Five days over in Zalm and not much to write ...

Unless you count for the umpteen movies stored on my laptop that I have watched/am planning to watch over the next several days. Work here is much less compared to Al Muwayh. The Out-patient department sees a load of less than 10 patients in 9 hours! Accommodation on the first floor of the hospital is good. I have the last room in a row of seven rooms ... a blessing, because the Mobily network is best here. I have taken my chapatis from Al Muwayh to Zalm, and I prefer to eat those instead of the refined-flour khubz that they give us thrice a day. For the last week, I was alone, but from today, the original Pediatrician of Zalm, Dr. Hani Moharram, is back. We are thus, two doctors, with not much work to divide between us.

The hospital continues to be better than the Al Muwayh one. Not only is it newer, it is managed much more efficiently. They have done quite well in the annual inspection of the Infection Control Department (they got 95% on their assessment, which means they are the best peripheral hospital in the Taif region!) and the Patient Safety Department (where, too, they are no. 1 among peripheral hospitals, with 94% assessment). 

The unreliable internet means that I have to depend upon the help of an Egyptian radiologist who is staying in the room next to mine. He has a STC 4G router, and when he turns it on, the net is faster than a bullet train! Sometimes, though, he removes the SIM card from the router and puts it inside his mobile phone ... thereby disabling his WIFI. I tried to buy a new STC 2GB net card, and although it worked quite well from the morning until the evening, it has stopped connecting since then.

Dr. Magdy, my old friend from Al Muwayh, came over to Zalm some months ago, and has been working here since then. He informed me yesterday, though, that his request for transfer to the Children's Hospital in Taif has been accepted. Today morning, he finally left for Taif. As Dr. Parvez and Dr. Rahim Baksh are also absent, I am having to live without live company from Indians/Pakistanis or any south Asians.

That's all for today. Will return after some days to fill you in on what is happening.

P.S. I cleared the IELTS exam (Academic mode) with flying colours, getting 8.5 out of a possible 9.0 in the exam.

... And now, back in Al Muwayh, on duty

I returned to Al Muwayh in the evening on Saturday. The return trip was with Dr. Niaz Qureshi, the ObGy specialist who works with me in Al Muwayh, and who was also, like me, in Taif for the previous few days. He stays with a friend in a place called Arafa, which is about 35 km from Taif on the way to Al Muwayh. So all I had to do was to pick him up from his station. It was a comfortable ride for us, and we reached our village around half past seven. 

The news from Al Muwayh was nothing much. I had my Skype session at about eight p.m. with three of my colleagues in attendance. All three were females - one, a pediatrician from Mumbai, and two of them, both Egyptian but working in Saudi Arabia. My colleague Dr, Sanjay joined us too after a while and we had good sessions on case presentations and a small didactic talk by one of my Egyptian doctor friends.

For dinner, I had the dal and rice that my room-mate Dr. Afzal had made. His cooking skill is much better now than when he had first arrived in the Kingdom, and it was food that was good and wholesome. 

The switch I made from the modem-based net connection to a wired DSL network has made a significant difference to my internet access. I am now able to open all websites pretty quickly and also do the Skype studies in the evening without much of a problem. This means a loss of nearly SR 350 to me, but, seeing that this is for exams that I plan to give in January, I guess it is okay to take this loss. I am trying to sell off my modem and card to someone else, even if it is at a discount, so let's see where this goes. 

One more thing. Inspired by my attempt to do a crash diet a week and a half ago, my Pakistani acquaintance Mr. Ameer Ali Burq has also begun the diet in right earnest. As per his updates, he has already lost over 5 kg in the first four days! More strength to him. God Bless him and the GM diet, which has changed the lives of thousands of people all over the world.

That's about it.

Day 132, Monday. 26th March, 2012

I was planning to take a day's leave on the coming Wednesday and travel to Ta'if, where I had some work related to the bank account I have in India, and to then proceed to Mecca for my third Umrah. I was mentally building up to this since the last few days, and went to the medical director to seek permission for the leave. Fate, however, had decreed otherwise. It seems that the director had received a formal request to send a pediatrician to Zalm General Hospital, located at Zalm, a small village about 50 km north of Al Muweh, to replace their own pediatrician who needed leave for three days. One of us, i.e. either yours truly, or my co-Pediatrician, would have to go to Zalm by Tuesday evening and stay there till Saturday morning. As my colleague Dr. Yasser was on call this week, it would be my "turn" to go to Zalm, and hence, leave to go to Ta'if  on Wednesday was not possible.

This considerably dampened my spirits for a short while, but I decided then and there to try and go to Ta'if today itself. I sought verbal consent from my co-ped Dr. Yasser, then went home to pack a few things for an overnighter to Ta'if, and returned to the hospital to join a few nurses who had already "booked" a hospital ambulance to go to Ta'if the same day. I was told that they would start after the Dhuhr prayers. I waited patiently for the same. However, the driver had not turned up until almost half past one. When he did turn up, he was informed about my intention to join the nurses to go to Ta'if, but due to some reason, he dilly-dallied the departure for a further 30-40 minutes. Then, just a few minutes before our intended departure, the ER received a road-accident patient who came in very severely injured. It was decided that we would accompany the patient on his transfer to Ta'if, and so, our departure was delayed by a further 1 1/2 hours. 

