As I have moved further into my career as a physician, I have asked myself a question over and over: what drives people? What is the essence of motivation? While the answer can be made simple and obvious (pleasure, gratification, happiness, reward), motivation is something many of us take for granted on a seemingly-unconscious level: human beings often do not know how or why we seek out certain activities—we just do.

I ask this question to understand myself more than anything. What drives me? Why am I interested in everything from classical music to cumulative doses of x-ray radiation causing increased risk of cancer to open source web browser development to current events to computer nerdery to cycling to ACGME guidelines on the resident 80-hour work week limit to giving forceful, impactful, meaningful presentations to photography? The list goes on and on. These things are pleasureful to me, not necessarily to others. Where I derive satisfaction from parsing my iTunes XML library file, syncing it into a SQL database and analyzing its contents, others probably would not find this fun in the least. (Shima, I’m thinking of you.) This question is deep and is very difficult to answer, yet in the past couple months, I have been asked about this many times: What drives me? What motivates me? Why have I succeeded where others have failed? I will try to answer this here.

Rands In Repose put it best by breaking down why gamers are fixated by the games they play:

We see the world as a very complex but knowable flowchart where there are a finite number of inputs, which cause a similarly finite set of outputs. This impossible flowchart gives us a comfortable illusion of control and an understanding of a chaotic word, but its existence is a handy side effect of a life staring at, deducing, and building systems. It’s also why we love games — they’re just dolled up systems — and the more you understand this fascination with games, the better you’ll be at managing us.

As with all mental excursions with geeks, there’s a well-defined process by which we consume a game, and it goes like this:

• Discovery
• Optimization, Repetition, and Win
• Achievement

This really struck a chord with me and brought me back to all my urology residency interviews I have been on during the last few months: how and why do I participate in so many other non-medical activities and how have I been able to not only dabble in some of these but master them as well? I’m not trying to toot my own horn here, but I’ll tell you my secret. Number one: I have many interests (alluded to above). They vary widely because that variety, for me, is satisfying in and of itself. I can relate to people on many levels and each offers something unique that is not provided elsewhere. In other words, I am stimulated mentally in various ways, not just one. Number two: It is the creative versus the logical. I pursue many activities in different realms so that I can enrich and broaden my knowledge in the hopes that discovery in one area might lead to an innovation in another. This approach necessitates broad interests and has created a positive feedback loop, whereby more interests spur more discovery as my appreciation and depth of knowledge grows.

Take my work for example. As a surgical intern, I have to gather vitals, labs, radiology test results, and more each morning for my patients. This is somewhat time consuming and mindless—save the interpretation! My intern peers do exactly the same thing for their umpteen patients every morning, every day of the week. Rather than simply act as a mindless transcriptionist using the same dumb tools day after day, I stepped back and _thought_ about how I could improve this. The data is all in the computer, I have a computerized list of my patients. Why couldn’t I develop a new tool to bring this data to me automatically formatted each morning. So I did just that, using my computer savvy to create a report of such information. It was fun and I learned new things at the same time. Pushing the envelope is satisfying and I was able to use knowledge from one interest to solve a problem in another. Simple, straight-forward, awesome.

Anyone can sit at a job and do that job day after day using the same tools. Few seem to delve deeper and ask, “Can this be done more efficiently?” This is innovation. It is fun, it is motivating, it is challenging, and I love it. Original thinking requires thought, poise, gumption, and conscious effort. I’m not just talking about computers, though. Improvement can involve people, organizations, tools, timing, the political process, and more. Too often, I see anonymous people going about their day in mindless manners, simply doing because that’s what they’ve always known and done and have no reason to change it. This passivity appears more and more pervasive in individuals in many aspects of life: political discussion, technological know-how, creative aspiration and expression, scientific knowledge and understanding. I have even seen people spurn others for involvement in such activities.

“You bake?!”

“You write computer programs?!”

“You read about economic policy?!”

“You speak French?!”

