Come fly with me
(I just found this on my laptop from last time I was on a long flight.)
Just before take-off, the guy across the aisle starts to read his paper. Every time he turns the page, he snaps the paper to straighten it out. It's a really loud snap, and for some reason it's incredibly annoying, but hey - how long can it take to read a paper?
Somewhere over the Caspian Sea I realise it's been six hours, in which time he's managed to produce two additional papers from his bag.
By the time we're near Kiev, I nearly lose my temper and engage in fisticuffs, or at least beat him around the head with my meal tray. To pretend I'm not a coward I mutter something about discretion and valour, and content myself with passive aggressive thoughts about his blood pressure and early death.
Over Warsaw, as the small child in the row in front and I make faces at each other, his pen leaks all over the crossword. Victory.
Time, place and person
The middle of a busy emergency department.
Mr X? What day is it?
Pause. "Friday."
Do you know what month it is?
Pause. He looks like a man more interested in season than month. No answer.
What's the Prime Minister's name?
Long pause. The registrar gives up, pulling out his stethoscope. But then, with a grin,
"Howard got shafted."
Internet recommendations 2: being a medical student
Some more interesting links, this time about what I do all day in the hospital:
If you're not a medical student, you might get an idea of what life can be like with this page from the ABC way back in 1999, when PBL was new and exciting. The Slab: So you want to be a doctor..., where one medical student tells the story of the clinical years.
The original page has vanished, but I managed to find a copy in the Internet Archive and mirror it locally: Churl's What every clinical clerk should know, a useful guide for medical students.
Single sign on and solving real problems
I'm not working on my assignments because the "technology" "platform" used for delivery keeps breaking on me, and it's all too depressing to think about the millions of dollars spent, so instead let's complain about something that's been bugging me for a while. Obviously written as personal opinion, not that of the UCC, the University or any sections that may have the misfortune to employ me.
Solutions seeking problems are not rare, but one is Single Sign-On, including as it is implemented at UWA - for a set of sites that are related but served by different platforms and administrated by different people.
The basic idea is that good passwords (like Bu6aenaiOod7cai0) can be hard to remember for intellectual weaklings. If you have a bunch of disparate websites which people need to access, you can make it easier by letting them use the same password to log on. SSO does this by redirecting users to a special page which logs them into all these systems at the same time. This is a massive technical oversimplification, but it's the user's impression that actually matters here.
Unfortunately, the SSO bit is not what solves the problem of remembering lots of different good passwords. Shared or centralised authentication does that just fine, which is why most systems and networks at UWA use the "Pheme" password.
As far as I can tell, SSO solves the problems of "I get tired of typing my password in" or "I can't remember how to enter my password". If your users are complaining of the first problem, you should probably reduce the complexity of your web presence. If your users are complaining of the second problem, they may not be ready for computers.
I mentioned this to a few people at the Uni's website office (who weren't directly involved with the SSO project, but thought it was pretty ace), and immediately discovered the kicked puppy look. SSO is pretty sexy stuff for Web developers, and it allows people to talk about exciting things like identity and trust rather than boring things like IE6 positioning bugs. Unfortunately, it's harder to do properly and costs more money, and I'm not convinced the benefits are worth it, because it doesn't solve problems people have. Am I missing something? Is there some glaringly-obvious UI hole that SSO fills?
Another problem from a user-experience perspective is that SSO might help train people to responding to phishing, because they get used to the idea that when they log in they are sent to a page that looks completely different and is on a different web address with a long and complex URI. Phishing has been the subject of much discussion within the OpenID community, which is an SSO tool for the wider Internet.
What's also annoying is that I'm pretty sure someone already made this exact argument, but I can't remember where I read it. There's a reasonable critique of SSO for the wider Internet as opposed to closely-related sites in a two-part TechNet Magazine article, on Identity is Hard and Ways to make SSO good (my titles), though it gets a bit technical.
There are, predictably, technical and political problems with the idea of site-local SSO, as well as in the implementation - don't use UWA's on an insecure network! - but it's the core idea that it solves a problem nobody has that bugs me the most.
Acopia
There's a stereotype out there about general medical registrars: they're all heartless, uncompassionate bastards focused on their exams and having as few patients on their service as possible by discharging mercilessly and never admitting anyone they don't absolutely have to.
Like many negative stereotypes, there is a grain of truth to this, which is that all med reges are heartless, uncompassionate bastards focused on their exams and having as few patients on their service as possible. THE ONLY GOOD ADMISSION...
What's interesting is that consultant general physicians (the metamorphic product of a med reg) have a diverse range of personalities, interests, clinical approaches, and degree of looking like Magnum, P.I. - my current consultant is towards the high end of the scale on that one. I'm not sure why this transition occurs. Is it the long hours and immense workload being a gen med reg involves, which seems to melt away once you get out of the training programme? Is it the sort of person who goes into physician training? Do they eventually learn to love (on the whole)?
(This post brought to you by exhaustion after 11 hours on take today - how will I survive as an intern?!)
