…Well, that took less time than I expected. Things look more or less exactly the way they did before I lost my customizations.

It would appear that my hosting service fell prey to some script-kiddie shenanigans the other day. All is well, sort of; the databases survived, so my posts and gallery photos are all safe. My WordPress theme, however, bit the dust and I never got around to making a backup copy. At some point I’ll have to re-write it, but that’s a pretty minor inconvenience.

Welcome to the newly revised blairlee.com. My goal is to make the blog section easy to read and content-centric, with just a splash of color. Let me know if you can’t stand it…but I really like it.

There are currently two links in the upper-right corner of this page. The “Gallery” link will take you to a collection of some of the better photographs I’ve taken; it’s a bit empty at the moment, but expect it to fill up soon. There are plenty of good shots from the past few years, and now, having just bought a real camera two days ago, I think there will be many more to come. The “Cars” link will take you to my old car pages. I haven’t updated them in a while. I plan to make a couple of summary updates on the pages that need them (most notably my E30 M3 project), but they’ll remain pretty static after that.

There will be more changes to come, I’m sure; for now, feel free to look around.

Development of my new blog is coming along. Expect the switch in the next week or two.

As far as medical school goes…when we left off, it was late night on June 1st and I’d just submitted my AMCAS application. My file was verified by AMCAS on 6/8, and secondaries started to arrive in the first week of July. Secondaries come in all sort of flavors; some asked for no more than a signature and a check, while others had multiple essays. As of today, I’ve yet to complete two secondary apps. I’ve had Duke’s secondary in front of me for a while, but it’s by far my longest and I just haven’t had the guts to sit down and work my way through it yet. UNC has yet to send me anything beyond acknowledgement that they received my primary app; this, apparently, is not unusual for UNC. The rest of my secondaries have been submitted. This process took me through most of July and August.

In related news, I got my MCAT scores on 6/15. I’m satisfied with the results: 37R total, 13 in Physical Sciences, 12 in Verbal Reasoning, R in Writing Sample, 12 in Biological Sciences. I think I could’ve done slightly better, but 37 already puts me in the 98th percentile of all MCAT test takers. I’m not complaining.

Things started to get interesting in the application process in August, but that’s a story for another day.

Looking back, I see that my last school-related journal entry is much older than I’d previously thought. A lot has happened on that front since then, and I plan to present it in chunks for easier digestion. If I may tease the audience for a moment, though, I will say that my medical school application(s) are in great shape.

On a side note, I’m toying with switching publishing systems from Blogger to WordPress. If things look very different around here one day, that will be why.

I think we’re back!

Testing…

Things may look a little strange here temporarily. I will be switching to a new hosting company, so it may take a day or two before everything gets sorted out correctly. Hang in there…

Cool — I just discovered that Scott Liles linked me from his most recent journal entry. Thanks, Scott! (If you haven’t already, check out his site.)

Say what you might, PHP’s integration with HTML is nearly perfect. I haven’t touched my “blog of the future” in weeks, but this morning I managed to insert the code into the template I use for this page. Seems to work well; I just need to tweak the formatting (bold the date, for example) and play with a few other things.

I can’t wait for my eventual implemention of this new format. These little snippets of my life are fine, but I look forward to sitting down and writing longer passages that perhaps define me better than what I do from day to day.