what do you mean you don't use PubMed!!!??!?!?!?!

My advisor never uses PubMed. He was utterly confused when I asked about how I could get the University's subscription/fulltext access. *sigh*

Part of what I view as a University's job is supporting academic research. And a huge part of that is subscribing to lots and lots of online resources such as Ovid, JSTOR, and especially PubMed so that researchers, professors, students,etc. can use them. Or at least, having easily accessible paper versions of some journals! Apparently, that is not the case here or anywhere else in Japan that people here have been. Individual professors subscribe to journals of interest, off of their grant money, entirely for themselves. My professor subscribes, most notable, to NEJM and to various Japanese public health journals. He reads papers relevant to his field, and if there are papers in the references that he wants, but which are in journals he does not subscribe to, he asks his friend at a pharmaceutical company to get them for him! Apparently, his friend is pretty high up in a major pharma company, and ironically, THEY have access to all kinds of information--but the university doesn't. Go figure. It's just completely amazing to me, considering that PubMed is the beginning and ending of every research project for practically anybody in the health sciences in the United States. Apparently, not so here. And, it's not as though language is the only barrier. If there were some Japanese version of PubMed with Japanese journals that everybody subscribed to, then fine. But no, despite all the environmental awareness, people here still kill trees by subscribing to paper journals--and only a limited number at that. If I browse PubMed and see something I want that wasn't published in NEJM, I'm up a creek. I suppose I can ask my professor to fwd it to his friend...but seriously, I'm used to downloading anything and everything remotely of interest to look at. I'm going to have to be more selective now.

Times like these, I start to miss Harvard. Do I sound like a spoiled brat or what? I just take all of those academic privileges for granted, and now I feel seriously handicapped without them! Some other people I've talked to miss the social life, the people--I miss the infrastructure. I had a pretty horrific meal at the University dining hall today that really made me miss Harvard. All in all, even though we joke about Mather House being ugly, I'd take the Mather dining hall any day over the Ehime University one, which compares unfavorably even with hospital cafeterias.

In other news, I just reformatted my computer last night. I ended up with some vicious malware that I couldn't get rid of. It replaced my desktop with a horrible image which was a link to download more spyware. It popped up every 2 seconds prompting me to run some cleaner and download more spyware to supposedly "clean" my computer. It was sooo annoying and pretty scary, actually. Tech forums gave no answer besides reformat, so thanks to the Thinkvantage blue recovery button, I completely restored to factory settings. But since then I've been reinstalling software, and actually uninstalling software too. Unfortunately, laptops come with tons of crap pre-installed on them and about 10 million things set to startup with Windows, so I had to go through all of that and delete it, one by one. Not to mention locate anti-virus software and immediately scan! Between last night and today, I've already gotten several viruses. Man, the internet is a dangerous place.

So the only redeeming factor yesterday was my cooking success. I've decided that I don't need a Chinese cookbook after all--almost everything I need can be found online, often times in multiple versions so I can pick and choose. So last night I sallied forth into the world of "hong shao" cooking, or red-braised cooking. Before getting to hong shao yu (red braised fish) which is one of my favorite foods of all time, I decided to start with pork instead. Ahhhh!!! so good!! I had no idea before looking up recipes that hong shao basically means braised in soy sauce. Hong shao rou (red braised pork) is basically little cubes of that really fatty pork (you know, the kind that has layers of fat/skin sandwiched between the layers of meat) simmered for an hour or more with ginger and garlic and any optional vegetables (often carrots or potatoes). The simmering sauce is just rice wine, soy sauce, water, and sugar. The only mistake I made was that I forgot to make the beginning sauce more dilute than I wanted the final product to be. I forgot that in the process of simmering for an hour, you lose tons of water and concentrate the sauce. So I had to dilute with water a couple times in the middle, and I still ended up with pork that was slightly saltier than desirable. But it was sooo delicious and soft and yummy and...real! Just like made at home, minus the vegetables I don't eat anyways. *sigh* oh...comfort food...