Subaqua Sternal Rubs

Just weeks after Barbados Butterfly reported that her content was being stolen and republished without her permission in her post "I do not want green eggs and ham", I come to find out that The same thing has happened to me. An "Aquatic Cabinets" company has syndicated posts (Don't worry folks - the one place on my site where the link includes rel="nofollow") from my Scuba Diving category onto their site. I have no problem with people syndicating my feeds (that's why they are there), but I have established rules as to how the feeds can be used, and those rules need to be followed. The license under which the content on this site is released specifies that it may not be used for commercial purposes. I have reiterated that in the disclaimer for those not able to comprehend the extremely simplistic license. Links to both are on the bottom of every single page, making them pretty hard to miss, if one were to adhere to common courtesy at all. BRI Aquatic Cabinets is obviously using the feed in a commercial manner. They have also syndicated every single post from the largest scuba-related internet message board onto their site. What's the purpose of all this? Fool search engines into thinking that the site is more important than it really is, thus raising the site's rank in the search engine's results (which theoretically brings in more customers to the site –> commercial.)
I have emailed the admin of the site to remove my feed, but so far no response. No worries though, I have blocked the web server the site is hosted on, so theoretically it won't be able to get any more posts, just constant 403: Forbidden errors.

How do you tell it's about to rain in St. Vincent?

No, it's not not cats meowing, dogs barking, or goats bleating… (Goats bleat, right? I mean, I should know, I hear them enough…)

My automatic rain alert is the sudden, inexplicable loss of my internet connection. We pay lots and lots of money to the local cable company for a 256k broadband cable modem connection. They must use a satellite uplink to connect to the rest of the world, since every time it rains, the internet goes out, just like satellite TV. However, upon calling them the other day after multiple outages to ask their refund policy for lack of providing service, or for lack of providing a certain level of service (i.e. other times when the internet goes at about 0.3k/s), they stated that there were no such things as refunds. This is why I hate monopolies - they can provide poor service in violation of a contract without recourse. Well, the only thing we can do is reduce our plan to a cheaper, lower bandwidth one if the speed they promise isn't guaranteed anyways…

Alright, back to studying Pharm for the 2nd midterm exam tomorrow. Though this author claims it is an urban legend, I am starting to believe in 7±2 (a 1956 theory where the human mind can only remember 7±2 related items… I mean some drugs have more side effects than that, and we have to remember all those plus mechanism of action, kinetics, indications, contraindications, drug interactions, etc… Ugh.)

Evidently there is such a thing as a free lunch. My federal income tax refund was direct-deposited in my bank account today, and I ended up getting 202% of the taxes withheld back, for an effective tax rate of -3.32%. I did even better with my state taxes, where I got 2.72 times the amount withheld back. I guess the government felt sorry for me that my adjusted gross income from working at the hospital over semester breaks didn't even reach the standard deduction. Now if they would only feel sorry enough to cancel all the Stafford loan debt, that would be great too.

The single most important day in my medical school career has finally been set:

That's the day I am scheduled to take Step I of the US Medical Licensing Exam. Granted, Match Day (where medical students learn where they will be doing residency and in what specialty), is very important too, but they keep telling us that our Step I score is the most important factor in securing a desirable residency, with 3rd year grades and Letters of Recommendation following closely behind. Probably when I get to that point, Match Day will become the single most important day in my medical school career.

I just hope that the date I selected for Step I is a good balance between enough time to study, and enough time for the scores to be posted so that I can start my clinical rotations on time. The school would not give a firm deadline as to when one had to take the test by, just sometime in "mid-July…"

Since our both our rotations earlier this week were canceled (Monday for the local version of Veteran's Day, and Wednesday for a national day of mourning following the assassination of the Prime Minister's Press Secretary), we were rescheduled today for a Medicine rotation. Our preceptor was a Family Medicine physician working out of the Kingstown District Clinic. Or at least we hope he was a doctor working there. The nurse at the reception stated that "we have no doctor by that name working here." She must have been new, as we finally found another staff member who had seemingly both met this mysterious doctor, as well as seen medical students before. After finally finding our preceptor, we spent the next couple of hours discussing many topics, including why a history and physical is important, the increase in use of technology in medicine with the consequences that has produced (those that can afford it vs. those who can't, and the decreasing satisfaction of patients with the increasingly less personal nature of modern medicine), as well as the history of Family Medicine as a speciality and its recent changes in scope. All very interesting topics I am sure, but some of our group members felt that 8 days away from an exam, our time could have been better used studying. Well, at least it counts as a signautre on our rotations verification card. Only 5 left to go!

And speaking of studying, I need to get back to that now. Though dinner, and the subsequent postprandial increase in glucose, might be necessary first.