…to get a taxi in Harlem. I was in the city today for an internship fair, which turned out to be pretty informative. Afterwards, I was just looking forward to relaxing. I got out of the fair with 20 minutes to get from W120th street to E125th st. But despite me desperately flailing my hands on multiple street corners, no taxi stopped for me. I missed the train, walked to the train station (which is farther than it seems), and destroyed my heels due to walking in dress shoes. On the upside, I stopped at a Subway on the way to the train station and got a delicious turkey sandwich!
Category: Uncategorized
Sometimes, I get amused by things that I never imagined I’d be amused by. Tonight, this happened. I was walking out to the car from the restaurant we ate in, and I noticed that the streetside parking meters looked different. I took a closer look and it turns out that all the old meters were replaced with digital meters that you can pay for with coins and your credit card. How convenient! You just key in the number of hours you want to be there, swipe your credit card, and leave. I love it. Really, let’s face it. Who carries around a bunch of coins anymore? I’m lucky if I can find a few quarters in my little change compartment in the car. Running a credit card through the meter is much easier. Nice!
I’m going to a Yankees game tomorrow night! I scored some really cheap tix and the seats are not on the top row of the stadium. These seats are worth at least $50 more than I paid. Stubhub comes through! Hopefully, I’ll get to see CC Sabathia win his 20th game in a season for the first time in his career. 
I could write a novel on this, but here are a few tips for all of you that want to get rid of all your money! Woo hoo!
First, sign up for a conference on the west coast of Canada when you live on the east coast in the USA. Then pay those people extra to go to 3 hour workshops in which you receive no extra credit towards anything because that privilege is reserved for professionals.
Second, book a flight to get to said conference. Bonus tip: if you wait longer to make up your mind, you will spend more!
Third, reserve a hotel. Sleeping indoors is much pricier than sleeping outdoors. Take it from me, the expert. 
That’s it for this edition of how to go broke, but have no fear faithful readers. It is pretty much guaranteed that I can provide you with more helpful tips for how to lose all your money! Have a nice weekend.
School is old news. I’d much rather be at work doing things that are directly helping patients than taking classes or working on my dissertation. This week marked the start of my 4th year of graduate school. Needless to say, I have some major senioritis. Being there sorta feels like going through the motions. Being at my externship comes with a different set of feelings. Even if I have to go in to work early, sit at a computer all day, and type reports or score data or whatever, I know that I’m at least making palpable progress. It’s a quicker goal to attain than finishing school, that’s for sure. But alas, I will complete one more year of classes and hopefully put myself in a position to be working full time next year and finally getting some $$$ for my efforts. That day cannot come soon enough!
I recently started reading a book that is enjoyable so far. It’s one of those books where it changes character POV’s each chapter. I like books that do that because the story comes together from many different angles. The main plot is that a senator has an affair and his family has to deal with the aftermath. Shocker, right? Lol.
Oh, one more thing. Last week, I used this computer program to score a projective test that I gave to a patient I worked with, and this program rocks my world! Not only did it calculate all the variables and indices for me, but it also spouted out a whole essay worth of test interpretations in prose. Without this program, it would have taken me hours to score the test and even more hours to come up with interpretations based on every individual score. What an asset!
I think I finally found a good title for this page. I feel like if I’m going to keep up with writing, I have to start at the top and that’s where the title is located. Musings is probably not the most original title ever, but I think it’s appropriate because if I can make my posts someone longer than a tweet or facebook update, then my writing can be considered “food for thought” for any given topic. As always, we’ll see how it goes. There must be a good reason I keep trying this over and over again. Glutton for punishment? Maybe, but I’d just like to think I’m optimistic about keeping something going.
So my musing for the day is “do one thing at a time.” We all lead such busy lives and are always on the go, but if you want to do things well, focus your attention on one task at a time. Consider it a list instead of a pile. Perspective is key. I often have to remind myself of this fact and this is the kind of thing that allows me to do my job.
P.S. Samsung just announced their new Android based tablet, the Galaxy Tab. Should be an interesting holiday season as everyone tries to compete with the iPad. Stay tuned folks!
What a surprise…once again, a lot of time has passed since my last post. I’m starting to wonder if I should just give up on this page. Part of me is saying that I should because I never post, but another part really wants to have the forum to write about whatever I want when the inspiration strikes. Another nagging voice is telling me that writing is good for me since I will soon be writing a series of self-reflective essays that will help propel my career forward. Let’s see where this goes.
