Friday, July 27, 2007

Potter Completed

I just finished Harry Potter today, after spending too much of this last week reading instead of working on an upcoming presentation. That's OK, I still have 2 weeks to do it.

The last 2 Harry Potter books I didn't enjoy quite as much. Book 5, The Order of the Phoenix, I just got tired of Harry being mad at everyone. While Book 6, The Half-Blood Prince, was good, I wasn't drawn into it like I had been by the earlier books in the series. Subsequently I was a touch guarded in my enthusiasm coming up to this release. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, however, gripped me at the beginning of the book and pulled me through with a ferocity that hardly let me attend to my other responsibilities, like eating. It was great, including lots of intrigue, combat, excitement, mystery, and never being certain how it was going to end. In short, it included everything J.K. Rowling should have included in the finale of the series. She also answered all remaining questions and I believe truly ended the series. In short, an A+ novel.

Outside of the wonderful world of Harry Potter, I'm up at Mom and Dad's for the weekend. They are almost all packed up to move to Morgantown in a little over a week. Once they leave I won't be coming up here any more and will need to find new things to do for weeknds. But I'm glad for them, this church has been really difficult for Dad and at this point they're very optimistic about the new church. Also the Morgantown church has worked it out so they will now be providing health insurance for Mom and Dad, so financially it looks like it'll work out ok.

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

New Computer


I just got a new laptop, it's pretty cool. I'd been talking about it for a while, trying to decide exactly what I wanted and when I should get it. I did a good bit of research, and compared prices for hours up in the NICU while working the night shift. So much infact that I think the resident I was working with got tired of looking over to see what I was doing and seeing laptop info on the screen. But I ordered it in June, it was shipped June 28, and arrived at the parent's house on July 2. That's what, 4 days transit. Not too bad even for any shipping, but they shipped it from Shanghai, so I was really quite impressed.

My new laptop is an HP and has some cool gimmicky stuff in it. There's a built in webcam and a memory card slot, those are cool. But the best part is the fingerprint reader. I love it :). I now can log into my email with a simple swipe of my finger. I guess it's still a security risk if someone steals the laptop because my passwords are stored on it, but it seems pretty safe unless they cut off my finger at the same time. And in that case I have bigger things to worry about than a few lost passwords.

Otherwise I am happily off my NICU night rotation. I don't have another month of nights until January. My next difficult rotation is in September when I do the PICU again. For now however I'm doing a Genetics elective, which is pretty light.