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Current weather : Sunny, -10 Celsius.

Doing: Eating instant noodles, pelmeni and cutlet + red wine.

I was watching this Thai horror movie yesterday which end up with the ghost sitting on the guy’s shoulders (looking up and around). Feeling very eerie now because I’m alone at home. Errr.. Scary.

Anyway, let’s count the amount of dead bodies I saw today in the Morph. 1, 2, 3…. I think it should be 5. Yeap, this morning was my post-mortem day for my forensic medicine cycle. Besides the eerieness when I think of yesterday’s movie, I’m actually pretty happy now.

I entered the building and the first thing that welcomes me is the smell! Smell like… dead bodies. And to tell the truth, I don’t really like the idea of seeing dead people on tables and being pushed around by personnels. For one moment I thought this whole process is going to be scary, eerie and disgusting. Everybody was pretty nervous in the waiting room.

We went into the room. Today’s victim is an skinny old man who died on the street. See, I told you, lotsa people die on the street during winter. The weather is cruel. We were quite relunctant to enter the room because there are another dead auntie lying on the other table. And it took us like 5 minutes? Or maybe less and our medical students curiosity kicks in and our hands are everywhere!

It was utterly cool to have 2 experts explaining to us what is going on, where is being cut, what is seen and we have the chance to touch and see for ourselves. The lungs was bubbling when we squeeze it and the adrenal glands are so small! But I guess the smallest ever would be the hypophysis. If he didn’t even point that out, I would thought that it was just some coagulated blood. When the scalp’s skin is over the face, I think even the most timid girl in our group felt okay and didn’t actually fainted (I was expecting that). We started with checking of internal organs, and saw cardiosclerosis, ‘fresh’ infarction and normal heart muscles in his heart (the cause of death) and then to the brain, the 12 cranial nerves and revised some signs of death on the patient.

I got blood on my arms.

But luckily my white coat is clean. LOL. (meaning no need to wash).

And it lasted for some 1 hour. I was anticipating for the chance to cut things myself but well, the teachers never initiated anything of that kind and so I kept quiet. It is end of the year! I would consider ‘not cutting other people’s body’ as a good deed this year.

If you want me to summarize today’s class, well, this is a very good experience! But I have some documents to fill up, one being the crime scene report and the other one would be the autopsy report. Hate homeworks on new year holidays.

That’s all for now. 1 last day to new year!

Nowadays I like to search for stupid stuffs on youtube, something like mat rempit la, gaduh la, spooky clips la, ahli parliament tumbuk la, even taiwan parliament gaduh beramai-ramai I also watch. But since my blog is kinda holy compared to my real personality, I’ll put up this video that maybe some of you never watch before. Never know Roti Canai can be played like this leh?

And another favourite and most hated movie that I like during my younger days!

Do you know why the chinese vampire hops around?

A supposed source of the jiang shi stories came from the folk practice of “Traveling a Corpse over a Thousand Li“, where traveling companions or family members who could not afford wagons or had very little money would hire Taoist priests to transport corpses of their friends/family members who died far away from home over long distances by teaching them to hop on their own feet back to their hometown for proper burial. Taoist priests would transport the corpses only at night and would ring bells to notify other pedestrians of their presence because it was considered bad luck for a living person to set eyes upon a jiang shi. This practice was popular in Xiangxi where many people left their hometown to work elsewhere. After they died, their corpses were transported back to their rural hometown using long bamboo rods, believing they would be homesick if buried somewhere unfamiliar. When the bamboo flexed up and down, the corpses appeared to be hopping in unison from a distance. - Taken from Wikipedia.

Translate word by word into ‘My name/surname is Schumacher’. LOL.

And it was sticked on this big ugly heavy machine!

p/s : I said to early yesterday, and maybe too ‘action’ also, because now I’m having the pain again and potential new ulcer and sore throat as well! Gargh!

Saw this outside of the kitchen’s door.

It says : “В случае необходимости разбить стекло”, which translates into “if necessary, break glass”. Inside is a chicken cube, black pepper and bay leaves. LOL!

Well, yea.. it is reanimated, after a major surgery of brain transplant. Duh! I seriously don’t know which monkey hair on me makes me feel like formatting my hard disk. And after that, I can’t install the Windows! Further format and diagnostic tests using Windows boot disk revealed that the disk is damaged. Another 3 times of attempt to format it made me sure of my diagnosis.

Solution: WHAT ELSE? Get a new hard disk!