My last post was about a month and a half ago. Recapping every single relevant life and news event since then would take up a lot of space and require a lot of time, so I’ll try to cover the basics for all my major categories. In my general (uncategorized) category, I’m happy to announce to all 2 of you that read this that my bf landed a really great teaching job. He is very excited and I am proud of him for all the hard work he put in to get there. To celebrate his success, we went on a cruise to the Caribbean and had a wonderful time. Pictures are on facebook. What else? I just started my new externship. So far, it has been a slow start with most of the time being spent learning new neuropsychological tests. On a more somber note, a close family friend of ours passed away last week. He was a stand up guy. He always put others before himself. He was warm, caring, passionate, and friendly and he will truly be missed.
Onto the world of android. I don’t even know where to start. I’ll have to keep this brief. The Droid X came out a little over a month ago and it is a sweet phone. It is just a tad too big for my petite hands. The Droid 2 just came out last week and while many things were improved, there were some disappointing aspects of it too. I think the froyo OS still has a few bugs and flash needs some tweaking. Also, when speaking into the phone, you can hear yourself in the earpiece almost as if you’re speaking into a microphone in front of an audience. Plus, there’s a really strange bug where things are laggy/buggy when the phone is plugged in vs when it’s off the charger. Verizon just put out a patch, but it mainly addressed other issues. In addition to Motorola phones arriving on the scene, Samsung’s Galaxy S series hit the markets on AT&T and T-Mobile. Sprint and Verizon are up next. I’ve tried out both the Vibrant (T-Mobile) and the Captivate (AT&T) and was really impressed with what I saw. Samsung’s UI makes the phone very intuitive to use and the phones are both very responsive. Of course there are a lot of rumors going around too. My baby (the Incredible) was supposedly supposed to get froyo a few days ago and that didn’t happen. Then there are a bunch of rumors about android based tablets coming out later in the year to compete with the ipad. We’ll see how that goes. I may want to consider getting one of these for myself if the price is right and I feel like one of them would suit my needs.
I haven’t talked about Glee in a while on this blog. I’m still hoping to write a couple paragraphs after each episode of the upcoming season though. We’ll see. But for all you Gleeks out there, the season 2 premiere is on Tuesday, September 21st at 8 PM. There has likely been a lot of Glee news and spoilers this summer, but I honestly haven’t followed much of it. I’m sure I’ll get back into my obsession once the new eps air!
Websites. I haven’t done one of those in a while. Hmmm. That I’ll probably have to save when I have enough time to sit down and do the research. I want to make sure it’s worth the read.
Finally the yankees. They’ve been playing ok lately. The pitching rotation is treading on thin ice right now, which isn’t good. Pettitte is injured, and Burnett and Vazquez stink. I’m surprised they’re even winning as much as they are. A-Rod just went on the DL today. Luckily, other people are hitting and bailing out all our stinky pitchers right now. Nick Swisher is having a great season. I’m happy for him. Robinson Cano should be the AL MVP. I know I’m biased but the guy has had a monster season. Jorge Posada is declining in his ability to catch. Even as recently as a few years ago, he had solid numbers throwing out baserunners. Now, any old person can steal on him. Additionally, a lot more gets by him and he has made some really questionable decisions with the ball in play. Brett Gardner has really become a solid member of the team. With the exception of a couple of slumps, he has played well all year. Phil Hughes has emerged as a reliable starter and even when he gets beat up a little, he still manages to keep the team in the game. Joba Chamberlain stunk himself out of the setup man role. That’s disappointing because when he first came up, he was unhittable. The Yanks got some quality people at the trade deadline for basically nobody in return. One quick comment on Kerry Wood. I saw him dominate the yanks in 2003 in a 1-0 matchup (that the Cubs won) between him and Roger Clemens, who lied to Congress (idiot). Ever since that game 7 years ago, I wanted him on the Yankees. I didn’t even care that his ERA was 6 something when they traded for him. He’s Kerry Wood, a fierce guy that has a lot of talent and who can really help the bullpen if he pitches well.
Alright, I tried to address all of my major categories. Ideally, I won’t have to play catch up all the time but with my track record, who knows. I really do like writing and I thought doing a blog would be a fun way to put my thoughts out there, but it has just taken a back seat to other things. Maybe I can integrate it into my routine once the school year starts up again. My schedule will be varied by day, so any constant would be welcomed.
Have a good night!
Hello! It’s been a long time since I posted to this blog. I’ll just skip the excuses this time. I guess it’s just inevitable that I can’t be consistent with updating this page despite me wanting to post on a daily basis. I’ve tried thinking out loud about how I could make myself more consistent but nothing has worked to this point in time. So I’ve decided to just post whenever I’m inclined to. I still hope it will be at least a few times a week though because if I can get myself into a routine, there’s a better chance that I’ll stick with it. We’ll see.