Anything outside their comfort zone is disquieting and jarring. I reject this wholeheartedly. Life is not meant to be consumed in neatly-organized cubes that fit squarely next to one another. Life should challenge, encourage inventive thought and discussion, should wake people up and consciously express desires and actions to push society forward. This drives me. And while I have goals, I relish the means to attaining those goals, not simply satisfied to reach them. This is why I would never, ever choose to simply zip forward to the future to see where I end up: I would never know all the bumps and bruises and petabytes of knowledge my brain churned through to get there. That is where we grow. This is where wisdom is born. I aspire to this model, and I encourage others to follow it as well.

My interest in this area and my thoughts on the matter were the inciting agents for refreshing this space, motivating me to change its inherent direction and content. While blogs originated as a medium that is highly self-serving (witness the many narcissistic entries in the archives that pertain solely to this space), they have morphed into something more. The blogs I read aren’t so much blogs as means to discovering new, fun, interesting information. Technical, medical, humorous, insightful. These are descriptors of things I want to learn from and discover. My significant other (Shima!!!) asked me recently where I find all the tantalizing links I send her. I search, I read, I pour over blogs of people I respect. I do it every day like clockwork. I like being up on current events across all the sections of the classic newspaper (local, national, international, business, politics, technology, etc). These are my goals for this space, eschewing the self-deluding nature of the “look-what-I’ve-done” post so common before this one for posts that convey useful, inciting nuggets that can inspire others. I want to share what drives me here with you in the hopes of energizing your inner drive.

I have not written much in this space lately. Whether because of lack of anything important to say or just being downright busy all the time, I’m not really sure. Either way, I was recently thinking how a blog provides skewed insight into a persona (in this case, mine). In so many cases, we human beings attempt to encapsulate the objects of our attention into manageable, discrete packages, such that we might better understand said objects. Too often though, we fall into the trap of over-simplifying an idea, a thing, or worse, a person.

While weblogs are supposed to allow anybody to publish his or her thoughts to the world at large (or anybody willing to Google your name), the medium necessarily encapsulates only one part of its author: that which he is willing to share. No more than I do not shout from the roof tops my most personal of phantasmagoria, this space does not transmit that which I would not otherwise share with complete strangers out browsing the tubes. Each author finds the appropriate balance with which he or she is comfortable, and I believe I have found mine. In the larger sense, though, this purposeful subset may inadvertantly steer you, dear readers, into the false notion that all you discover here is me.

Please know that it is not.

With that said…

And as quickly as I reveal my wish to act slowly, methodically, and thoughtfully, circumstances might request otherwise. Opportunities arise once in a lifetime, so I have unexpectedly landed at a crossroads, paradoxically contemplating whether I stick to the original _stratagème_ or jet down some new, unknown path. Exasperation ensues.

This writer remains torn between the ideal and real. Perhaps by placing such supreme importance in the decision I face, I only set myself up for future self-doubt and regret, regardless of path chosen. This thought exercise serves to point me in a direction, shaping my potential future. How can one be objective in knowing whether one sense is overriding another? (That is a rhetorical question, if there ever were one, as one cannot objectively analyze the competing factions in one’s own mind. This is decidedly a good and bad human trait, but I digress.) It boils down to this: Am I willing to be bold and take a risk or be conservative, watch, and wait? When I paint the situation that way, I certainly put a lot of pressure on myself, don’t I?

With that said, I leave you with another quote from Le Fabuleux déstin d’Amélie Poulain. Monsieur Dufayel says to Amélie near the end of the film, « _Voilà, ma petite Amélie, vous n’avez pas des os en verre. Vous pouvez vous cogner à la vie. Si vous laissez passer cette chance, alors avec le temps, c’est votre cœur qui va devenir aussi sec et cassant que mon squelette._ »

I seem to invite paradox, intrigue, dreams. How could I not? I’m only human.

Slow. Methodical. Thoughtful. It is the only way to proceed when playing with fire, figuratively speaking. While I allow myself to be impulsive at times, this is not one of them. So, I find myself in the predicament of “Amélie Poulin”:http://imdb.com/title/tt0211915/, relying on _stratagème_ in order to satisfy my imagination’s wild aims.

