Rock Out With Rock Band

Rock Band
System: PS3
Release Year: 2007
IGN Score: 9.4

Rock Band: Beatles
System: PS3
Release Year: 2009
IGN Score: 9


I first played Rock Band and Guitar Hero back in 2008 and instantly loved the concept. I was probably a year or so behind the trend when these games came out but truthfully I was just getting back into gaming at the time and I really had no idea these games existed until a couple of our friends in Erie were talking about it. We used to get together every once in a while to have a few drinks and rock out with our plastic guitars. I really feel like these games really helped to develop a pretty good friendship with several people while living in PA. Because of this I really think these games are some of the best games ever made. It allows several people to get together at once and play simultaneously, and the ones who aren't playing still enjoy it because music is being played in the background. Truthfully, one of the best gaming concepts I've seen. It is one of those things you look at and think "Why didn't I think of that?"

With that being said, I am not going to spend much time discussing the actual game. I assume we have all been exposed to these games at least a bit. Even my dad has played them. With that being said, once we moved out of Erie and back to Indiana I really haven't played the music games too much. However, since the anniversary of John Lennon's passing I have been on a big Beatles kick. Plus we went to a party a few weeks ago and someone brought their drums for guitar hero. Playing the drums that night inspired me so I purchased the Beatles edition of Rock Band for $100. It is really one of the only ways to get the drum set without spending a bundle. I also purchased the original Rock Band for $8 on Amazon.

Both of these games are pretty fantastic. The Beatles edition has most of their biggest hits and Rock Band has a ton of well known songs and artists. Plus the store allows you to purchase and download all kinds of additional tracks. Truthfully, though, I don't think either one of these games is as good as Guitar Hero III. A lot of the Beatles songs are too heavy on pop and not heavy enough on guitar to make them great songs for a guitar-based game (though they are still quite fun to play). And while Rock Band has tons of recognizable songs, I've always felt like the more obscure songs were usually the better songs to play on Guitar. Take Eric Johnson's "Cliffs of Dover" from Guitar Hero III. It is a fantastic song, both fun and challenging to play, and I had never heard of it until I first played GH III on the PS2.

At any rate, we will be rocking out to some Rock Band this weekend during a New Year's party. I hope everyone has a fun and safe weekend. Below is a YouTube video of someone getting 100% on expert on "Cliffs of Dover." Pretty amazing.

Crazy Christmas

Anytime I would tell someone I was working over the Christmas weekend they would always apologize. I don't know if they just didn't know what else to say or what. Truthfully it wasn't that big of a deal to me. As an adult Christmas just isn't as exciting as it used to be. It was fun as a kid but anymore it is just another day to me. It doesn't rank anywhere near the top of my favorite holidays. I much prefer Memorial day and Thanksgiving. At any rate, my attending was nice enough to let me have Christmas Eve off so Sarah and I were able to make it home Thursday night and spend some time with each of our families so it worked out pretty well.

The census at the hospital this weekend was pretty low truthfully but I stayed consistently busy and we had some weird stuff happen. Some of the highlights are below.

• Twenty-nine year old male with a history of Trisomy 21 (Down Syndrome) came in short of breath. He had no fever but did have an elevated white count at 18,000 and was breathing 40 to 50 times per minute. His percentage of oxygen in his blood was only 55 (normal is 80-100) on 100% oxygen. As a reference, normal atmospheric air that most people breathe is only 21% oxygen. His chest CT showed bilateral pneumonia and his left lung was approximately 80% filled with infiltrates. We ended up transferring him to Methodist so he would have better access to pulmonary specialists.
• A 72 year old female came in complaining of abdominal pain. CT showed evidence of free peritoneal air consistent with viscus perforation. She went to surgery overnight last night and was found to have a jejunal (part of the small bowel) perforation. I'd love to know how something like that happens. It's pretty much unheard of. Our surgeon, who has been practicing medicine longer than I've been alive, said this is only the second case he has ever seen.
• A 52 year old female who continues to have fevers and worsening chest x-rays with progressive dyspnea. There was a question of pulmonary embolism but her chest x-ray looks a lot like BOOP. I honestly don't know how common BOOP is but I've never seen a case before this weekend. On a side note, I have learned to take the obese middle age female cautiously. Their condition can seem to turn for the worse quickly. The last patient I saw like this had cellulitis from her foot to her naval and there was about a 6 hour period where I thought for sure she was going to get septic. The patient before that went from completely normal to dead in about 72 hours. She succumbed to strep-associated Toxic Shock Syndrome (which is actually pretty unusual). And no, it wasn't from a retained tampon.
• Saw a guy who I actually first met several months ago getting IV antibiotics to treat a variant of Pott's disease. The mycobacterium infecting his spine actually is not tuberculosis but some other species. He said he was only one of five ever documented to have this specific mycobacterium in the spine.

