Trompe Le Monde

Trompe Le Monde

Fancy Fingers

I scanned the radio stations this morning. I couldn't get my favorite one on my little alarm clock. 105.3 KITS. So I scanned to a classical station and listened to half of one of Haydn's London Symphonies, played by the London Orchestra. Afterwards the station played "Ricordi di Napoli (Recollections of Naples)" by Antonio Pasculli, played by Christoph Hartmann and the Ensemble Berlin. I never knew fingers on an oboe could move so fast or that an oboe could sound that amazing. If I could find a sample to play for you I would, but if you want to hear it yourself, you'll have to buy a CD I think. Sorry, this was just a teaser. 

Weclome to My World

The game Portal is part of the Orange Box package that includes Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2 and others. It was just meant to be a side game but became one of the better known parts of the package. I'm totally spoiling the story, but you wake up in some testing facility for a futuristic tech company and a computer voice instructs you through the various challenges. Along the way you get a gun that creates portals interconnected to each other. So, say if one is on a lower

 floor and the other is on the wall. Jump into the lower one and your momentum through it will launch you out the other one sideways (or which ever direction it's pointed). As the game progresses, the computer, GLaDos, gets creepier and you'll notice strange things about her and the facility (marks and writings on the walls in blood helping you with more difficult areas) all the while she's promising cake for you at the end of the challenge (with blood-writing scrawled on the wall "The Cake is a Lie!!!!!"). Turns out she tries to kill you by dumping you into a fire, but you escape and make it through the back halls and utility rooms of the facility all the way to GLaDos herself. In attempting to kill you again, a piece falls off of her and you throw it into a furnace. A few more of these pieces knocked off and dumped into the furnace and she blows up and you escape into the outside world. 

Before the video fades black, a dark room of the facility is shown with shelves full of GLaDos parts that start lighting up surrounding a table with a chocolate cake sitting on it. A robotic arm then puts out the candle on the cake and it goes black.

The game is crazy cool enough that it's spawned a cult following and jokes about it jumped all over the internet within a few weeks of its release. It's not a long game, get it done in a solid afternoon if you want to, and then play again later just for the ambience of it. One of the greatest parts of the game are the machine gun Turrets and their catchy phrases. Your heart starts pounding when you hear their really cutey voices "I see you... There you are...I don't hate you....Dispensing product.." especially if you don't see them first. When you hear them talking, they see you and bullets will soon be flying (despite GlaDos's reassurances that any signs of danger are only there to enhance the testing experience and that a taste of blood is a normal part of the experience). 

After "destroying" GLaDOS and escaping this song plays with the text and various computer data being typed out. Some creative guy on the interwebs put this typography video of the song out there and it rose to the front page of Digg (since most digg readers are the same kind of internet geeks that get into games like Portal). 

Portal - Still Alive typography from Trickster on Vimeo.

As a further testament of my geek score, I used to play this song at least once a day. I even put together a file of various turret phrases and put it on my phone as the ring tone, which I put in the music player above- along with a few other clips floating around the playlist.com website. 

I played this at school for about 5 minutes (during a very boring lecture, and the sound was off, I mostly just wanted to show it to a friend, it was okay) and three other guys who'd been sitting somewhere behind me recognized it and came up to me later, "Were you playing Portal?!" 

Be A Dentist!

My parents were visiting last week and I had fun showing them the city while doing some exploring myself. They even took me home with them for a niece's baptism and 20 hours after arriving, I was on the Amtrak Surfliner heading back north (only to Santa Barbara, an Amtrak bus took me the rest of the way, 8 hours). 

After a stressful week, it is now Sunday and I have an afternoon to chill. Yesterday I spent 2 hours buying groceries. It took that long because the car I borrowed wouldn't start when I tried to go home. The owners came to rescue me at the grocery store and we figured out why it wouldn't start and I got home fine. Studied. Watched part of the BYU-UCLA game (59-0 Go Cougs!) and studied a bit with some classmates out here. Spent 2 hours tuning up my bike (the wheels are so straight and true now it's awesome, but my brand new  front brake pads squeal loud enough to be heard 5 blocks away, it echoes off of buildings) and went for a 20 mile ride through the San Francisco nightlife. I saw a re-creation of a 1902 Buffalo Bill Cody photo taken on Ocean Beach that an artist had set up, about 40 bonfires further down the beach, lots of people hanging around on sidewalks and waiting outside restaurants, a small streetside photo shoot, and a couple of shopping neighborhoods I didn't even know were there. At night-time just ride around and look for lights down the side streets. It's pretty neat what you'll find. Through the Haight-Ashbury, Market Street, Chinatown, Union Square, Japantown, Clement Street and home. I had my first bike crash. I rode down to the Baker  Beach parking lot just to see what it's like at night and ran my bike into some deep sand and bailed. It was a very soft landing, but now I'm sure I've got sand all inside the moving parts of my bike..... but the Golden Gate Bridge looks really cool from down there at night.