If the cryptic nature of my writing today has yet to sink in, I will say that my imagination is not truly the source of my conflicted state, as implied above, but rather its boundless ability to create satisfying states of mind stems secondarily from another source. In fact, it is blindly following, the pull too intense to ignore. Any description of this originator would, no doubt, reveal it to you, dear reader, thereby compromising the very integrity of my secret. I realize I am being hard on you, perhaps too hard. In time, the details of the future shall be revealed.

Of Amélie, it was said « _Elle aime ça, les stratagèmes._ » Well, so do I. I just wish I were as creative and thoughtful as her at formulating them. Truth be told, in reality I have only my wits, not secret plans. Secret plans make for delusion and more fires, things I’d do well to _not_ create.

!(alignright)http://www.sensoryoutput.com/wp-images/postings/red_tape.jpg(Red tape)! Paperwork. It is at the same time the most necessary part of our litigious world and the most cumbersome. I find it to the be the bane of my existence, my nemesis, the ultimate nightmare for a person attempting to be productive. Electronic paperwork, like PDF(Portable Document Format) documents or well-designed web forms, are less annoying, but still equally superfluous in my opinion. So much effort must be expended just to keep track of financial aid applications, tax returns, FAFSA(Free Application for Federal Student Aid), and many other sundry forms and documents and copies to be completed. In this time just before I start medical school, everyday I get a new request from UNR(University of Nevada, Reno) to complete some mundane outgoing paperwork to complete so that I can receive my degree or from one of my future medical schools. (I’ll tell you all about my medical school saga in the coming days.)

Wonder why I have no time to post lately? Paperwork.

I know the above to be true and have known it for a long time. Why you ask? I know it because I am interested in many things, a litany of geeky, nerdy things: science, chemistry, self-organization, synthesis, spectroscopy (IR, UV-Vis, NMR, single-crystal X-ray), kinetics, rate laws, activation energy, entropy, enthalpy, Gibb’s free energy, Slater determinants, orthonormal bases, Schrödinger equations, Heisenberg uncertainty principle, Pauli exclusion principle, Stoke shift, fluorescence, phosphorescence, vibrational and rotational relaxation, Franck-Condon principle, π* ← π transitions, d-d transitions, MLCT and LMCT transtions, paramagnetic versus diamagnetic, singlet, doublet, triplet, acid-base titrations, transitions metal chemistry, C&E News, physics, universe, Einstein’s space-time, relativity, particle accellerators, CERN, antimatter, gluons, photons, phonons, tau particles, neutrinos, tachions, quarks, cell biology, signal transduction pathways, G-proteins, kinases, phosphorylases, helicase, proteosome, ubiquitination, protein folding, amino acids, primary – quaternary structure of proteins, meiosis, mitosis, spindle apparatus, structural proteins, physiology, hormone activity, web publishing, HTML/XHTML, CSS, CSS hacks, “CSS Zen Garden”:http://www.csszengarden.com/, PHP, WordPress, Geeklog, TextDrive, PhotoStack, Mozilla, SVG, JavaScript, AppleScript, Mac OS X, *NIX, CLI, SVN, .plists, fonts and typography, design, layout, print publishing, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, iPhoto, iTunes, SubEthaEdit, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, Pixadex, Pages, Keynote, Safari and the Acid2 Test, IMAP-SSL, X-509 Certificates, rsync, iSync, HDTV, Frontline, Lost, Star Trek (all), Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, West Wing, BitTorrent, MP3s, AIFFs, ACCs, M4As, JPGs, PDFs, PNGs, words, language, French, nuanced passages, books, Walt Whitman, Toni Morrison, Mark Twain, W.E.B. du Bois, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickenson, Jack London, Edith Wharton, E.E. Cummings, John Steinbeck, Billy Collins, math, calculus, integrals, derivatives, differential equations, linear algebra, matrices, LU, LDU, QR factorization, Cramer’s Rule, subspaces, nullspace, column space, row space, determinants, Macs, Apple Computer, iBook, iPod, iMac, PowerBook, PowerMac, Mac OS X Tiger v10.4, Spotlight, Dashboard, multi-part video conferencing over iChat, VPN, SSH, WDAV, SFTP, IP, AirPort, 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n, 10/100/1000 Base-T, FireWire 400 and 800, USB 2, HD, RAM, DDR, PPC 970FX, PPC 970 GX, PPC 970 MP, “ScienceDaily.com”:http://www.sciencedaily.com/, “SpaceRef.com”:http://www.spaceref.com/, “SpaceDaily.com”:http://www.spacedaily.com/, “EET.com”:http://www.eet.com/, “Wired.com”:http://www.wired.com, “/.”:http://slashdot.org/, baroque, classical, romantic and contemporary music, Bach Inventions and Sinfonias, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin’s Polonaises, Gershwin, M-Audio KeyStation Pro 88, piano, clarinet, french horn, Sennheiser 280 Pro headphones, GarageBand, politics, Karl Rove, Senators, Congressmen and women, Supreme Court justices, cabinet and its members, national security, NSA, FBI, NIMA, CIA, The New York Times crossword puzzle, beer, brewing beer, wine, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel, Pinot Noir, Bergundy, Bordeaux, Pau, Armagnac, Cognac, fromage, information, statistics …