Hope everyone had a great Christmas holiday!

Taking One For The Team

I must have been the only resident in the program who didn't ask for time off during the holidays. Subsequently I am scheduled to work on Christmas day. I have no idea what I was thinking. Unfortunately working holidays and weekends is part of the job.

At any rate, I hope all readers have a nice Christmas with their friends and families.

Perspective on Snow

After living in Erie, PA for a couple of winters you really gain some perspective on winter weather. I was at the dentist a few weeks ago and they had the Today Show on and a weather reporter was standing at the intersection of Peach and I-90 in Erie reporting on the snowfall. There had been 36 inches of snowfall the previous week there. That is more snow than Indy gets all winter. That's why when we get 3-4 inches of snow here I really don't think much of it. Erie could easily get that much snow in an hour. The other thing is that here the snow mostly is gone off the roads by the next day whereas in Erie it wouldn't be gone until April. The biggest difference in winter weather here is ice. We get lots more ice here which I think is actually quite a bit more dangerous for traveling than snow.

Below is a picture of my Grand Prix covered in snow in Erie. Sarah and I had spent the night at a friends house and the next day when we went to retrieve my car this is what I saw. The funny thing is that as we approached the car Sarah said "Look at that loser's car!" and it turned out to be my car! One of my favorite pictures from that year.



Sarah and I watched Christmas Vacation this weekend to put us in the Christmas mood. What a great movie. I like the old vacation movies quite a bit and Christmas Vacation is no exception. So many classic lines. One of the better Christmas movies in my opinion. I think I am going to make it an annual tradition to watch it every Christmas.

My mom had a birthday over the weekend so I would like to wish her a happy birthday as well!

Attack of the Show-O, Attack!

Attack of the Show is a news & variety show featured on the G4TV channel. It focuses mainly on technology and has various segments including electronic product reviews, gaming reviews, and news regarding announcements of new products. In addition to technology each show features highlights of trending videos on YouTube. The shows every weeknight at 7 pm. I wanted to mention the show for two reasons.

I had thought of starting a blog a few times before I actually created this one. I always questioned what I would feature on the blog and who the audience would be (I guess this part is still in question). At first I thought it would be a specific blog about what happens on rotations. I decided that discussing interesting things from work would be OK, but I wanted to broaden the subject a bit. I decided instead of focusing on one topic, I would have posts on various recurring topics. Thus "Life In The Cave" as we know it was born. I got the idea of featuring numerous topics from music to sports to work from the blueprint of Attack of the Show.

The second reason why I wanted to mention Attack of the Show is because it was announced last week that co-host Olivia Munn would no longer be on the show. I am a pretty big fan of Olivia and thought she was perfect for the type of humor and content featured on the show. She also worked really well with co-host Kevin Pereira. It is sad to see her go but came as no surprise. She really hadn't been on the show much at all for the last several months and her fame has risen quite a bit in the past year so I am sure she is off to bigger and better things. With the announcement of her departure came the announcement of the show's new co-host. I was really hoping the always cute Sara Underwood would be named the new co-host. She has been hosting a lot recently in Olivia's absence. Unfortunately someone else was named the new co-host. I hope at the very least they find some other job at G4 for Sara, whether it be hosting the Feed or going out on assignment. With that being said I decided just now that I was going to name Sara the official co-host of this blog. I have the authority to do such a thing since I am the author. If you like the topics you see on this blog you would probably enjoy Attack of the Show.