As for dental school, things are really busy but lots of fun. On Mondays we're learning about the clinical side of things, how to do various exams, take health histories, do periodontal probing, head and neck exams, interpret x-rays, etc. Tuesdays we have dental anatomy where we make teeth out of wax and then get graded on how accurate and ideal they look based on all the fine specific anatomy of each tooth. It's really relaxing but the grading is so subjective you'd think they're just randomly picking numbers to make some sort of nice looking bell curve that only has a little to do with the quality of the work. Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings is anatomy lab where we dissect cadavers and learn about the structures and organs of the body. I love it and think it's really neat. You don't really think of the cadavers as people, they're far enough removed from living-ness that it's not as weird as you'd think. I got to remove the heart from ours. We've also completely removed the digestive system, opened kidneys, picked apart the spinal cord, separated individual muscles, nerves, and blood vessels. The only part I don't like is how stinky my hands get (even through the gloves!!) from the phenol/preservative and Fridays it's the worst because then you have to eat lunch shortly afterward.

Wednesdays are learning about restorative dentistry like crowns, making models, taking impressions, casting metals and various other materials. It's like arts and crafts. They even give some fun assignments like making a piece of jewelry out of silver to learn the casting process and making Halloween teeth to learn about making prosthetic mouth pieces from acrylic. 

Thursdays all day is Operative dentistry practicing drilling teeth and filling preparations. It's alright but the tests are killer right now and working in the mirror for the upper jaw is still super awkward. But I am getting better (or at least I was until this week. It's like I reverted or something, so frustrating). 

Sprinkled through the week are biochemistry and anatomy/physiology/histology lectures. We've covered more in the past 8 weeks than I ever covered in a full 14 week semester at BYU. I'm extremely glad that most of it is review from all the classes I took at BYU. Trying to learn this for the first time now would be devastating. 

We have one week left for this quarter and then a week of finals. Weird to think that the first quarter is almost over already. It flew. For anyone that comes to visit, I'll be glad to give a tour of the school and show you around. My parents seemed to enjoy it, I think they were even impressed by the cadavers despite having some reservations initially. 

I'll take this as a chance to brag about how cool this school is. Many schools haven't started, most only barely so. I even just got an official notice from USC that I sadly wasn't accepted into their program. It's official. Shoot and I was so hoping to go.....(LOL)

Trompe Le Monde

Here we Go Loop-de-loop

Soon, I'll have to write about all the cool stuff I get to do at school. Maybe next time. For now, this is my second ride of the Labor Day Weekend. Pictures links below.


I did the Marin Headlands Loop (voted best bike ride in the San Francisco Area) The Profile is only the first half. I was too lazy to finish it. I'm already putting off my anatomy studying. A great ride. On the 600 ft climb to the top of the Marin Headlands, a guy on a single speed passed me about 1/3 the way up. Not to let this happen, I kept up just behind him almost the rest of the way up in a similar gear as he had. The last half-mile or so he gained some distance on me. I talked to him at the top. Been riding the SS for 3 years. Rides a fixie around town, but it's harder on his knees he says.

Lots of old military posts, artillery stations, and batteries scattered ALL OVER the headlands. Some of the guns had ranges of 26 miles (WOOF).There's even a restored Nike Missile Silo with missiles on display. They're cool looking but I didn't get a picture. I did get some other pictures here. It's really quiet back there. Really quiet. So nice. It really reminds me of the Santa Monica Mountains. Very similar terrain. Greener and with Black Sand Beaches. I definitely have to go do that ride again. Again, in case you missed it, my own pictures are HERE.

Also discovered from a classmate The Bike Kitchen, a non-profit bike shop where you can purchase a year's membership or pay by day for use of the shop and get advice from the mechanics on bike care and help. You can even volunteer as a mechanic to earn credits towards your own bike. That'd be cool. Work a couple evenings and Saturday afternoons and build myself a fixie! We'll have to see about that.