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Welcome to eloquensa! Currently masquerading as a newspaper hot off the press for want of a better idea, the story behind this edition of my world is a fairly simple one. In order to unfold it, one need only use the navigation above. Some articles will be viewer censored, and all commenting is only available once registered and logged in.

· behind the scenes

I'm Melissa; pretend journalist and currently real-life accountant wannabe. I used to be a kid in highschool, but I've since kicked the habit. At 18 years of age I'm just moving through life, enjoying my free-time and earning lots of money whilst still living with my parents. Continued on page 2...

XHTML - Icelandic for “painful death”
September 8, 2004 | Filed under: Daily Grind, Educate Me, Online Stuff

“I don't mind spending every day, out on your corner in the pouring rain. Look for the girl with the broken smile, ask her if she wants to stay a while, and she will be loved.. Tap on my window, knock on my door. I want to make you feel beautiful.. Maroon 5 - She Will Be Loved”

Okay, so I was typing an entry for Eloquensa the other day when disaster struck: I actually had a blackout. Because of this, I not only lost everything I was going to say, but a fair few hours of electricity. Pah, you say, you can’t cope without your electricity for a few hours? Of course not. When the power goes I lose internet, TV, and phone.. then I have to start talking to my family. :P I also had to do homework by candlelight, that’s how sad things got. But never fear.. my iPod and mobile phone run on batteries. :)

Well. I’ve taken a big step towards furthering myself and my knowledge of website coding, and I’ve begun making this site XHTML 1.0 Transitional. That’s right, the new generation of coding! :O The only problem is.. IT’S SO GODDAMN FUSSY. :P Sure, I knew it was going to take effort, but I didn’t know it was going to make me put alt tags on every image and learn to only use a CSS ID once in a page, rather than 20 odd times. Not to mention the javascript mouseovers for the navigation, “onMouseOver” is unacceptable now - XHTML isn’t clever enough for capitals.

I guess a large proportion of people who know me would now be asking: “So why is she doing it?” Because I can. :P More precisely, I decided I want to join an elite clique thing and felt my site wasn’t up to scratch, and that I should do something to make it cooler (no, I don’t think any of you were fooled into thinking that wanting to better myself was actually the reason - eh, I tried :P).

As much as I’d like to continue bitching about XHTML, I won’t, because I’m sure if you know what it is you already sympathise with me, and if you don’t you’re wondering when I’m going to get a life. So, instead, I’ll tell you about the wonders of work experience. :D Read on, gentle viewers*.

Optometry: was great. I went there for the first two days of the week, and I got to sit in on all sorts of eye exams. I mean, I can’t really explain why it’s so good, because unless you’re queer like I am you won’t appreciate it, but it really is. Eyes are so damn pretty under the microscope, and they’re so complex and interesting with all the different factors you have to take into account when something goes wrong. After a while I felt kind of guilty that I sort of *wanted* someone with something wrong to come in, because when everyone’s eyes are fine it’s a bit repetitive. :P Although, I did get to see a guy with some UV damage to the cornea, and a young(ish) girl who’d worn her contact lenses too long. Contact lense wearers out there: Don’t do that! She got an ulcer on her cornea that nearly caused her to have permanent blurriness in an area of her vision.

Pathology: Mmmm, the smell of fresh blood in the fridge.. oh how it’s not so pleasant. :P Pathology was really good; it was interesting certainly, and I liked talking to a lot of the people, but it really showed me how much I don’t want to do that for a living. The first day was data entry, that was satisfying as we got around 800+ people into the system in that one day, and I played a small role in getting that done.

The second day I was following around a biochemist, Amanda, who was pretty funny and explained to me how boring her job was. I also got to go to the histology section (by far my favourite), where I got to watch the trainee pathologists cutting up bits of people to make sure there’s nothing abnormal in their “amputation”, and if there is it’s made into a slide for examination. My experiences: lung, pancreas x2, chunk out of someone’s shoulder with lesions through it, 2.4kg of waste product from some woman’s breast reduction, uterus and ovaries/tubes 4x the normal size full of cysts, lymph nodes from the neck (enlarged), etc.

The third day was pretty boring and creepy actually - I spent the first half of the day in bactology, which can I tell you absolutely STINKS.. in a literal kind of way. You may as well be a toilet cleaner, and I don’t see the fascination with identifying different strains of bacteria/virus by whether they’re green, yellow, make the blood go yellow or look cute and furry. The second half of the day I was in haematology, where they look at blood cells and mostly do a full blood count test (with a machine, that does everything, and you just have to put the tube in there and watch, bored out of your mind) and some other stuff. It was an exciting day for them, though, because they found someone with malaria in their blood. After that I ran away to the histology section.

To those of you who made it down to here, congratulations. :P I think that could possibly be the longest post I’ve made where I’ve been talking, and not filling out some quiz. Or maybe that was the post where I was bitching about Dr Croyle.. Oh well. I’ll update again soon, maybe. :P

* Buffy reference, don’t be too scared. It’s good for you.

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Site Updates:
- Removed: 1 hostee. Ben has moved on to his new domain name. :)
- Changed: Navigation. Added some new content. 1, 2, 3.
- Changed: Song on the rotation page.
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Composed by Melissa at 3:22pm ·

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