Olivia Munn



Sara Underwood

Houston, We Have A Problem

Amazon.com had some great deals on movies over the black Friday weekend. I am not a huge movie fan, but with that being said there are some movies that I really enjoy so I decided to take advantage of their $8 blu-ray sale and picked up some movies for my film collection. One of the movies I purchased was the 15th Anniversary Edition of Apollo 13. I was able to watch the film again over the weekend and was reminded of what a great movie Apollo 13 is. We all know how the movie ends and yet it remains interesting because it does a great job of developing the characters and making us want them to survive. Plus it visually tells the story very well.

One of the interesting parts of the disc is all of the behind-the-scenes footage. There is an hour long clip describing how they made various parts of the film, including all of the shots in space where the actors were floating. They also interview Jim Lovell and several other people associated with NASA and the Apollo 13 mission and have a lot of stock footage from the real event. After seeing some of the stock footage and listening to people who were associated with the real event talk it becomes apparent that the movie is pretty darn accurate in telling the events that occurred during the space mission.

Apollo 13 was a space mission scheduled to land on the moon. While in transit an explosion in one of the oxygen tanks jeopardized the mission and what resulted was a string of issues that had never been planned for and had to be solved using only instruments and tools already on the spacecraft. There is so much engineering and math and thinking that goes into this stuff that it just boggles the mind. For instance, who would have thought that the spacecraft being 200 lbs lighter because they didn't gather moon rock would have made so much of a difference in their re-entry trajectory? Making things further amazing is when you look at the computer systems NASA was working with in the early 1970s which quite frankly are a joke in computing power compared to the PC I am using to type this blog in 2010.

I have been to the Kennedy Space Center in FL when I was younger and would love to go back again now that I am a bit older and understand things a bit more. I have seen a shuttle launch from a close distance (a few miles) and it is amazing. Apparently the current space shuttle is being retired in 2011. A space launch today still makes the news but is far from front page information. It is almost considered routine today. One of my favorite lines in the movie is when Jim Lovell is asked about what he thinks of the public opinion that the Apollo 13 mission is routine. He responds by saying "There is nothing routine about flying to the moon." I really couldn't agree more. I find flight in general fascinating and space flight to be just absurdly spectacular. The Apollo 13 film does a great job of telling this amazing, almost too good to be true story of NASA's "successful failure."

Gran Turismo 5: Final Impressions

Gran Turismo 5
System: PS3
Release Year: 2010
IGN Score: 8.5


Gran Turismo is one of my favorite gaming series of all time. I don't have the time logged, but it has to be in the top three or four all time for me in terms of most hours spent total playing a gaming series, with most of those hours spent on Gran Turismo 4. It's been 6 years since Gran Turismo 4 was released on the PS2. During the past 6 years we have heard a lot about Gran Turismo 5 and have been frustrated with numerous delays. I would have to say that GT5 was the most anticipated game of all time for me. I have had time to sit down and play it for more than 20 hours and have several thoughts, most of which are good but some are kind of bad.

GT5 immediately has a familiar feel. You have licensing exams, A-Spec and B-Spec, a garage, the Sunday Cup, confusing menus, they all return to GT5. It immediately feels nostalgic and for long time fans of the series I think this is a good thing. They have added some great new features as well. I love the addition of NASCAR in the game and finally the Special Challenges section is fun and makes sense. The AMG challenges around the Nurburgring are my favorite. Karting is surprisingly fun as well.

Speaking of familiar, a lot of the old tracks from previous games return in GT5. Thankfully they got rid of some of the more dreadful tracks and kept mostly the better original tracks in my opinion. Between the real tracks and original fictional tracks, the real-life tracks are better and there is a great collection of real-life tracks as well, including several famous F1 tracks like Monza and I was glad to see return of Nurburgring, Laguna Seca, and Circuit de la Sarthe, as well as the debut of Indianapolis and Daytona. Overall the track selection is quite solid and a number of terrific circuits are recognized.

I really enjoy the music while on the menu screens. The music during the races, however, is pretty bad in my opinion. I actually turned it off while I race because it was annoying me so much. Truthfully, one of the worst soundtracks of the series.

