Where the accident happened

This past Friday – May 17th, on my way to my Summer League practice, I was involved in a fender bender. It wasn’t my fault at all though! I simply stopped at a traffic light and BAM! I got hit from behind :/ The accident happened near the intersection between Blackburn/Haskell and N. Central Expressway (pictured). The guy that hit me was uber polite and seemed very sorry he hit me (according to him this was the first time he had ever hit anyone else) and we exchanged insurance info with no major drama. Besides my neck being sore for a couple of days and my bumper getting pretty messed up, nothing major happened (thank God!). The guy’s insurance was USAA and I already go set up with repair and rental car (nice job USAA!) so the damage should be fixed pretty soon. Below you can find pics of the damage:

Fig.1-Final NTR Rankings

We ended the season with a final team gathering at BJ’s Brewhouse were we awarded the girls with the following awards:

#1 | Krista | Best Right Side Award
#2 | Victoria | Best Outside Award
#4 | Caroline | Best Server Award
#7 | Haley | Best Short Server Award
#8 | Cailey | Best Leader Award
#11 | Nicole | Best Attitude Award
#12 | Riley | Best Tipper Award
#13 | Kierra | Best Blocker Award
#16 | Kayla | Most Improved Award
#17 | Natalie | Best Middle Hitter Award
#18 | Bre | Best Libero Award
#83 | Ashleigh | Most Valuable Player Award

Below you can find all of the team’s results and some of the pictures that we took:

YPDF Tournament Rankings

Today, a new FREE app called Minbox was launched. It is a very fast way for mac users to share files from their desktop. The product is pretty awesome. I have already downloaded, installed it, and already took it for a test drive and I am already hooked. Maybe the best thing about it was the promo youtube video (seen above). Perhaps a tad risque with the choice of music, but definitely got me excited about the product.

Saw the video below and then created a post-it with the letter B and put behind a co-worker of mine’s chair. It made my day… 

What made your day today? Let me know!

A week later we met again and, to our surprise, C mentioned that she had gone to yet another psychic. The new one while very pricey ($100/hr) said that some DEAD ON remarks about her life and recent relationships down to length of relationships and even name’s initials. However, for her repeated disappointment, he ALSO emphasized that she would fail in the relationship department.

Today, I stumbled upon the video embedded in this post and thought of C [now would be a good time to click play] and wondered: how much of her information did C provide before her session? Did C give them her name and last name? How much of C’s personal information is available online for anyone to see? Did those mind readers/psychics use information that they found about C online (and charged her an astounding $100/hr for repeating it back to her)? More importantly, I thought about our students of today. In a world where we willingly put our information in social networks, financial websites, and that schools/university’s fail to prepare individuals to deal with their digital dossier in a responsible way how will that information be used? In the case of this video, it was used as a joke and as a warning. However, people still continue to increasingly and deliberately add their information to “the cloud” without knowing what is going to happen from it. My hope is that schools and universities react to this situation and offer digital literacy and digital citizenship courses so that future citizens do not fall pray to predators of their personal information and identity and that they don’t regret putting out information that may hurt them in their futures.

This week, I stumbled upon this beautiful picture of my hometown’s new picturesque symbol. The Octavio Frias de Oliveira bridge (pictured) opened in 2008, the last time I was home. In fact, I made sure to ask my family  members to drive me through it. With the World Cup and The Olympic Games being hosted in Brazil I hope to be able to go back (and now I have a job! That will help in the financial side of things). If I do, I will blog about it and share the pics with you all.

Love,

This week I finished reading Thomas Hager’s The Demon Under the Microscope. Since I have a pretty decent home-to-work commute, I have been entranced by the culture of audiobooks. Because of my enthusiastic description of enjoyment in listening to Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and  Victor Hugo’s FIFTY-SEVEN! hour audiobook reading of Les Miserable, my in-laws gave me a three month subscription to Audible.com (the audiobook service by Amazon.com) as a christmas gift. In that subscription I receive a credit that allows me to download a book every month.

Per my boyfriend’s request, I started off by reading Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, which had inspired him to study abroad in Hungary and Eastern Europe. The problem was that The Historian was NOT fifty-five hours long, therefore I didn’t take me a whole month to read it. Not wanting to spend a lot of money on a new $40 audiobook, I seized the opportunity of cashing in a promo code for Audiobook $5 Valentine’s Day sale. The Demon Under the Microscope was listed as one of the books available, and while I have been enjoying more of the fictiony types of books in my commute to work, I must say this was a VERY interesting, education, yet fun read.

The book tells the story of the journey behind the discovery of sulfa drugs. I am not going to reinvent the wheel here, so below you can read the the amazon.com book description:

The Nazis discovered it. The Allies won the war with it. It conquered diseases, changed laws, and single-handedly launched the era of antibiotics. This incredible discovery was sulfa, the first antibiotic. In The Demon Under the Microscope, Thomas Hager chronicles the dramatic history of the drug that shaped modern medicine.

Sulfa saved millions of lives—among them those of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr.—but its real effects are even more far reaching. Sulfa changed the way new drugs were developed, approved, and sold; transformed the way doctors treated patients; and ushered in the era of modern medicine. The very concept that chemicals created in a lab could cure disease revolutionized medicine, taking it from the treatment of symptoms and discomfort to the eradication of the root cause of illness.

A strange and colorful story, The Demon Under the Microscope illuminates the vivid characters, corporate strategy, individual idealism, careful planning, lucky breaks, cynicism, heroism, greed, hard work, and the central (though mistaken) idea that brought sulfa to the world. This is a fascinating scientific tale with all the excitement and intrigue of a great suspense novel.

For thousands of years, humans had sought medicines with which they could defeat contagion, and they had slowly, painstakingly, won a few battles: some vaccines to ward off disease, a handful of antitoxins. A drug or two was available that could stop parasitic diseases once they hit, tropical maladies like malaria and sleeping sickness. But the great killers of Europe, North America, and most of Asia—pneumonia, plague, tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera, meningitis—were caused not by parasites but by bacteria, much smaller, far different microorganisms. By 1931, nothing on earth could stop a bacterial infection once it started. . . .

But all that was about to change. . . . —from The Demon Under the Microscope

This book was definitely valid as a tool for understanding the importance of ethical research methods, especially since I am working on my dissertation research project. I used to take for granted the whole idea of antibiotics, but with this book I learned a lot about the positive aspects of using these types of medicines and the negative sides as well. Overall, a good read for $5 bucks!