In the event, I remained in the ER till almost 3:45 p.m., when the ambulance finally started off with the nurses, the ER resident who would accompany the patient, and myself. We reached Ta'if at about half past five, and I got off at a turn-off point where the ambulance and the rest of its occupants would proceed to the King Abdel Aziz Speciality Hospital (KAASH). I first went to a local eatery where I had a kabab frankie (it was delicious) with sweet-lime juice. Then, I went on to the bank office to complete my official work.

After this, I contacted Dr. Asadulla, the Pakistani surgeon whom I have befriended, and he asked me to come near his house in Bukhariya after Maghrib, and he would assist me in getting a hotel room for the night.  
So it was that I walked about half a km from the Panda supermarket where the bank office was located, down Abu Baker Street, to finally reach Bukhariya. I met Dr. Asadulla, and, with his help, I was able to secure a room for myself in one of the small hotels located in the vicinity of his residence and a stone's throw away from the Indian souk located behind the Gazzaz mall in Ta'if city centre. The room was actually a BHK type of accommodation, and although the facilities were simple, it had the advantage of a quiet location, reasonable charges (SR 90 per night after considerable bargaining by Asad), free wireless internet access, working AC units in the bedroom as well as the living room, and clean bedsheets. I settled in, then took a bath and refreshed myself. I sat for a while to surf the net. Dr. Asad, meanwhile, went off to meet a few more doctors - one of them being a newly arrived Pediatrician who was to join a military hospital in Ta'if. When Dr. Asad came back, I met with his new guests, who, in fact, also visited my room as the new doctor needed a room for a month or so before he got his own rented accommodation in Ta'if. In fact, this promise to the manager of my hotel helped bargain my room price down from SR 130 (his original demand) to SR 90 (which I paid). 

Dr. Asad then left me for the night, and I went to the Indian souk to buy kadhi-patta (an essential that is not available in Al Muweh), and then have an amazing dinner at the Asian Restaurant located there. I had the Indian-style tandoori roti with Mutton Kadhai and rice to end off the meal. With a soft drink, it cost me SR 18, and it was worth its cost.After dinner, I returned to the room, and then began downloading various things on the laptop to take advantage of the free access to relatively rapid internet. I fell asleep a little after midnight. This was a great day indeed. By the morning, I had downloaded four complete movies, and about 17 episodes of Series 7 of How I Met Your Mother!

About Google Knol

As most of the net-savvy readers know, Google Knol has been officially launched about a day ago! I have already reviewed a few of the posts submitted by others, and also written one item related to sleeping habits of children! To learn more about the site, click here. To read my first article there, click here.

My expectation is that while Knol is not likely to outpace the sheer size of Wikipedia (see this for Wiki), in a year's time or so, it will start giving competition to the latter. And the benefit will be to the users, who will now be able to get two major sources for any item they want to search. Google knol has a few more advantages: it permits collaborative writing in addition to private items and public editing. Wiki has only the last option for most of its usual articles, but it has begun to close some of the items for editing once they realise that the items are perfect, factual, and do not need any further elaboration or editing.

So let us see how far Knol takes us ...

Firefox Mozilla Stable version 3.0

A few days ago, Firefox 3.0 stable version was released by Mozilla. I downloaded it on the very first day, as I had tried the beta version earlier and had found some of its features very innovative. Now, lest someone thinks me to be a guru on the internet and its related subjects, let me confess that I am as far from being a net-guru as Plutoid (the new name of the erstwhile planet Pluto, the solar system's recently demoted 9th body from the sun) is from the sun! I was interested a) because I am always into checking any and every program for updates and b) because of its great new features.

The features I really liked were the amazing number of compatible add-ons such as extensions, themes and so on; the ability to add a web-page as a "favourite" by simply clicking on a star symbol on the right end of the address bar box; the drop-down list in the address box that lists the title of the web-page, its URL short name, its actual url and some extra contextual material; inherent customisation of its look; the ability to integrate thunderbird and its mail application to it; the excellent download utility; and the reduced number of unnecessary buttons and the like on the browser.

I am telling you all: download this stable version of FF3 and do all of us a favour: it is simple, intuitive and great for those who do not mind a little extra work to enhance their browsing experience.

To download it, click here.

To look for add-ons, browse this page.

My first income from my net activities

Although I have earned money earlier too because of my net presence, I was pleasantly surprised last week when I received my first ever cheque for contributing an article to http://www.merinews.com.

I joined this interesting site a few months ago on prompting by a person called Shilpadeep on the net. She sent me a link to the site and interested me enough to visit that link and become a "Citizen Journalist" or "CJ". I wrote a string of four articles on the medical "industry". These articles were well received but did not garner the kind of attention that I was looking for. Then, sometime in August, I wrote an article based on my real life encounters with Orkut. This artocle became a rage, so much that I received both fan-mail and hate-mail for it. In the end, the Merinews editorial team elevated it to a "Merinews Pick" and sent me the payment as a recognition-cum-reward for doing what I had already done.

Do visit the site mentioned above, and use the search option to see my articles. Search for "Dr. Taher" without the quote marks and the next box selected to "by Contributor".

esnips

Hi! In this entry, I want to share with you all - this amazing photo and file sharing website - http://www.esnips.com. It shares some of the features with other phot0-sharing sites like picasa on the web, webshots, flickr etc, but the unique thing is that it is fully integrated with the web-browser that you are using and comes with a nifty toolbar that lets you upload not just photos but books, music files, program files and so on. Users from all over the world can see your uploaded files, and conversely, you can browse the folders of other members too. Membership and download of the toolbar are free and easy to go through.

Check out my folder here: http://www.esnips.com/user/drtaher