I am going to echo what numerous other reviewers have said about the graphics. The tracks and scenery look fantastic. Ninety percent of the time the cars look fantastic too, but sometimes, and usually it's with the "standard" cars, the cars look pretty average. GT5 is a pretty game for sure but I think it has solid PS3 graphics. Nothing really blew me out of the water.

The addition of on-line play was an obvious must and luckily is a ton of fun. I have met up with friends on-line three or four times and thus far have had no problems with connections or frame rates when playing over the net. Playing on-line is probably the best feature of this game in my opinion.

Finally I wanna talk about the game play, which is a huge disappointment for me. There is so much wrong with the game play in my opinion I am going to switch to bullets to make my points.

• I wrote an article back in March expressing 4 or 5 things that I wanted to see in GT5. I feel like they only kind of answered one of those things and that is the number of cars. GT games have always had 6 cars on track at once and finally that number was increased in GT5. I was hoping to see between 20 to 24. Instead I got 8-16, which isn't bad. I was glad to see they increased this number.
• The AI drivers are as dumb as ever. They are like zombies. They have no emotion, they don't react when you hit them, they never change their racing line, they basically drive like robots. I see no difference between the AI drivers in GT5 and the AI drivers in GT4.
• There still seems to be little to no consequence for hitting other cars, cutting corners, or wrecking yourself. I flipped my AMG Mercedes (which was awesome), landed on my wheels, and continued to drive to victory like nothing happened. They say there is damage but I see very little of it on screen and more than 20 hours into the game it hasn't affected any of my races at all.
• Racing ability seems to have little effect on the outcomes of races because you can still buy most of your wins. Who cares if you wreck 100 times when your car has 400 more bhp than the other drivers? It wasn't until level 16 where I came across a series where I couldn't buy/modify a car quick enough to win while driving recklessly.
• Speaking of cars, the entire system they have on this game for cars is just weird. First off, they say there is more than 1,000 cars, but you can actually only buy what seems to be a couple of hundred. Then they limit which ones you can buy based on your level. There are tons of cool cars in the used car section but they come and go without warning and often cost $10,000,000 or more. I'd love to have an old Ford GT40 but don't have $19,000,000 laying around or a level 23 ranking. Plus the cars they give you for wins are almost entirely useless and sell for next to nothing. Gone are the days where you could win a cool car that could actually be used in a series then sell it for big cash. Now we get crappy cars and the ability to look at a lot of cool cars but not buy any of them.
  
• The rain effects and racing at night with your headlights are really cool additions to this game. Why aren't they used more often? I am on level 19 and have only seen this aspect of the game sparingly.

I really feel like this game focuses way too much on the cars and the game play suffers as a result. I love buying cool cars (the ones that are available) and taking them to the shop and adding horsepower and handling and all of that stuff to see how fast I can go. One of my favorite things to do on the game (beside on-line play) is buy a new car and fix it up and take it to the track to do individual hot laps to see which car in my garage is the quickest. I really think the game shines in this aspect. Each car handles different, sounds different, drives different, and you can really feel that as you turn lap after lap searching for perfection. When you are in races you loose all of this as you blow by Honda Civics in your Bugatti Veyron. I think the game would have been much better if they would have dropped about 400 of the pointless cars (does anyone honestly enjoy the Lupo Challenge??) and focused a bit more on actual racing.

With all of this being said, I do think the game is fun and overall is good. I love racing and racing games and Gran Turismo is one of my favorite gaming series of all time. With that being said, I was expecting the best racing game ever. I don't think GT5 is even the best racing game on the PS3. The on-track action in F1: 2010 is much better. If anything, I think GT5 could have easily been called Gran Turismo 4: HD as it is basically a fancier, shinier version of the previous game from 2004.

Let It Be

Wanted to take the time to mention John Lennon as today is the anniversary of his death. I don't even know where to begin with discussions on Lennon and the Beatles. They were a music tour de force, an amazing band and unfortunately people of my generation will never get to experience any band quite like them while in their prime. Lennon and the Beatles are rare pop-culture icons who continue to be popular decades after their rise to fame. Song after song they display a perfect mix of lyrics and music unmatched by any band I've ever listened to. Among the best song writers of all time. I loaded up some Beatles today in my music player to pay tribute.






