Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.

Category: Life

Short (and long) reads extracted from my personal life.

  • Decisions

    I have now received some form of response to all sixteen of my med school applications. The final stats: Twelve rejections, four interviews.  Of those four, Loma Linda University, Penn State Hershey College of Medicine, and New York Medical College offered acceptances, while the University of Maryland School of Medicine (where I’ve worked for two…

  • This Should Never Happen

    I just read a news post from Tim at CAD-Comic: Apparently, he searched the web for outfit ideas when creating a new character, and inadvertently based one off of some other artist’s painting. Since then it sounds like somebody came after him for “infringement,” and he’s gone back and changed every comic containing the artwork.…

  • Missing the Point of the GPL

    Michael Martin of Pro Blog Design seems like a swell chap, but his recent post on applying the GPL to premium WordPress themes exemplifies the kind of erroneous thinking I frequently find in the creative community. In trying to apply scarcity rules to infinite goods, he misses out on an opportunity to utilize, rather than…

  • Reconstruction

    Now that the social purge is complete, I’ve begun adding people back to my Facebook friends list. In addition to grumbling about Facebook’s cluttered, opaque interface (remember when we all joined it because it was so much simpler and cleaner than MySpace?), I’m placing new friends into category lists as I go along. Because friends…

  • Social Purge

    I have been threatening to clear my Facebook account for a while now, and with the EFF’s latest revelations of how the site attempts to “zucker” private information from its unsuspecting users, today seemed like as good a time as any. And so it is done: zero friends. This has certainly been a long time…

  • Our Collective Ophitoxaemia

    Even as content industries, patent trolls, and cretins shamelessly abuse their monopoly privileges, some of their behavior filters down to creators with even less to gain from such behavior. The false concepts of idea “ownership” and permission culture are a flesh-melting venom chewing away at our creative body. One of the most egregious examples is…

  • Articulatory Excellence

    Not only is Lolita excellent writing, it tells a tragic story worth reading.

  • Exiting the Nest

    Over the weekend Rachel and I drove up to Penn State Hershey for the College of Medicine’s second look day. The whole thing was organized by the med students, and while they did squeeze a lot of information and activities into the day, I was impressed once again. I was also quite surprised by how…