an ideal way to spend one's birthday.

Standing at a distance away meant I saw nothing and it seemed my primary purpose for the evening was to hold the registrar's bleeps. Thoroughly depressing. I was glad to be able to slump into bed and sleep the day's events away.

Thankfully, today's been better. Went to hospital for an hour or two to clerk a patient, then came home before dinner with my housemates in Chinatown. For me, the arrival of the weekend is most definitely welcome.