As you may (or may not) have noticed, I added another category to the list of potential topics that I could post about. Android. Why, you ask? I’ll give you the short answer. In the last 3 weeks or so, I have become “very into” Android, or for those who don’t know, the mobile phone operating system created by Google. Droid, anyone? Ok. Anyways, I got into Android enough to make the decision to ditch my blackberry in favor of this up and coming platform. However, the phone I ordered (HTC Droid Incredible) is so popular right now that it’s on backorder for 3 weeks. If you were to go on Verizon’s site and order this phone, don’t expect to get it until mid-July. Yeah, it’s insane. Mine should ship on 6/29 though due to order it almost 2 weeks ago. But I digress. The point of me saying all this is that I’ve been reading a few Android related blogs and I find the news interesting, so I think it could be cool to post thoughts about what I read on my own blog. I am by no means the person on the front lines of this news. Other people do all the work. I’ll do my best to credit my sources when I comment about news. For anyone interested in technology or Android, you may find this interesting. I’ve learned a lot in the last few weeks.
As for my other categories, I’ll keep them for now and see how things evolve. Maybe I’ll add more. Variety might be the thing to spice things up. We’ll see. Right now, I have the opportunity to use my summer time to start being more consistent with my writing. That’s step 1.
Tomorrow, I’ll do my first Android post assuming that there is something newsworthy out there. Also, sorry I stopped short on the Glee reviews for the second half of the season. I got feedback that the reviews were good and I just got caught up in other stuff. I feel like that’s something I’d like to continue in the fall once the episodes restart.
Ok, see ya tomorrow!
Well folks, it’s been a break in more ways than one. I’ve been off from classes the last couple weeks and I haven’t attended to this blog in over a month. I have a small list of topics that I’ve been meaning to put out there for you, so that’s what I’ll get to tonight. I envision that as the semester wraps up and I get more free time on my hands, I’ll be able to post a little more often. I feel like all I do is make excuses about why I can’t post, which is why I’ll just say that I’d ideally like to get more consistent for you. So if you have any interesting topics that “matter” as my title would suggest, then feel free to let me know. Anyways, onto my post…
I’ve been watching a tv show called “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution.” It’s on ABC on Friday nights. The bottom line is that it’s an excellent show. I won’t get too in depth with what it’s about, but the gist is that Jamie (a famous Food Network chef) goes to this town in West Virginia to try to get them to eat healthier and lose weight. He chooses that town because the CDC has determined that it’s the most unhealthy place in America, so that’s where Jamie wants to start his revolution. The reason I feel that the show is so important is because it conveys important messages. It’s still early in the series, but Jamie has already pointed out to everyone that there are consequences of eating greasy and fatty foods. We’re talking about obesity, hypertension, diabetes, hypercholesterolemia, heart disease, and ultimately death…much earlier than any person would want. In America, we’re privileged to have access to whatever food we want. We can have a bacon, egg, and cheese for breakfast from Dunkin Donuts. We can have a burger and fries for lunch from McDonald’s. We can order pizza at 3 AM if we want. Food is abundant in this country, and since food is abundant, you can compare it to a street drug and make the argument that food is abused. I don’t need to look up official statistics to say that America is one of the most obese countries in the world. That’s common knowledge. It’s a problem. What are we going to do about it? Jamie is trying to bring people on board to help foster more awareness about cooking healthy foods and promoting overall better health. Yet if you watch the show, you’ll be disheartened to find that he is encountering a lot of resistance from the townspeople. Honestly, I understand how those people feel. Here comes some hot shot chef who is stepping in and claiming that they are fat and need to change their lifestyles. I’d be shocked if they weren’t defensive. However, at some point, you have to swallow your pride and realize that his intentions are good. In the face of a lot of adversity, this guy is standing his ground and insisting that he can help produce change. Not many people are willing to take that stand because the chance of failure is high. I admit, I’d be very nervous to do what he’s doing and if people gave me a hard time, I’d find it very difficult not to walk away. But I truly believe that the things in life that are worthwhile are the ones that require hard work and time spent outside your comfort zone. I wish that Jamie had come to CT to do the show. I would have been on board in a heartbeat. I’m fortunate that I don’t struggle with my weight. However, I’m always thinking about how I can eat healthier and feel better overall. That’s something I can work on. That and exercising more. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is show a little restraint. If even 1 person made an attempt to hold back on 1 excessive thing everyday (whether it be eating, committing a crime, etc), then we’d start to see a whole new America. As important as it is to take action in some situations, in others, it may be equally beneficial to hold back. I for one can’t wait to see what’s in store for the rest of the Food Revolution.
