Sunday, December 16, 2007

Clinical Reflections


Clinical Reflections
I have two more months of holidays to go. This time will be well spent, revising stuff I learnt over last year. I guess I have reached a point in my education where dry memorization doesnt work anymore. The bottom line is that I have to put more thought/thinking/mental effort/focus into my work. I have started a new blog to fulfill this purpose. I will be updating it with things that cross my mind that I feel are related to my course. Medicine is about familiarization and application of knowledge. The inaugural post is about angioplasty - a topic that i happened to hear about, and subsequently look up, when a relative had heart palpitations.


All About Banners
It took me awhile to come up with a suitable banner for the new site. It had to be something that reflected the subject matter. Initially i used a red crystal (alternative to the red cross/crescent/star/lion) and WHO caduceus (snake thingy).




I did a bit of reading about the two symbols. Apparently the red crystal is protected by the Geneva convention, and using it is a violation of international law. The same goes for the WHO watermark I used. I decided to remove the WHO watermark and use just the crystal symbol instead. In much the same way as some videogames (eg. Call of Duty) replaced the internationally protected red cross symbol with an army green cross, I changed the colour of the red crystal to army green.



The problem now was that the banner looked ugly. Imagine the banner with the above symbol and no WHO caduceus. It didnt even feel like it had anything to do with medicine. I then set off to look up wikipedia for some opensource images that made a viewer think "medicine" on first glance. The free to use images werent of the best quality, but would suffice for my banner with some editing. I decided to use the image of a syringe and needle. Sthethescopes are too cliche.




After playing around with it awhile, I came up with another banner.




It still somehow didnt have the feel I wanted the new blog to have. Working on GIMP (opensource, free photoshop) I came up with a suitable banner a few hours later.



Click the banner above to drop by my new site!

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