I recently jumped on the Twitter microblogging bandwagon, as part of my gradual attempt to reconnect with technology that I’ve shunned ever since committing my studies to medicine. I’ve been content with my progress. So far, I’ve been tweaking the website’s inner workings to make it SEO friendly, and tightening up some security interfaces.

Twitter is a welcome beast useful for obtaining links to other websites that incorporate technology and medicine. I grin in triumph when Twitter notifies me of a new follower, which has been happening frequently. Is it a product of the sweat I put into this website? Perhaps… That is, until I discovered Twitter spam.

Yes, Twitter spam. Just when email users thought spam was under control, spam comments on blogs began rampant. Now there is Twitter spam. It’s disgusting. From what I understand, spam bots seek out Twitterers (is that a word?) and mass-market their products. They “follow” the victim, who receives an email from Twitter–this only happens if the email option is enabled. The victim then views the spam box’s Twitter page and clicks on its link, which usually leads to a banner ad or product page.

So much for fame and glory. My viewers are simply spammers. There are some ways to pare down these spammers. (1) You can disable email notification or filter out these notifications from your email. (2) Find a cleaner like Twerpscan. It peruses your loyal followers’ profiles, and helps identify those bots. There are other available services online, but this has worked for me. Twerpscan simply flags those Twitter accounts that seem to be following a disproportionately high number of people. You can then block them from your list. Yes, it’s crude and may have low specificity, but it works especially if you have a small list to begin with. Twitter has also been working on an internal fix to block these clogs that bog down the web. Good luck.  And if you’re a real live person out there, find me on twitter!

computing web

typical Anki screenshot

I finally managed to register for the USMLE Step 3 after going through all the hoops that the NY State Department dishes out for physicians. Now the only thing left is to learn the material for the test. The test itself is a two-day exam with clinical scenarios relating to general medicine. It’s run by the National Board of medical examiners, but is actually administered by the folks at Prometric. (I’ve taken MSCE’s and IBM AIX licensure exams by them in the past, as well as Step 1/2 exams).

I haven’t decided how to prepare for the exam. I haven’t purchased any books yet, nor have I the urge to. The exam itself was $690, and the NY State Dept charged me $735 to make sure I’m not a villian.  What a rip.

However, since I’m not necessarily in the mood to do any group studying, I might try to use some spaced-repetition software to help some of the material sink in my head.  Read more…

computing usmle, work

When I was part of the residential networking team back in college, I always cringed at how people let their computers deteriorate.  “You have how many icons on your desktop? 2000? How is that possible?” Then you have the perennial file-sharers who have 3-4 different file sharing apps running at the same time while connected to 237 other computers. No wonder your computer is slow. I, on the other hand, have always maintained a well-tuned system until today. Read more…

computing rant, tech

Floor demonstration at AAO Atlanta 2008

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computing coca-cola, pharma

While I had been a pure linux user up until medical school, I’ve migrated to WinXP mainly because the media (ppt) used in medical school made it impossible to use anything but M$ and Apple software. My Athlon 700mhz desktop at the time simply was inadequate for virtualization. My current Thinkpad T42 is showing its age, and I have no plans to replace it until absolutely necessary.  This left dual booting or Cygwin my only means to tweak scripts via CLI…that is, until I discovered Unixkit. It’s a little publicized compilation of unix executables for Windows that serves as a simple shell replacement without the overhead of Cygwin. Some of the files were obtained from the unixkit sourceforge site. Read more…

computing tech