I could spend a lifetime on that list, but those are the core points that make me a nerd/geek. (Is there a difference?) I just wanted to make sure that everyone knew it because I realized it last night as I was trying to learn “Subversion”:http://subversion.tigris.org/ (a versioning system similar to, but better than, CVS). Until I find a way to work it fluidly into my workflow, however, I think I will refrain from using it to manage various web sites. As I do not manage more than two or three at a time, I think I can use my fat brain to keep it all straight, for now.

I am a total nerd.

Yes, I am a total geek for posting that which you can read in “this post”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/archives/2005/03/07/lost-gone-forever/.

I regret everyday that passes that I do not write here. Blogging has a natural calming effect, I think, as I spill my thoughts into the browser for all to see. I can give excuse after excuse for not writing more, but I guess it comes back to how much I have actually been doing of late: not much. I read, I work, and I play, but unlike my days in school, I am far, far less occupied. Case in point: I just watched the latest episode of “Stargate Atlantis”:http://www.scifi.com/atlantis at seven in the morning.

My work on the new Department of Chemistry web site is nearly wrapped up (but still not live), as I have verified compatibility of the CSS with Windows Internet Explorer v5, v5.5, and v6. Still, looking at sites in that browser regardless of version is disheartening. I know that despite all my efforts to make the site as compatible as possible and as rock-solid a design as I could muster up, those experiencing it with Internet Explorer will suffer. Those users do not suffer for my work, but they suffer with all the web as Windows IE(Internet Explorer) falls farther and farther behind the compatibility curve with new web standards. Viewing the new site with Mac OS X’s Safari or Mozilla’s Firefox is pure joy, knowing exactly what to expect and why (from a web designer’s perspective). Despite such knowledge, I am quite proud of the new design and believe it will age well.

As I look out the window on this cold and frosty morning, I see trees blanketed in white and bulges in the landscape where cars remain abandoned on the street below. The sight is mystical, with the suns rays glistening on the ice as the day awakens. This tranquility, however, will not last: the car owners will have awaken soon to unbury their vehicles and the shining vista before me will melt away as quickly as it appeared last night. And Reno moves on.

Today is Tuesday, or more precisely the second Tuesday of the new year: Steve Job’s Macworld Keynote, an annual tradition of sorts. All-a-blogger in this blogosphere that has any Mac affinity will certainly be writing and reporting as the new gems are revealed. Naturally, there will be disappointment among some as their perfect product never -materializes- rises from the podium on stage after the coveted saying, “Oh, and one more thing…” Still, as Apple’s product line stagnates with each new day, Januaries offer a rebirth (sometimes) to this favorite of fruit companies as new gizmos and software hit the shelves (after some delay, usually). All eyes will be on the keynote hall at Moscone Center in San Francisco in forty-five minutes. I know mine will be.

(Actually, Apple has opted not to spend horrendous amounts of money to webcast this event, so I’ll be watching figuratively as I find live updates from news outlets.)

