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Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Some stuff arrives for me from India; plus, a little loud thinking

Okay, so our local Indian TV-fridge-A/C repairer is Mr. Niyaz Shaikh, a good friend. I requested him to bring some things from my Mumbai home on his way back to the Kingdom from his holiday, to which he had gone over a month ago. He lives in Uttar Pradesh, but flies in and out of India ex-Mumbai, so this thing was doable. I sent a list of things I wanted to my family back in India, and over the last 45-odd days, they set about collecting all the stuff. This included, among other things, my original M.D. and MMC registration certificates (which I had sent to my place for some official work), my Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (KPW) (which I had bought online and which had been delivered to my India address), a new 32-GB Sandisk USB drive which I had purchased online for a special price of just Rs. 900/=, some eatables, some masalas, etc. etc. 

Thus, it was a great pleasure to receive all these things safely from Mr. Niyaz when he arrived back in Al Muwayh. He had taken good care of the bag that all the items had been sent in. I am truly grateful to him. 

The Kindle is so easy to operate. However, used to Samsung smart phones and other tablet devices, the humdrum look of a book reader was a little unsettling and depressing. It has a great interface, no doubt; its fully charged battery should last more than a fortnight, and perhaps even a month, before being needed to be re-charged. I already have many free Kindle-books through my account, and occasionally read them on the Kindle PC or Android app. Once I connected my KPW to a wi-fi account, I was easily able to download all those books on to my device. Now, I can read them on the device whenever I want. Believe me, the experience is great, as the device allows you to change the font, the font size, the brightness of the screen, and so on, and also allows you to highlight text, book mark things you like, add notes, and check meanings of words through a downloaded Oxford dictionary (should you need to). Additionally, you can buy more books, or newspaper subscriptions, or magazine subscriptions through the Amazon store, and keep updating your library.

The Sandisk Cruze has a pre-loaded "Secure Access" program that you can install on to your computer. This allows you to store important documents into a "Vault" that is more like a cloud storage. This is additional to the disk space the device itself has, which, in my case, is 32 GB.

In other news, tomorrow, I will go to Taif to courier my application to sit in the MRCPCH Clinical exams in India in September 2014. I must leave early, and return by lunch, as Dr. Yasser has expressed his desire to go to Madina, Tomorrow happens to be his last working day in our hospital, and from the next day, I would be the lone pediatrician in Al Muwayh.

I made my first chapatis yesterday using the automatic chapati machine that I had brought back with me from India when I came back to SA after the last holidays in January. The result was not bad at all, but the chapatis looked a little undercooked and felt a little harder than normal. Anyways, I first viewed a nice 10-minute video (You Tube) on how to use these automatic devices. Hence, I am happy with my less-than-perfect result.

Lastly, as a Patient Safety director, my first three weeks have been quite okay. I have designed a new protocol (here they call it policy), had an inspection round of all the wards, had a meeting with all the nurses to refresh their knowledge on matters related to Patient Safety, and shot off many requests to the administration, such as requisition for equipment, etc. I also have an office on the upper floor, where they have given me a chair, a desk, a PC and a basic B/W printer to better manage my new responsibilities.

And, oh yes, I finally sent my June vacation papers from the hospital's HR department for sanctioning of my short holiday.

That's it for now ... more tomorrow. Thanks for reading. Once again, I appeal to you all, my dear readers, to let me know how you find the entry, and comment here if you wish. - Taher

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