Last night as I was flipping through the channels I came across A Charlie Brown Christmas on ABC. I don't really ever get into Christmas music or the whole Christmas spirit all that much to be honest, but there are a few of the Christmas shows that I do like and A Charlie Brown Christmas is my favorite of them all. It's funny because I enjoyed the show as a kid but I don't think I ever caught on as to how depressed Charlie Brown is during the episode. It is almost sad to watch. I really enjoy the music in the show and my favorite part of all, probably the one reason I try to tune in every Christmas, is when the Peanuts gang is dancing on stage. It never fails to bring a smile to my face.

No Longer Monopoly Money

I used to always joke each year as I was filling out my FAFSA and student loan information how the amount of money being borrowed was so absurd it seemed like Monopoly money (i.e. not real). I'm not laughing so much now. I've been trying since June to get all of my loans consolidated with the department of education and the process is still on going. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. The US Government isn't exactly known for its efficiency. In the meantime, the grace period on all of my loans has ended. I was able to place the loans on forbearance with one of my lenders without any problems at all. The other lender, however, is a different story. I've already applied for forbearance with this second lender once. Instead of placing all of the loans into forbearance like anyone with any sense at all would have done, they only placed one of the loans into forbearance, leaving two in the normal repayment schedule. I sent in a second forbearance application last week. Unfortunately it hasn't arrived in time and thus I got a bill today from this lender that was slightly over $1,000. I was able to call them and get the payment reduced to a little over $500, but this is still a lot of money to spend on loans every month. And that isn't even covering half of my total loans. I am going to be checking thoroughly over the next week to make sure the second forbearance application went through. I hate to continue to push off payments as more interest gets added to the principal, but at this stage of the game we can't even afford to make interest payments on these loans. It's ridiculous.

I went to the dentist the other day. Either advancements in dentistry have occurred since I was a kid, or my pain threshold has raised since I was a kid because going to the dentist isn't nearly as uncomfortable as I remember it being when I was younger. I actually didn't feel anything - not even the numbing injection. I like my dentist quite a lot. She is a little fancier than I am used to but her and her office staff are really nice.

Public Speaking

This weekend was the Indiana Osteopathic Association (IOA) Winter Update conference. It was located in downtown Indianapolis. It is attended by physicians mostly from Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan. Most of the physicians in attendance are primary care docs. Anyway, I volunteered to speak at this conference a few months ago. Speaking in public is somewhat nerve racking to begin with, but speaking to an audience made up of physicians who have more experience than you adds an additional amount of anxiety. I could choose any topic so I decided to do my talk on concussions. Obviously concussions are in the news a lot these days regarding long term increases in morbidity and mortality due to repeated hits to the head seen in football players. I focused most of my talk on acute management, return to play protocols, and current research. I just gave this talk a few hours ago and overall I think it went pretty well. Funny thing - the fire alarm went off and the whole room had to be evacuated just minutes before my talk. You cannot plan for stuff like that, obviously, which made for an interesting beginning to my talk.

Last week I switched from pediatrics to internal medicine. My pediatric rotation was at a different hospital from where I usually work. Overall I enjoyed my pediatrics rotation. Our hospital is very medicine heavy so I was able to see a lot of stuff that I've never seen before, including a text book case of Kawasaki Syndrome. Besides seeing kids on the pediatric floor, I also spent a lot of time in labor & delivery seeing newborn babies and in the neonatal intensive care unit seeing premature infants. I even got to do some procedures there like lumbar punctures and UV lines. Overall it was a good experience and in general I enjoy working with kids so it's something I'd like to do more of in the future. My only complaint is that I don't think the hospital is used to having residents around and subsequently sometimes didn't really know how to use me well. I voiced my opinion on this to a few people so hopefully things will be better in the future.

Like I said, I am back on internal medicine. I feel like I've done IM 1,000 times at this hospital. It is something I am pretty used to so it is starting to become a bit routine. So far nothing interesting to report in the first week.