“What’d I miss?” – Week of August 23rd

As usual there were a lot of things that happened during the week, and not all of it was pharmacy or technology related. Here’s a quick look at some of the stuff I found interesting.

– Inglourious Basterds was #1 at the box office last weekend. My wife I saw the movie this morning. It was good, but nothing I couldn’t live without.

– For those of you with your head in the sand this week, Senator Edward Kennedy died from malignant glioma at the age of 77.

– DUO by KCI Communications is a neat little gadget. DUO adds pen input to a PC screen up to 17”. The device uses a base station attached to the top of a computer monitor to track the XY coordinates of the pen as you move around the screen. With this product you can basically turn a standard laptop into a tablet PC. Cool! Go to the website and watch the videos. It’s hard not to be impressed.

– Last year a guy named Wei of Weistudio developed a Mac Tablet created from a Wacom Intuos tablet and a MacBook. He affectionately called it the iTab. Well he’s done it again, but this time he created a great looking portable version dubbed the iTab Mini. Apple should take lessons from this guy. The iTab Mini has a 2.16GHz Core2Duo processor, a 12.1” resistive touch screen, and a whole lot more. The website chronicles the process and makes for some very interesting reading.

– There are two new developments for the iPhone that are going to make note takers very happy. First, Evernote has added web clipping to its list of incredible features. For those of you that don’t already know, Evernote is a great way to keep track of notes, web clippings, documents, etc. Second, there is a new application for the iPhone called MobileNoter that allows users to sync their OneNote notebooks between their desktop and iPhone. MobileNoter is in early beta testing, but looks promising. Anyone that owns, or uses, a tablet PC knows about Microsoft OneNote. It’s a great product.

– Italian researchers have shown that long-acting testosterone on top of optimal medical therapy seems to improve a host of symptoms in elderly men with chronic heart failure. The article appears in the September 1, 2009 issue of Journal of the American College of Cardiology. I can see it now, every elderly man in the country with a heart condition will be lining up at their cardiologists office with a copy of the article in hand.

– The September 1, 2009 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases is reporting that the total cost associated with the treatment of an MRSA infection is the same regardless of the drug being used. The conclusion of the authors states that “when all costs of therapy were considered, the cost‐effectiveness of daptomycin and vancomycin‐gentamicin was similar, even if the cost of vancomycin was $0.” Ouch, that’s going to make the pharmacist’s job just a little bit harder.

– Crabapples.net: “Ok, so we can’t offer trials at the App Store, but I sure wish we could. As a result the App Store is full of paid and free versions of the same application. The free version is basically a limited functionality version of the paid app. Silly isn’t it? If app developers could offer trial versions that could be upgraded to the full version after a period of time, even if that time period is fixed by Apple, would be a huge step forward.” – I agree 100%. Apple should definitely support trial applications.

– I discovered the Non-Clinical Medical Jobs website this week. I found the site very interesting, as I consider my current position as an IT Pharmacist a “non-clinical” job.

– IT World: ” Why Excel beats iCal for to-dos on the Mac – While I generally keep track of long-term deadlines in iCal’s calendar view, every Sunday night or Monday morning I make a list of all my discrete tasks for the upcoming week in trusty old runningtodos.xls. I’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember; I knew in theory that iCal had to-do list functionality, but I had never bothered with it, for reasons I can’t now remember.” – I do the same thing. I’m a very visual type of guy and I need to see things in list form to make sense out of them. The other thing I typically do is create a running 12 month calendar using Excel that contains important dates; cheer meets, volleyball games, vacations, etc. I know it seems strange, but this has served me well for nearly 10 years now.

– Want to use your TV remote to blog or Tweet? Well, apparently IBW thinks you should be able to. Techcrunch is reporting that IBW has filed a patent for just such a device. Sweet!

– Football, it’s all about football people. The NFL season opener is quickly approaching and I can’t wait.

Have a great weekend everyone.