Console Wars

Until the current generation of video game consoles, I've always managed to own most of them. For the 128-bit generation for example, I had the PS2, Gamecube, Dreamcast, and the XBox. But for the current generation, I only own the Wii. The high prices of the PS3 and the XBox360 combined with a relative lack of quality games for those systems early on held me back from making the investment.

But unfortunately, I feel let down by the Wii. Just like with the Gamecube, Nintendo has front loaded its releases with promising games towards the launch of its system followed by several years of nothing. And in the meanwhile, the PS3 is catching up in terms of quality games. I think I'll be jumping ships to the PS3 in the very near future... I figure it might be nice to have the Blu-ray functionality as well.

And honestly, I had some serious thoughts about getting the 360 a few years ago... but Microsoft's unwillingness to fix the ongoing red ring of death issue with their system makes it a very poor investment.

I probably missed the boat with the current generation of gaming systems... for the next generation (still several years away) I'll be vary wary of making Nintendo my only/first choice... I'll probably grab one of the other systems first and then grab Nintendo's system after it proves itself worthy.

Japanese Wedding Customs

So my fiance and I are starting the preliminary stages of planning for our wedding. I figure it'll be good to get as much done while I'm still on "vacation."

One of the first steps is trying to figure out how big of a wedding we want to have, as in, how many people to invite and how big of a venue we need to look at. While discussing with my parents which family members they thought could make it over here, I learned something shocking and new to me.

In Japanese weddings, you're expected to pay for the travel & lodging expenses of ALL OF YOUR GUESTS!

Wow, did not know that. Considering the flight alone is $1000, inviting just 5-10 of my relatives could wipe out the entire wedding budget! No wonder I wasn't invited to my cousin's wedding last year... And my parents appear uneasy with the thought of asking our relatives to pay their own way to fly over for our wedding. With this new revelation, it appears as if I'll have to follow my cousin's cue and not invite anyone outside my immediate family members as far as family goes. As for my friends and my fiance's side of the family, we'll follow standard American protocol.

Engaged

So as most (if not all) readers of this blog probably know already, I got engaged to my girlfriend of 3+ years during our trip to Japan. We're both pretty excited about it, and we've begun to brainstorm a little bit about planning the whole thing. Also, I apologize for not posting anything here during my trip. Hopefully the photo uploads to Facebook made up for it.

So here are some pertinent information that you all might find interesting:

-It definitely won't be till 2011
-Due to vacation restrictions of my residency program, possible months include May, August, September, and October. If I had to guess right now, I would bet on August or September.
-It'll definitely be in central Ohio.
-Not doing a traditional ceremony in Japan.

Will keep posting updates and thoughts here and there as we go through this whole planning process.

Off to Japan

I'm heading out to Japan today for 2 weeks. I promised Noah to post updates on my trip here, so I'll try to do so.

The good news is that we're flying business class for free using frequent flyer miles.

The bad news is we're connecting in Atlanta (instead of Detroit or Chicago) and have a 5-hour layover. In terms of hours (27 hours) it might be my longest transit to Japan yet.

With the advance in portable electronic devices like laptops and ipods though, I think extended plane rides have gotten considerably easier. Now if every international flight offered wireless internet, things won't be so bad at all!

Pavestone Patio

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm spending some of my time off this month building a pavestone patio behind the house. Basically, you mark off the area, dig up the grass & soil 6 inches deep, lay down base gravel, compact the gravel with a rented plate compacter, lay down sand, and lay 1'x1' pavestones.

We're planning of creating a patio that's approx. 260 square feet, so the material costs ended up being around $1000. Fortunately, my parents had donated $1000 to us towards a home improvement project as a housewarming gift last year. Compare that to $3000+ if we had a contracter do the work, so it'll definitely be worth it to do it ourselves. (assuming we do it correctly)

The challenge is going to be the sheer volume of materials that we'll have to move. Literally, tons of material.

5 tons of gravel
2 tons of sand
3.5 tons of paver stone

And we need to do it all with shovels and a wheelbarrow... Either I'm going to get really buff, or I'm gonna herniate a disk in my back.

Wedding Season

In 2008, I attended 1 wedding.
In 2009, I attended 2 weddings.
This year, I've been invited to 6 weddings with another invitation possibly incoming!

