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Today's Foxtrot is a commentary on how little people care about the security of the vote. It's great, really.

It's incredibly easy for someone to steal the vote when using electronic voting machines with little more than a basic knowledge of computing technology and an agenda.

As Jon points out, it's a bipartisan issue. There are ways of making your congressional people aware of it, too. It's certainly an article worth reading. Here's a PDF of it so you can print it for offline viewing (since it's pretty long).

My blog format is a bit too narrow for it, so click the image for the full view.

Voting, security, democracy, e-voting, foxtrot, comics

I've got about 10 minutes to kill before I need to make a phone-call, and I've not written in a while, so I figured I would write a quick entry since I've been feeling introspective of late.

It's October now, and in the last 4 months, I have made several significant changes in the way I go about my life. I made a conscious decision back in June to stop doing things the way "they're supposed to be done" and have opted instead to do the things that bring me happiness and fulfillment. There's been some overlap, but there wasn't a whole lot. Not at first.

Bulleted lists are always fun, so here's one so I don't ramble for paragraphs:

• I left pharmacy school
• I decided to only do things that make me happy
• I have realized that sometimes it's better to bite your tongue and do things you don't like rather than trying to fight The Man. Not all battles are worth fighting. It's not worth it on a personal or professional level.
• I've gotten rid of all unnecessary overhead in my life. A concept I will go into more detail about on my blog here later. Briefly, though, that refers to getting rid of extraneous distractions in one's life, not lowering one's electric bill.

Somewhere along the way everything started to change very quickly:

• Instead of barely passing grades, I'm getting straight As.
• I've decided I want to go back to MCP. (Readers of this blog with a memory know that's a mind-boggling statement.)
• I have decided that I'd rather learn than do almost anything else.*
• I think I may go to med school when I am done with pharmacy. But not before.

There were several catalysts for some of these changes in action and attitude. The main one has been that my mom told me that she won't cosign on all my student loans any longer. That made me angry at first, but now I'm grateful for two reasons: I already have a mountain of debt; and it has really made me get my priorities right in a more meaningful way than "gee maybe I should stop clowning around in school."

* In terms of "learning" I mean that I have taken to reading my physiology book for fun. Really. I took our therapeutics book home from work, and I'd take Drug Facts and Comparisons home too, if I could get away with it. I spend all of my free time not occupied with work or school reading and researching things. Because I want to. In fact, I have a list of things that I want to learn about on my Desktop.

In my Facebook profile I have said that "Rian is feeling spongy" or "Rian is a sponge". This is because I have re-developed the ability to read and retain almost all information after only reading it once: an ability I lost somewhere in the early stages of high school. Along with this has been an ability to study and absorb heavy information for long periods of time. On Saturday I worked hard for about 13 hours straight with no artificial help save 2 cups of coffee in the morning. I haven't done that since I was taking t, I didn't know I could do it without stimulants.

Suffice it to say that I'm happier now than I've been in a long time. Most of my days are spent in a state of autotelic flow, and it's not even a battle to get to that point any longer.

Bumps in the road aren't a problem any longer, either. I spent a significant chunk of free time with someone whom I love very much this past weekend who needed company. This meant having to re-arrange my remaining free time drastically to accommodate. I didn't mind at all, but six months ago, I wouldn't have been able to adapt like that. It's a refreshing change.

Flow, psychology, self-actualization

So I'm not in pharmacy school at the moment — though I hope to return in Fall 2007 — so I'm taking courses at UMass Lowell. I've changed majors to psych just to make it easy in the meantime. Anyway, I wasn't expecting it to be quite this easy. I haven't taken courses that required so little effort since I was in early high school. While I am getting mostly As, I find myself dissatisfied because the work is so utterly unchallenging.

Fast forward to yesterday morning around 7.30am: I discovered yesterday that I had a research paper due today by 11.59pm. Between then and midnight tonight I'm scheduled for 15 hours on the Pharm. Oops. Anyway, of the 5 topics on the list, the one that seemed the least interesting at first glance ended up being the most interesting upon closer inspection, and now I find myself biting into a fairly information-dense biochemistry paper discussing the viability of using ADAM 12 — a disintegrin-containing metalloprotease — as a breast cancer screening test. Since it can be isolated in urine, it's far less invasive than other tests.

It's actually been pretty fun so far. I'm feeling the crunch (been up since 4am), which is not something I've felt in quite a little while, and it's invigorating. The material is pretty cool, and it's relevant to medicine and pharmacy, and since that's what I'm truly interested in, it's been a nice breath of fresh air.

It's also nice to have something challenging to sink my teeth into for a change.