An old classmate of mine is making big news!

( link)

A few weeks ago, I accepted a position with Medscape as the editor of The Learning Curve, the student and resident section of the Medscape Journal of Medicine, a great open-access medical journal and online medical resource, and as a medical student editorial board member of eMedicine, an open-access clinical reference site. I’m looking forward to getting to work! Open-access publishing, medical education, and writing have been interests of mine for the past several years, so I’m happy to have this opportunity to work in such a capacity.

PLEASE STOP STANDING ON THE TOILET SEAT
You are making a mess on the seat and on the floor
This is a professional work place and not your home

So weird. Let me set the scene here: This is a private, individual bathroom, devoid of stalls within which to hide via standing on a toilet or even other people to hide from in the first place. It is also a very clean bathroom, typically. There is pretty much no good reason to stand on the toilet seat and make a mess on the floor unless testing one’s aim from above counts as a good reason.

I had no idea I was working among such gymnastic, adventurous barbarians.

So many of you may not know that I also run a grammar blog called Language Rules! (tee hee) that, by most measures, is quite successful, or at the very least oft-visited. As of early last week, there were almost 27,000 hits on the site with nearly a hundred daily visits.

To a grammar site. About grammar.

GRA.     MER.
I must have been mistaken because I didn’t think people were all that interested in grammar.

The funny thing about it, though, is that there has been one post to it in the past year or so. The vast majority of the hits come from Google searches and people wondering whether their writing is correct or not. There is literally zero traffic coming from RSS readers and very little from direct links. Why would there be? It’s a site about grammar.

But, as of late last week, it was taken down. It appears that, without warning, it suddenly began violating Wordpress’ Terms of Service. With one-ish post in the last year. No emails, no warnings, no cease and desist letters. Just taken down. The ToS discusses things like defamation and nudity and obscenities and “racial objectionability,” things typically reserved only for the most extreme of grammar blogs, not ours. And no one has gotten back to me after numerous emails about how or why or whether it will be put back up or whether the content even still exists anymore.

So, on their suggestion, I tried the forums. Seems those don’t work either. See? (Can anyone else access these?)

What’s the deal, Wordpress? It’d be nice to have a little communication here.

More Differential action on Medscape’s group medical student weblog.

A few weeks ago, I was feeling a little labbed out, and things were getting a little monotonous. The cure? Make a list of the commonest signs and symptoms of labitis. (No, not labiitis.)

Shortly after that, another post went up comparing the daily lives of medical students and graduate students.

Finally, for your enjoyment and/or practical, clinical use, I presented some of the greatest medical acronyms known to man (in a field already known largely for its somewhat ridiculous acronyms and abbreviations).

Totally forgot to post about this earlier, but the eighth edition of the Cancer Research Blog Carnival, founded way back in 2007 by those crazy Canucks at the bayblab blog, is being hosted this month at The Skeptical Alchemist. Go there.

This is getting huge, and I love it.

Since I totally forgot to mention the seventh edition, it was hosted last month by Walter at Highlight HEALTH. Check that one out too.

The coolest cat in town.

My Wordpress stats are totally borked. Anyone else’s stats look like this?

A partial recap of my morning ride:

“…I’m gonna bring my gun over to your house and put a silencer on it and kill you and your motherf*cking family dude, so shut the f*ck up…”

“…my brother got a gun yesterday, and his friend got a gun too, and he only 12! He got a dimebag at the same time too!”

“…nah, I like bud better…I think clearer when I’m doing that sh*t, like what b*tches I’m gonna shoot this weekend…”

These are three of the dozens of gun references they made while on the bus for all of 20 minutes.

Then, they got off the bus, took off their hats, and walked into the hospital behind me.

Really? Do you really think more people need guns than already have them? Do you really think we need less gun control?

Guns are cool to these people. Killing people is cool to them. There needs to be a serious paradigm shift here, and giving more people more guns is probably the worst idea I can come up with.

Or, I would if it weren’t the slowest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life. Mozy is a great idea in theory: backup to the internet, something that can’t burn or be stolen along with your computer and something that can be accessed from anywhere, unlike a physical hard drive, and do it automatically—at night, or when your computer is idle, or whenever else you want, or all of them. I somewhat idiotically carry my external drive around with me most of the time; if there’s an apartment fire or if my bag is stolen, I’m screwed. Online backup is good for someone like me.

But damn, it is slow. I’ve been using Mozy now—my second attempt at embracing this idea—for about two weeks now, and it still hasn’t uploaded 50% of my files yet; that’s how slow it is. The first time I signed up, I still hadn’t uploaded all of my files after a month and a half. I just did a speed test of my IP, and I’m getting nearly 3.3Mbps on uploads. Mozy? At best, it’s uploading at 150Kbps.

What is the deal, Mozy?