What better way to celebrate Valentine’s Day than opening night of the Boston Ballet’s production of Romeo & Juliet? Well, it’s really more of a romantic tragedy, but…ermmm…romantic nevertheless! It was an evening of cultural sophistication, down to our prelude of beef chow fun and duck noodle soup at good old HK Eatery. =) Anyway, I’m just glad that on this day, even geeks like me deserve a little love.

Welcome to the Year of the Rat! Unfortunately, neither of our ratty pals could be with us this year. And since this is our first Chinese New Year as a married couple, that means no more red envelopes either – a double whammy! Nevertheless, we celebrated the holiday as usual, by mouth. This included both a Canto-style seafood feast on Friday AND an all-you-can-eat sushi buffet this afternoon. In fact, the ease of the month-long pharmacology course I’m taking has afforded me the ability to finally eat and sleep like the average Joe – maybe even a bit more than Joe. Even after writing my honors thesis, I still had enough time to beat Gears of War on hardcore level. Now, with a few large expenditures in upcoming months, I’ll hopefully find stuff to do that’ll be more remunerative than collecting ammo or star bits.

I can’t believe they actually…terminated…the Sarah Connor Chronicles yesterday for the big G’s State of the Union address. It was fun nevertheless watching Pelosi struggle to avoid rolling her eyes in front of the camera while he continued to insist on our success in Mid East campaigns. I was also afraid that he’d still say that we’re not in a recession, as he had claimed earlier this week. I can almost imagine him waving his fingers and saying “there is no recession,” like “these are not the droids we’re looking for.” Anyway, we celebrated my birthday today with the equivalent of a 3-day Chinese feast, followed by some couch-time with Super Mario Galaxy. Until the weather gets warmer, our lifestyle is becoming reminscent of a quiescent state in roundworms as reported in the newest issue of Nature called lethargus.

It was tough getting any rest from sleeping last night. I kept dreaming that I had matched to my top choice residency program, only to wake up to realize it was all an illusion. This actually happened several times, and I would pop out of bed each time with my heart thumping. That is, until approximately 9:05am this morning, when I got a real-live call from the program director at MEEI telling me that I have indeed matched with them. I almost had to pinch myself to realize that this was the real deal. Luckily, I had the day off from work, so after calling up some family and friends, I celebrated with 8-ball and noodles (my favorite combo!). Anyway, I guess this means that I’ll be staying in Boston until at least 2012! My capacity for inertia is truly boundless.

My new year started off smoothly as I slowly settled into my rotation in the emergency department. Besides learning many new things (like how to sustain an hour of doing chest compressions), I also had the fortune of laying my hands on a brand new toy. Looking back at the many cell phones I’ve owned (see here), the RAZR has been my favorite. Although it was tough letting it go, I really wanted a data phone, and the introduction of an irresistable plan helped sealed the deal. So far, the new phone has performed nicely. It’s not as flashy as the iPhone, but is certainly more utilitarian. Today, I used it to retrieve my confirmation for the rank list I submitted for the Ophthalmology match. Now that my fate is sealed, I can only cross my fingers as I anxiously await the results next week.

Happy 2008! Believe it or not, it has been exactly 5 years since I started Xephalon.net. Although the design scheme is basically unchanged, the website has undergone a few upgrades, including user comments and Recaptcha. But more importantly, this past year marked several major events in my life, like getting married, attaining my PhD, and deciding to specialize in ophthalmology. Beyond love and career, 2007 will also be remembered as the year that electronic gaming returned to my life in full force. It began with completing our epic journey through the world of Oblivion, then shifting to the white, witty, wonderful world of the Wii to defeat crazy raving rabbids, rescue Mario’s multi-dimensional world, and embark on a quest for the Twilight Princess. And with a line up of some of the most impressive FPS games I have ever seen – Gears of War, Call of Duty 4, Crysis, and Bioshock, all sitting on my computer, I fear that the gaming industry will finally squeeze that last drop of productivity from my existence.

Our goal over this year’s holiday season was to accomplish absolutely nothing – which was exactly what we did over the past 4 days in New York. Much of our time was spent reliving the joy of sci-fi novels like Ender’s Game and Asimov’s Foundation series. We also flexed the language portion of our brain muscles with DS games like NY Times Crossword and WordJong (it’s better than it sounds), some high-speed scribbling action with Boggle at my cousin’s house, and the increasingly addictive Scrabulous app on Facebook. Of course, we did not neglect to flex our stomach muscles as well. We gobbled Joe Shanghai’s famous soup dumplings, tender BBQ beef tongues at Gyu-Kaku, and a somewhat underwhelming luncheon tasting menu at Bouley. To my dismay, I was struck again with another cold on our return to Boston. I guess I’ll just have to veg out for a few more days before we ring in the new year.

After many flights and sleepless nights (hey, that rhymed!), my interview trail for Ophthalmology finally ended last week as my plane landed in Logan Airport moments before our first major snowstorm this winter. Over the past 2 weeks, I’ve been living out of my suitcase as I traveled around the country, through New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Miami, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. I joined the several dozen other applicants with the same conservative black suit and same leather portfolio, as we all did our best to appear confident but not cocky, unique but not weird, and smart without being a smart-ass. Anyway, after both college and med school interviews, most of us have gotten the whole smile-and-nod routine down cold – like “Wow! You guys have slit lamps too?” Fortunately, through carefully orchestrated planning – pricelining hotels, using public transportation, bumming free rides, and crashing at my friends’ pads, I did manage to save my bank account from taking too big a hit. For the grand finale, I completed my Step II board exam yesterday, powering through the 9-hour exam and taking only one 5-minute break for bathroom and a snack. Now as I sit in my warm apartment and watch the rest of the city being blanketed by the heavy snow, I can finally breathe a sigh of relief.

… tachycardic and palpitating…in San Francisco. Even as I’m writing this entry aboard my red-eye flight back to Boston, I can feel the pain in my feet after climbing the slopes of the city in my dress shoes for the past 2 days of residency interviews. Even yummy dungeoness crabs in Inner Sunset or upscale Indian fusion in Palo Alto were hardly worth the exhaustion. Fortunately, the trip did give me a chance to meet up with some old friends. By the way, I hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving holiday. As per tradition, we raided the undergrad turkey luncheon, and cooked up a storm for a friend’s turkey dinner. Right now, I can hardly wait until my holiday break – just my board exam and 11 more interviews to go!

Spam has always been annoying, but lately it’s been out of control. Over the past weeks, you may have noticed the crap-load of spam messages being left on my website. I had put off dealing with it since I’ve been overwhelmed by my rotations, residency interviews, board exam studying, and Kaplan work (to pay for all the traveling). Last week, after removing 75 spam messages from my last blog entry, I finally decided to install reCAPTCHA. CAPTCHA actually stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. The reCAPTCHA service I’m using is part of an online effort to digitize printed books using OCR. Words that cannot be read are used by this program to be solved by the user before a message can be posted. This should hopefully hold off those annoying bots in the meantime.