I guess it's about that time in our lives. I love weddings as they also seem to double as a reunion of friends you haven't seen in a long time. Tragically however, I may only make it to 3 out of the 6. One was a destination wedding requiring a week-long Caribbean cruise that would've drained $1500 out of each of our bank accounts and decimated our yearly vacation days. The other two are 500 miles away and on Sundays. This would require us to take the following Monday off as travel days, which would not have been an issue had they been before June or closer to home/work...

But I start my residency training in June.

I do get 3 weeks of vacation a year, but apparently there are only 3 designated months during which I can take the said vacations. Which months end up being these so-called "vacation friendly" months depends on your rotation schedule, but apparently June and December are "no-vacation" months for every resident. (June for new resident orientation, December to cover for everyone else taking Christmas vacation)

This has been a major disappointment for me, as the 3 weddings I'll probably miss are ironically the weddings I was looking forward to the most. (No offense to the 3 weddings I'll actually be attending...)

But in the end, I'm still very thankful to all the friends who invited me to their weddings. (My own cousin didn't invite me to his wedding last year!!!) Whether I'll be in attendance or not, I hope your special day goes well and that I hope to see you all again soon!

Post-Match

So as I wrote in my first post, Match Day was a little over a week ago on 3/18. I found out that I got my top choice here in Columbus, so I'm very excited about that. It's a good feeling to know that I have a job lined up after graduation. And the program I matched at isn't nearly as intense as some of the other programs I could've ended up at, so maybe I won't be quite as stressed out about my intern year!

April should be a very exciting month for me. I do have one power point presentation left between me and graduation, but I'm essentially on a 3-month long vacation. I'll be doing an one-week away rotation up at the University of Michigan shadowing a Japanese doctor to improve my medical Japanese vocabulary. And at the end of the month, I'm heading to Japan for a 2-week vacation with my girlfriend. Sandwiched in there somewhere should be some videogaming, catching up with old friends, and building a paver patio in the back yard. Wish me luck!

Staying in Touch

As I progress through life after college, I'm finding it harder and harder to stay in touch with old friends. Interests drift apart, jobs and new friends keep us busy, and certainly, being spread out throughout the country doesn't help.

I wonder though, is it necessary to stay in touch to remain friends? I'd thought that it's a nice thing to do... With the advent of online social stalking like Facebook, it's a piece of cake to keep tabs on who lives where and does what. It'd be nice for old friends to at least care about what you're doing in life.

But does that mean we need to stay in touch consistently? Isn't that what "catching up" is all about when you finally do see that old friend again?

The key here might be to remain responsive. I've had a few people who flat out won't even respond to my e-mails and/or phone calls. When someone does that, it's essentially impossible to ever catch up. I would consider that burning the bridge. (And no, it's not entirely because I fail at life. I've seen this happen to other people close to me as well!) But as long as you leave the window open for an old friend to reach back out towards you, I think friendship will survive. 

You can't maintain all friendships, but I also don't think that you need to trade in your old friend to get a new one. As we get older, I hope that we can continue to expand our network of friends.

The Match

As I restart my blog, I think it's appropriate to provide a baseline on where I stand in life right now. I have 3 more months of medical school before I (hopefully) graduate and get my MD degree. I'm also less than a month away from Match Day.

The Match is the process residency programs use to select graduating medical students for placement. It begins much like a traditional application process to college. The students first choose which specialty they are interested in. (In my case, my specialty will be Family Medicine.) After that, students apply to multiple programs in their desired field. Most med students apply to 10~20 programs... although I've heard 40~50 depending on the competitiveness of their desired specialty. I personally only applied to 5... mostly because Family Medicine isn't a very competitive field. This is followed by interviews. Some people see this as a great opportunity to travel around the country. I saw it as a pain in the butt, because you're responsible for travel expenses. Not so fun when your current income is NEGATIVE $40,000/year!

Once you're done with your interviews, you work on your Rank Order List (ROL). You basically make a list ranking which programs you like the most. If you really didn't like a certain program, you also have the option of not placing a program on your list at all. This is important because the ROL is kind of a binding contract. By placing a program on your list (whether it's ranked #1 or #50), you are saying "I agree to work at this program if I am chosen." When finished, you submit your ROL to a central computer. Similarly, the residency programs also submit their own ranked lists, listing the interviewees that they liked the most. In the end, a computer goes through a certain algorithm to "match" applicants to residency programs based on the submitted ROLs.

And this is where I stand right now. My ROL is submitted, and I'm just waiting. March 18th is called "Match Day", because that's when all graduating medical students across the U.S. receive an envelope telling them the results that the computer popped out. I must say I'm pretty anxious to find out where I'll be working for the next 3 years of my life!