Where to start? I guess I have been a bit remiss in my blogging of late, and much has happened in that time. First and foremost, I somehow got sick again (second time in as many months). I guess I should feel more fortunate that I am in good health, as getting sick only twice would be a blessing for some; I was a bit annoyed as I rarely get sick more than once a year. Out of this ordeal, I must pass on a valuable lesson that emerged from this recent contagion: do not eat sushi when sick! I had a fever one night, and believed that my immune system had finally purged my system of any viruses and ailments. The next day, I jaunted over to the best sushi place in town (Woo Chon) and savored every roll my stomach could fit. The next day, though, my minor cold turned into a major head cold, and it lasted several more days. I think sushi, in all its raw goodness, may have weakened my immune system temporarily as my body waged war on two fronts: one in my sinuses and the other in my intestines. Oh well, lesson learned.

I have nearly finished my redesign of the “UNR Department of Chemistry website”:http://www.chem.unr.edu/ and it’s looking pretty snazzy (not yet live because it is only _nearly_ finished). I am particularly proud of the very clean, well demarcated CSS(cascading style sheets). The simplicity of the XHTML(eXtensible hypertext markup language) speaks for itself (as it should). I am still a bit wary of how various browsers interpret and inherit positioning between parent and children objects. Mozilla browsers and Safari behave in a similar manner, but Opera was giving me a major headache. I messed around with many things before discovering that I needed simply specify @position: relative;@ in the parent @div@. Seems one learns something new with each site one creates.

Christmas came and went without much fanfare. I received several DVDs including “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00005JMJG/qid=1104817510/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/103-8143672-8959837?v=glance&s=dvd and “The Last Samari”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0001JXOVC/qid=1104817459/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-8143672-8959837?v=glance&s=dvd. Both are excellent movies, in my opinion. My brother received “Napoleon Dynamite”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00005JNBQ/qid=1104817657/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-8143672-8959837?v=glance&s=dvd and “Garden State”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00005JNC2/qid=1104817631/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-8143672-8959837?v=glance&s=dvd, both of which I had never seen before. After watching _Napoleon Dynamite_ three times, I had to buy it for myself.

My first medical school interview went extremely well, and I was pleasantly surprised how nice my two interviewers were. With an hour for each, the topics discussed were all over the board, and it was fun covering such a wide range of subjects.

My friends and I made the seven-hour trip down to Las Vegas for New Year’s celebrations. One of my friends had planned on us staying in this really cheap motel, the “Happi Inn”:http://gaming.unlv.edu/v_museum/neon_survey/surveys/happi_inn.html (and no, that is not misspelled). The pictures and description in that link do not do the place justice, as it really looks like a dump—both inside and out! After getting there and seeing the awful conditions, we decided to go elsewhere. Of course, finding a place to stay in Las Vegas the day before New Year’s Eve is not an easy proposition. Fortunately, we found a decent hotel, the “Frontier”:http://www.frontierlv.com/, located on the strip. The price for both nights (December 30th and 31st) were actually cheaper than the run-down hole in the wall we almost had. Plus, our new hotel was literally right across the street from the “Fashion Show mall”:http://www.thefashionshow.com/, complete with “Apple store”:http://www.apple.com/retail/fashionshow/. I had more fun on New Year’s Eve’s Eve, as we went to “Margaritaville”:http://margaritaville.com/lasvegas/open.htm and “Seven”:http://sevenlasvegas.com/main.html and had a great time dancing it up into the wee hours of the morning. We had hoped to get into one of the larger clubs in the big casinos, but we heard the wait times were horrendous.

Upon returning to Reno, we found the city under a foot and a half of snow. Delighted, we went up to “Alpine Meadows”:http://www.skialpine.com/ for some awesome powder (or as we like to call it, nar nar) action. It was, sufficed to say, awesome. Bottomless powder all over the mountain, great conditions, and the forecasts are looking great for the next week. I may try and round up a crew to hit the slopes on Wednesday, as long as I get some work done tomorrow. I thought about heading up tomorrow, but, alas, my muscles are still aching from all those maneuvers in the nar nar. The pain, however, is definitely worth the excellent fun to be had.

Well, now that I have caught you up for the past two weeks, lets hope I can stay on top of things for a bit. That should not be a problem as school doesn’t start for another two weeks, and even then, I plan to head to Washington, D.C. for the inaugural events.