Despite the title, I shall try to explain. People amaze me. Smart people amaze me. Their knowledge is vast, yet they foist data upon data onto us, bereft of any coherent organizing principles. A particular topic arises, then twenty minutes later the PowerPoint slide (shudder) for that very topic pops up and another sentence or two about it reverberates through the lecture hall. Am I you, dear professor? Do I look like I can digest stream-of-consciousness details from your vast intellect as you see fit to profess it?

I think not, so I mutter under my breath and plod along. You can only hope I will attend your next lecture. Oh, and I’m not bitter. I swear.

The weekend after a big exam is always most enjoyable. I have a chance to catch up on email, projects, and best of all, play with my (new) computer. The “MacBook Pro”:http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/ is lightning quick: I setup “MySQL”:http://www.mysql.com/ and “PHP”:http://www.php.net/ to allow me to develop web stuff locally, and in using “phpMyAdmin”:http://www.phpmyadmin.net/ to peruse my databases, the query times were astonishing. Of course, my old 600 MHz iBook did the trick, but with two Intel cores running at 2 GHz, wow!

There have been some reports of display and sound issues. On the first, some have noticed a band of slight darkness near the bottom of the display. I have no such problem. In fact, this display and brightness is absolutely gorgeous. There are not enough superlatives to bestow onto my new computer to do it justice. With every new portable computer I have owned, the display has been brighter and brighter, and up until the MBP(MacBook Pro), there were still instances where it was not bright enough. That is, it did not match desktop LCD(Liquid Crystal Display) displays in their quality or light output. The MBP now claims to be as bright as any desktop LCD monitor, and I find this to be completely accurate.

On the second issue reported, “the sound problem”:http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?t=286970, I have become aware of it, but only after explicitly listening for it. Apparently, the sound, which is of a whining or high-pitched character, originates from the power supply. The sound is intermittent, but hardly noticeable.

To further test my new computer, I put it through the paces of running my custom-made AppleScript to resize photos from iPhoto and output them for my web site “photo gallery”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/photos/. This entails resizing to two different sizes and applying an unsharp mask filter to counteract the softening that occurs when down-sizing an image. With the iBook, this was a slow, arduous process. The MBP, however, performed swimmingly. Even though Photoshop CS was running under emulation via “Rosetta”:http://www.apple.com/rosetta/ (Apple’s PowerPC binary translation engine), it was still faster than my old iBook.

To round out this mini-review of sorts, I should mention the other goodies Apple gave MacBook Pro owners: built-in iSight camera, MagSafe power connector, Front Row and remote control. For the first, I have found the iSight to be of superior quality to the older, bigger iSights. Next, the MagSafe magnetic power connector is sturdy and works just as advertised: it pulls out when enough force is applied. As an example, just the other day, I was pulling my computer forward on my desk and the plug was stuck behind my desk, yet the MagSafe adaptor disconnected. Nifty. Finally, Front Row, which gives users a full-screen interface into their movies and DVDs, music and photos, is handy and fun to sit back and browse. I have found meda on my computer to which I was completely oblivious before running Front Row. Naturally, the IR remote will be nice during “Keynote”:http://www.apple.com/iwork/keynote/ presentations.

Go check out the “unpacking pictures”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/photos/macbook-pro-unboxing/ I shot of my MacBook Pro.

The first year class is just over a day and a half away from our gross anatomy final exam. I am sure my fellow classmates are feverishly studying Mini Moore, MNTS(medical note-taking service) notes, Netter and Grant atlases, flash cards, PowerPoint slides, “netanatomy.com”:http://www.netanatomy.com/, Chung, and other homemade study materials.

Some of my classmates have expressed their disdain for gross anatomy given its wide breadth of coverage (and time-compressed duration), but I, for one, revel in the details. I treat each new factoid like a gem in the rough, to be extracted and saved. Maybe there is a some masochism in me, but I don’t care. I like it, and I will miss the lectures and lab. What is medical school without gross anatomy? We will know, come Monday morning, I suppose.

Anyway, good luck to everyone, study hard, and let’s celebrate when it’s over!

For the curious, the structures in the above figure are:

1. superior oblique muscle, innervated by CN IV (trochlear)
2. lateral rectus muscle, innervated by CN VI (abducens)
3. inferior rectus muscle, innervated by CN III (oculomotor)