GLEE UPDATE: Glee returns this coming Tuesday at 9:28 pm sharp on FOX. Don’t miss it! I’m dying to see a new episode. It’s been almost 4 months since we saw our favorite glee club win sectionals. In the meantime, if you go to youtube, you can find videos of the cast’s recent appearance on Oprah. Very good stuff. Performances, interviews, behind the scenes and more. Yay!
No, this is not a reference to me being spacey or high! In fact, I’m talking about the beginning of a movement to store computer data on the internet instead of on your hard drive or USB key. This concept of storing information in the clouds is becoming more and more popular, despite the fact that it has been around for a little while. When the iPhone first came out a few years ago, Apple reintroduced their proprietary mac.com as me.com and boasted that all the data sharing between iPhone and computers would happen by uploading information into “the cloud” and then being able to retrieve it whenever you needed it. Nice concept right? How many times have you left home and then realized that you forgot to stick a file on your flash drive or email it to yourself? Or how many times have you been bored in a place away from home and wanted to work on a document that is sitting on your personal desktop? Now that online storage is gaining followers, sites are working harder to make their solution the one that most people choose. Google has a service, Adobe has one, Microsoft has one, and more. I’ve been trying out Microsoft’s Skydrive recently and I’m liking what I’m seeing. You get 25 GB of free online storage, and the ability to test out the beta versions of the upcoming Web Apps that will be integrated into the new Office 2010 suite. What Microsoft is doing is essentially putting Word, Powerpoint, Excel etc online so that you can use Skydrive to store your documents and then open them up/work on them on any computer no matter where you are. There are a considerable amount of perks to that situation, and the most obvious is that you don’t have to be tied to your own computer to get stuff done. With speed of information transmission becoming more and more important, especially in schools, offices, hospitals, and big companies, the need to have all necessary data at your fingertips regardless of where you are is crucial. Maybe it’ll make or break an outcome. Who knows? For me, I’ve already seen the benefits of storing some stuff on a cloud. I put a few open documents on my Skydrive and worked on them in my school’s computer lab. Then I saved them back to Skydrive and downloaded them to my own hard drive later. Work accomplished. I think I can predict with a fair amount of certainty that online solutions like Skydrive will explode with popularity in the near future, especially if these services can convince even the biggest of skeptics that their information will be safe online.
Speaking up when you get the chance is important. Not only will it make you feel better, but it will also potentially create change. If you have a strong opinion about something or something comes up that you’d really like to respond to, speaking up is the thing to do. There are contraindications for speaking up too, but I’ll get to that in a bit. Recently, I’ve experienced a lot of difficulty with my train into NYC. The train has picked me up late, it has made unnecessary stops, and it even went into total mechanical failure in the middle of the tracks…in Harlem. It has basically just been a huge disappointment lately. When I brought up the possibility of writing a letter to customer service or some person in a position of power, the initial reaction to my thought was a mixture of laughter and balking. People asked, “What do you hope to accomplish by writing them a letter?” or “Do you really think they’re going to pay it any attention?” I said I hoped to make myself feel better and inspire someone to think about what I said. I also said that if I address it to the right person, it would get read. That last statement was more of a wishful thinking type statement, but I wanted to get my point across. Not everyone was discouraging though. A couple people said it was a good idea and reaffirmed that you can’t get anywhere unless you stand up for yourself. It’s true. If you consider the state of our economy, you know that everyone has to put in a big effort to make themselves stand out so that employers want to hire them or keep them around. Your chances of success are higher when people know who you are and where you stand. That’s done by speaking up. BUT…let me just throw something else out there. Deciding when to speak up has to be done on a case by case basis. My hypothetical train letter is unlikely to cause a stir because companies get (both good and bad) feedback letters from their customers all the time. They’re used to it. Now let’s consider a different situation. This is a true story by the way. Last year, a newly admitted student to my grad school program made a bad move. Like everyone else, she went through our interview process, got accepted, and chose to attend the school. Fine. All is good, right? Not exactly. Soon after the start of the school year, she decided that she didn’t like the facilities. The chairs were uncomfortable, the lounge wasn’t great, the building is too small, etc etc. She started complaining to my program director and was not met with a good result. The director suggested that she wasn’t ready to start grad school and effectively got rid of her. This girl clearly did not know how to choose her battles. Choose your battles wisely. I’m not saying you can’t ever voice your opinion to a superior. I’m just saying you have to be careful with how you do it and when you do it. Believe me, I know this from personal experience! So that’s my little discussion on speaking up. It’s important to do, but it’s also important to consider your timing.
