Random Cell Phone Pictures

This is a shot I took in Claremont - one of my favorite places here in Perth. Random.
Another shot taken in Claremont. This one shows a nice blue Ferrari. I've never seen a blue Ferrari person before. This one was exceedingly dirty. There were about 4 guys standing around looking at it. I also took a picture of them because they were literally drooling on the car.
This photo was taken two days ago while Danielle and I were crossing the main intersection of Subiaco (AKA: Subi). If you look closely, you can see a small "space invader" character next to the "Subi Plaza" sign. I've seen these in random places on my campus, around our neighborhood, and now in Subi. They are made out of those small 1 inch ceramic tiles and I've seen them in vairous colors. There is even one inside the pharmacy building at UWA. Strange.

At the petrol pump.



I took this photo of the new 135i cabrio that is parked up the street. I want one. As you can see Australians like to park even the newest of cars on the "verge".

More Lectures

Yesterday I had lectures as I do most days. Except, yesterday two of my lectures were presented by Dr. Barry Marshall – a Nobel Prize laureate in Physiology or Medicine. His researched proved that the stomach is not sterile and that some bacteria can live in the acidic conditions. These bacteria were later determined to be the cause of stomach ulcers. He did a crazy experiment to make this discovery. He actually drank some bacterial culture and got a stomach infection. I remember when this Nobel prize was announced because my UofA microbiology professor told our class about his experiment and said that he won the prize. I even wrote about Barry Marshall in my UWA admission letter.

Anyway he does research at my university so he presented two lectures on Helicobacter pylori (pictured) to the pharmacy and medical students. It was kind of exciting. The lectures weren’t anything special though.

wikipedia

Wikipedia is one of my most favorite sites on the internets. Some of their pages are so up to date and extensive it is unbelievable. I find myself searching wikipedia almost everyday for both school and non-school related searches. I’m left wondering when wikipedia will get degree granting status or something. Google’s weak attempt at a wikipedia style site has been disappointing so far. Its called knol if you care to check it out. I'm sure knol will get better with time but at the moment I"m not a fan. Maybe if I had time to write some knols myself then it would be a better site :-S

Products I won’t recommend as a pharmacist

A few months ago I received some samples of Flo sinus care products from the rep who visited the pharmacy where I’m working. Tonight I used one of the products called a sinus douche (pictured). Basically it’s a plastic bottle along with some salt to make an isotonic solution (so it doesn’t burn). Anyway, the product is a pain to use because first you have to boil some water then fill the bottle and let it cool. After it cools add the “salts” then insert the bottle into one nostril and squeeze out half the contents of the bottle. Switch nostrils and then squeeze the rest out.

Now, when the rep was going on and on about how great this product is she mentioned how I should expect to see lots of mucus and all sorts of stuff coming out of my nose after this douche. This was not observed with my “treatment”. I was under-whelmed to say the least. The “treatment” was uncomfortable and two hours after doing it my nose still feels like crap. Yes I followed the directions to the letter. No I will not recommend this product to anyone who comes into the pharmacy. I’m the glad the rep let me try it out though.

Other than the product sucking I’m sure that most users would “skip” the boiling step and douche with plain tap water. This might result in sinus infection.

I hate the Australian dollar!

The Australian dollar seems to fluctuate a lot and moving money here feels like gambling. For this reason I hate the Australian currency.

That is all.

Qantas

When I flew here via Qantas they seemed to be a top notch airline. The flight was as good as can be expected and they kept us well fed which was nice. They exceeded my expectations for an economy flight. I was planning to fly home with Qantas after having a great experience with them in the past. However, for the past few weeks I’ve been hearing nothing but bad press regarding Qantas and their aircrafts.

This news article details the most recent event.

From the article:

The spate of problems started last month when an explosion ripped a hole in the fuselage of a Qantas jet en route from Hong Kong to Melbourne , forcing an emergency landing at Manila.

Last week, a domestic flight was forced to return to Adelaide after a wheel bay door failed to close.

A Qantas Boeing 767 flight turned back to make an emergency landing at Sydney airport on August 2 after a hydraulic fluid leak was discovered.

On Monday, a jet was grounded for almost three hours after a technical fault was discovered in a pre-flight inspection at Sydney airport.

Hopefully they can get back on track soon because I’m ready to get out of here.