Adventures in Dentistry, pt 3.0.2
Posted on March 28, 2006
So, not a bad day outside, but it was cloudy and a bit misty/drizzly. My one week follow up from the extraction went quickly. In fact, I hardly saw the student who did it at all. About an hour or so before my appointment, he gave me a call and said that I had a couple of cavities (no surprise to me) and that another grad student had to state board exams in a few weks and asked he asked me if I was interested in getting one or two filled for this exam. I told him I had no problem with that, so he introduced me to the other grad perio student and put him on the phone.
РуÑÑкий
Posted on March 21, 2006
Many years ago, when I lived in Colorado Springs, I attended Pike’s Peak Community College. I took a wide variety of classes, just checking things out to see what interested me. One of the classes I took was Russian. PPCC had the usual laguange offerings of Spanish, French, and German, but they had some others as well. While I don’t remember all the others, I do remember I took Russian and got a B in the class.
Adventures in Dentistry, pt 3.0.1
Posted on March 21, 2006
It dawned on me today that a lot of the times I’ve had dental work over the past year, the weather has been foul. It doesn’t really affect my attitude too much, but as I trudged through the snow today, I remembered when I got the other tooth pulled on December 22, 2004, it was snowing, and when I was getting the scraping and root planing done, it rained a few times. Odd but interesting.
Wimps
Posted on March 20, 2006
People here in Indy seem to get all worked up over snow. Even the “threat” of snow sends them flurry of worry (pun intended, laugh). As an example, tonight, we are supposed to get some snow. Reports say anywhere from 3″ – 10″ by rush hour tomorrow.
Dis da prez?
Posted on March 16, 2006
It seems as if some Republicans are flabbergasted that Jessica Simpson turned down the opportunity for some face time with President George Bush, especially when it would give her time to lobby him on behalf of Operation Smile, an NGO (Non-governmental organization). Apparently, she doesn’t want to politicize the organization, and it seems that getting to meet him would only be possible if she attended a Republican fundraiser which he would also be attending.
Normally, I don’t write about media personalities because I am underwhelmed by the culture of fame. I don’t watch TV. I’m not likely to buy her records or watch the Dukes of Hazzard movie (shudders), but on the other hand I am surprised she is socially aware enough to devote time and/or money to Operation Smile, which is certainly a noble cause from what I’ve read about it (doing plastic surgery on underprivileged kids with facial deformities around the world).
As far as lobbying El Presidente Jorge goes, I don’t know that it would do any good. If the president says there isn’t enough money to support vets when they come back from Iraq or Afghanistan, he probably wouldn’t support writing Operation smile into the budget. Besides that, the president doesn’t control the purse strings. Congress does that. He can approve it all, or veto it all, but he doesn’t have the line-item veto, so I don’t think he has that much control over where the money goes. The administration submits a budget, which Congress will attack, change, cut, and mutilate before sending it back to him for final approval. She would probably be better off lobbying various Members of Congress.
Anyway, now I have a smidgen of respect for her.
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Adventures in Dentistry, pt 2
Posted on March 8, 2006
Yesterday, after a couple weeks of phone tag, I finally had an appointment to be evaluated for a dental implant. Surprisingly, the appointment went much quicker that I thought it would. Unlike my previous appointments in the “undergraduate” clinic (the students there are actually post-baccalaureate students working towards their DDS degrees), this one was in one of the “graduate” clinics (where the student presumably already has a DDS or DMD and is learning a dental specialty).
And the winner is…
Posted on March 6, 2006
Actually, I think they say “And the Oscar goes to…”
The 78th Annual Academy Awards (a/k/a The Osars) was held last night, and from what I understand, it got mixed reviews from others. Overall I thought it was pretty good, though it did seem to lack a lot of drama. of course, since I didn’t see any of the movies up for the big awards, that might have something to do with it.
Cruftiness
Posted on March 2, 2006
Cruft, for the non-geeks out there is a semi-technical term used to descibe added features of dubious utility. The term is usually applied to software. For a long time many people in the computer industry looked at GUIs as cruft. A more modern example of cruft might be all those features of office suites (software) that you never use. I’ve never used a macro. I rarely use mail merge. In the modern, net-connected world, I think websites can be some website can be thought of as crufty. If it’s hard to navigate, that usually a good sign of cruftiness. On this site, I try to keep the cruft down with varying degrees of success.
Scrabble
Posted on March 2, 2006
One of my new found addictions is a console based version of Scrabble. No fancy GUI here. I open up the terminal window in Gnome and type in “scrabble 2″, where 2 is the level I want to play on. In this version, level 1 is the easiest and 9 is the hardest. Since I am only on level 2, I guess I have a way to go yet.
At first, I started out by playing on level 1, but it wasn’t very long before I began winning most of the games, so I began to play at level 2. The first few games on level 2 were easily won by the computer. I was nearly hopeless. In Scrabble, if you clear your rack of all the letters, you get an additional 50 points on top of regular points for the word. Combine that with a triple-word-score and the points can get lopsided very quickly. The computer has managed to do this two or three times on me, while I’ve only been able to do it once. even with that, I just played a game that is making me consider moving up to level 3.
Wikipedia: One meeeelllyyuuunnnn articles. BWAHAHAHAA
Posted on March 1, 2006
Tonight, the English language Wikipedia just posted it’s one millionth article, which is on the Jordanhill Railway Station in Scotland. Congratulations to Wikipedia, one of my favorite places on the web.
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