Geek Shirt

Papers

Gamespy top 10 of 2004

Blimey, Gamespy just awarded Halo 2 the title of best game of 2004 over HalfLife 2 in second place. Good job I got a copy then. All I need now is an Xbox, but they're all sold out until mid-January/February.

I've got plenty of gaming on the PC to keep me going until then. I can wait.

Eagle

Walking the dogs

Motorway Snow

From Christmas Day.

The Coven

(Kim's family)

Christmas Day

Christmas Eve

Car PC

My next project? Check out this car PC on mini-itx.com. I didn't realise you could pick up 7" LCD touchscreens so cheaply. Mind you, it'd probably get nicked in Swansea. Something to think about for the kids in the future.

Sega Rally

Wow! Sega Rally! Jack's a crap co-pilot though.

Handbrake

Jack's found the handbrake. No wonder we didn't even make the 2nd
checkpoint.

Jump

Can you believe this place? How good if you're under 4ft tall?

On the phone

Chatting to Nanna.

Shoulders

Tesco

Cold and wet

Icy morning.

Wet.

Peeking.

Update OK

This seems to be OK. If you see any bugs, let me know.

Brace brace brace!

Brace yourselves. We at samwebster.net are going for the upgrade of this blog's engine. Hold on tight everybody.

Comment Spam

Oh for fuck's sake! I was just about to sit down to write a little note about how I'm off work now for a couple of weeks over Christmas and I see 23 spam comments in my blog for generic versions of viagra. Fuck off!

If you don't know, the same evil, scum of the earth thieves that fill your inboxes with spam also buy web bots that search the web for blogs. They then automatically add comments to various blog entries with links to their websites in. Why? One of Google's known methods of ranking web searches is by the number of other websites that link to a page, and probably how well those linking pages are also ranked. So comment spam drives up a search result in Google for free. It's taking advantage of the system, a system that we all use because it works so well, returning useful results quickly and making our lives on the internet easier. Those that aim to inappropriately drive up their search results threaten these systems. Wankers. I hate them. I hate them all.

Fight back!

Jacks Back

(And Kim of course).

Zombie.

Woah dude. All feels normal, and then you realize you're one of the shuffling undead from Night of the Living Dead.

You will never know how long this took to write on my PDA.

CWA Christmas

Out drinking with the girls

IT Wales

Here's the IT Wales article I mentioned being interviewed for last week. Are you counting the geek points, Phil?

Link.

Weekend

Sorry this site was down for a bit - it seems to have been a Jack related router incident. It is up with a temporary fix at the moment.

This Friday I'll be taking just over 2 weeks off work (*silent woohoo*). My favourite part of Christmas is definately the holiday, and it's a time of year that I really appreciate being an academic and being able to take a full holiday. Kim always used to have to go back in to work on Boxing Day or some other stupid time when she worked in sales. Life is different now.

This week the students will have their first anatomy exam. I would say that for the first time I'm actually looking forward to an exam, but that would be untrue. I'm sick to the level that I used to look forward to exams when I was revising - I knew that once the exam was over the workload would drop, whatever the result. It was always a chance to use what I had learnt.

It has been a tough first term for the new medical students. That in itself is not unusual though, as the first term of a medicine degree marks a profound change in the lifestyles, mindsets and views towards the future for its participants. Before, there is a dream. Once it has begun, reality takes over. The dream's still there, but reality modifies everything. You knew it was going to be hard work, but you never quite anticipated how hard work feels, how you were going to motivate yourself, or that it would be hard from the start. The brain seems to treat "hard work" in the same way it treats pain. You think you remember what it felt like, but you don't. Only when it recurs do you realise this.

There's a week of teaching and half a week of exams left until Christmas, when the students will get a chance to relax (for a short period - there are more exams after Christmas) and return to the lives they had before the course started. Traditionally this is the time that new medical students reflect on this huge change in the lives, which they thought they were prepared for but begin to think that this isn't for them. So after Christmas there are usually some that drop out. Strangely, I don't really expect this on our postgraduate course, but time will tell. There is a well known phenomenon within new medical students, where they feel that they shouldn't be here, that they shouldn't have been picked and sooner or later someone is going to find out. The truth of the matter is that if you crack on with the work you will learn what you need to learn, you will grow, and you will be the right person for the job. Our bunch are older than the undergraduate selection of medical students, so maybe most of them realise this?

As time has marched on towards their first anatomy exam (horror of horrors) the attitude to learning human structure has changed in most. Many wanted to be fed the secret knowledge. On the one hand this is impossible, and on the other it isn't secret. It exists in hundreds of textbooks (and nowadays in DVDs and IT packages). You cannot be fed the knowledge of anatomy. You have to invest the time in understanding, learning, and storing it. Read, discuss, test. If they haven't learnt that yet, then they'll probably fail. And this first anatomy exam is also one of their "finals". Its mark makes up part of the all important Intermediate MB examinations that occur midway along the course. Fail that, and you will not continue. And they must pass all of their exams along the way, at least at a resit attempt.

On a brighter note, I wish them all luck. Anatomy is a basic science of medicine, and a basic but thorough knowledge really will help them become quality doctors of the future.

Male fertility under threat from laptops

Link bwaaahahahahaha*eurg*hahak*cough*huuurk *wipes tears from eyes*

Sperm donors on Ebay heeheeheeteeeheewheee*hakhakhak *oh God I'm off again*

Father Christmas

He was so happy to see Father Christmas. Kim's been explaining it all to him, and he soaks it up like a sponge these days. He had such a big smile. Afterwards he kept wanting to go back and see Santa again.

This was at the St Fagans Museum of Welsh History, where they hold an evening of Christmassy things. Jack went with his friend Isobel. He really enjoyed the lights and sounds of the fair, singers, bands, and (I hate to say it, but even) the morris dancers. If Jack's having fun, I'm having fun.

Quicktime VR

What am I reading this morning?

Link.

I'm initially making some Quicktime VR panoramas of the anatomy suite for the Swansea Medicine course's website, which I've done before, but I want to create some object VR movies to allow students to view objects on the PC in 3D and rotate them as they need to. This way they can have access to normally restricted materials in an IT format via the PCs that we have locked away securely in the Anatomy Suite.

Study time for me.

IT Wales

I'm being interviewed for an article in IT Wales this morning. They want to talk about our uses of various technologies in the Swansea medicine course, which are many, particularly in teaching anatomy.

Plus 1 geek point for me!

Teletubbies

Woohoo! The BBC have updated the Teletubbies' website!

Shutup - I'm a dad. Jack's not even 2 and he's already using the internet for Self-Directed Learning ;)

Plumbing in my brothers bathroom

Me and my brother plumbed in his new bathroom suite. As you can see, he's very happy about it. What are those other plumbing brothers called? Mario and ....?

Don't worry, he's just pretending. He's dressed. You'll see much worse if you go out drinking beer with him.

1 man mosh pit

Mexican Food!

Red Dawn

Sometimes it's worth getting up early and out on the bike.