It is a painful solution as I’m currently damn broke. I spent all my hard-earned Paypal money on this. Imagine, most of us final year students are trying to sell their computers, and I’m here upgrading it, not once, but twice!

First was the 520mb Radeon graphic card.

And now this 250Gb Seagate SATA hard disk.

Sigh. But hell, I had already live 2 days without computer and I’m so sure I just need to get this fixed!

Trust me, my mood is even more gloomy than today’s weather.

Another picture while walking through the short cut to the hospital this morning. Damn sad!

And I spent another 1500rubs on this SATA Seagate 250Gb hard disk (made in China). That fella didn’t sell the wires and I got to buy them in another shop for 25rubs! Grrrr…

Nah you can see the two generation hard disks down there. One is grandpa, one is grandson. Well, it is a SATA, so the speed is almost twice faster than my old PATA hard disk and I have double storage capacity as well.

The old PATA hard disk. I think I’ll try to make use of it again when I think my com is stable enough. Maybe there is some bad sectors inside that can be repaired.

I tried to back up as much files as I could. But I still lost my font which I put on my pictures. The above pictures now have different signature but I decided to settle with the bar code one. Hehe. Any suggestions? I failed to find the previous font, forget how it is called.

Hopefully my computer doesn’t crash anymore!

It is definitely faster and louder and better now. But, at the cost of my $$. Sigh.

No, it doesn’t mean you are dumb if you eat brown bread.

Introducing: Brown bread

Most of us in Russia know how the black bread taste like and smell like. Indeed, it is Russia’s smell. My first ever Russian teacher who stayed in Malaysia showed us this black dark small hard brick of bread and told everybody in the class to smell it. She said, THAT is the smell of Russia.

When I came here. It is indeed the smell of Russia. LOL. I don’t know why but it is significant and the smell reminds me of what my teacher said from time to time.

So, what’s the difference? The white and dark bread.

White bread is made from wheat flour with the wheat bran and germ removed. The bran and germ contains a lot of minerals even healthy fat and oil. With them removed, the flour basically has little nutritional value that most people would need to add it man-made vitamins and minerals into the bread making process.

The sayings is very correct. Nature provides, we destroy, and then we add them back via a man made form.

After the removal of the bran and germ, the flour will be bleached with potassium bromate, benzoyl peroxide and chlorine dioxide gas. Just by looking at the name and you know that they are not mean for good natural life.

Wherelse the brown bread is processed straight away without the removal of the germ and barn, giving them more nutritional value and more ‘natural’.

The taste is somehow hard for first timers but you can try by switching to light rye bread which is more subtle in taste, before changing the whole diet into true wholemeal bread. Enjoy!

Sometimes the bread is brown doesn’t mean they are made from brown floor. Look at the ingredient of the bread. If it writes enriched or wheat flour, it means that it is actually white bread with colorings like caramel.

Now you see it, now you don’t. Inside my stomach.

AI’m so high now I gotta blog this down. I bought a new graphic card! LOL. Since the day I came backhere, my com’s fan already stop spinning and I gotta fix another small fan on it so that the card would not overheat. Since then, I had experienced -

1. Laggy computer
2. Can’t even open more than 7 windows at the taskbar.
3. If people send a message from MSN, the screen would freeze for a while.
4. Can’t view more than 10 YouTube videos a day. If yes, the screen black out and restart.
5. Can’t even watch a movie.
6. Can’t even play songs while typing stuffs!
7. Can’t even use Microsoft Media Player properly
8. Freezes according to its mechanical and electronic brain.

My solutions was:

To put a small fan on the graphic card (which you could see later down there). But the fan is hard to fix since the card is facing down, so I turn the whole CPU upside down and attached the small fan on the card, and another big fan blowing from behind.

Notice the small fan on the black heat sink?

By doing this, my computer black out less. But since there are still some blackouts (like once every 2 days), and I was afraid that it could damage the other parts of the computer, I decided what I’m going to do next.

And I had been wondering whether I should get a graphic card or not since I’m going back soon (not really soon actually, still 8 months to go) but the problem is getting more and more serious and that’s the time when I say, ‘Hell, let’s get a new card!’

The quest of looking for an AGP graphic card is hard in Russia. Most of the shops do not sell them anymore. But thanks to Natasha that helped me asked around her friends, I found this shop which is near 7 Gvardeiskaya.

Tadaaaa! That’s my baby with the gun. 512mb babe! It is 4 times faster than what I’m having now.

Now to mention the heat sink is damn cool. Well, I guess it is their business tactic to sell a card but do not sell the fan! If anything happens to the fan, you will need to get a new one! Well, you can actually get the fan but you would need to buy it from ebay. I did some searching and it is quite troublesome. Plus, it is time for something new. Hehe..

Here comes the new one and the old one. Sayonara reddie.

Results:

1. The com is not freezing anymore.
2. I opened some 20 windows just now just to feel syok.
3. Blasting songs now.
4. Everything is working perfectly fine.

What to do next:

Pray that it lasts more than 3 years! Pleaseeeee…

Well, what I’m going to say now is something that never happen or never WILL happen in Malaysia. It is about our internet connection here in Volgograd. I don’t know much about Moscow’s service but I got to say that I’m pretty happy about our internet connection here. Let me introduce you to the company.

What happen was, few years back, this internet provider called Diselcom.ru had offered a 256kbps speed for 1350rubs. We rent their modem so per month, we will be paying 1400rubs.

What happen after this summer was - they increased the speed of our internet to 333kbps, while charging LESS at a price of 990rubs!

What’s even incredible is - there was this new plan and we upgraded it via online during 31st of November. And now we are enjoying 1mbps for the price of 900rubs!! LOL!

Everything is getting more expensive, except this.

And don’t think that the service is bad when it is cheap! Compared to streamyx, I think Diselcom.ru is way more stable and reliable! So far, I can only remember few ‘down’ time only. What a miracle :)

For those who has Diselcom.ru as their internet provider and wish to change to this tarif of 1mbps for 900rubs (called the unlim-city 1mbps), these are the instructions (I tried this at the last day of November after 6pm. I’m not sure how it would appear in the middle of the month but these are the steps. If  you can’t get it done, please go to ??? to ask for the date which you can do such tariff changes):

1. Log in to https://issa.avtlg.ru and log in with your card’s number (at the left lower corner of your registration card, given to you when you subscribed to their service) and the password as provided. Usually a window saying mentioning about certificate problem will pop up but ignore that and just enter the site.
2. Click on ‘technical info’.
3. Click on your registration account, usually starts with ‘dslppxxxxxx’
4. Click on ‘dogowornie karti xDSL’ and you will see an option to change the tariff. Change the option to the one you would like and save it. The plan will starts on first day of the next month.
5. If you want a better tutorial, you can download this manual at http://www.avtlg.ru/issa.rar and scroll down to the ‘change tariff’ section for guided steps with pictures.

Good luck and enjoy!

What’s a gravatar?

Gravatar is the nick name for Globally Recognized Avatar. If you are a wordpress user, you must have came up with those small avatar beside your comments. Sometimes it pops up as some mosaic designs, cartoons, a grey outline of a person, a boring solid color or just blank.

Boring to see your comments attached with yet another not so interesting avatar?

Put some personality to your avatar by using gravatar! It is really easy to get one. And you could change it anytime you want and the process is just so easy!

Steps:

1. Log in to en.gravatar.com
2. Click sign up now
3. Pick a picture that you want, crop it using the website’s tool.
4. Fill in the details
5. And wala! You got your own gravatar!

Please not that the gravatar appears according to the email-address that you enter when you are using the comment box. Try it!

It had been sometimes that I have my iPod touch now. Before this, I was slightly disappointed with its function actually. Don’t get me wrong, everything works like how they are suppose to be, but the programs and things that I can do with it is just too limited.

And I had been searching for a way to make the iPod help me with my studies. As you know, it doesn’t have a windows mobile or stuffs like that, putting a medical software in is just impossible.

First I got it unlocked myself, and now, I discovered this!

Medical video podcast on iTunes!

Let you have a bigger look.

Basically you can get all these medical audio podcasts or video podcast from clicking the podcast button on the left bar of the iTunes. Look for ’science & medicine’ and click for medicine.

The video podcast is still a bit limited. But I personally like the radiology topics, it teaches you how to read xrays films, with videos! Kinda like an animated power point slide shows, but slight better.

The other one that I like is the 101 medpodcast (audio). This guy is really creative! He would first disguise his voice into a patient, revealing signs and symptoms, and using his own genuine voice as a doctor. Patient’s examination, diagnostic features and managements will be discussed.

Most of them last for less than 10 minutes.

You can also download some lectures given by the lecturers of US medical school on the topic that you want, just by clicking ‘get’ beside the topic. Easy and free!

Hope you find this review helpful for you iPod/iPhone!