Saturday morning coffee [September 15 2012]

So much happens each and every week that it’s hard to keep up sometimes. Here are some of the tabs that are open in my browser this morning along with some random thoughts….

The coffee mug to the right is from UCLA, obviously. I accompanied my daughter down to UCLA a couple of weeks ago to attend her orientation. It’s a beautiful campus. While I was creeping around I ran into Jim Mora, head coach of the UCLA Bruins football team, sitting on the steps outside of Ackerman Union. I’ll admit, I thought it was pretty cool to see him. I made eye contact and gave him “the nod”, i.e. the male equivalent to saying hello. He blew me off completely. Nice to know he has standards.

The Possession was #1 at the box office again last weekend. Still haven’t seen it, and still have no intentions to. And Lawless was #2 at the box office again last weekend. Still haven’t seen it either, but would like to. Maybe today or tomorrow.

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Interactive Handbook on Injectable Drugs for iPad and iPhone

It feels like a day doesn’t go by that I don’t receive an email letting me know of something cool for mobile devices. With the ever increasing onslaught of tablet and smartphone use in pharmacy practice it’s only a matter of time before everything will be available in some electronic media format.

In this case it’s ASHP’s Interactive Handbook on Injectable Drugs: IV Decision Support by Lawrence A. Trissel. Every pharmacist working in a hospital pharmacy knows about this reference. And if they don’t then they have a big problem because it’s only one of the most definitive reference sources for IV compatibility. Over the course of my career it’s simply been know as “the Trissel’s”. (kind of like “the Talyst”…just sayin’ – private joke people)

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To iPhone, or not to iPhone: on Verizon is the question

I saw an article in this mornings USA Today regarding the impending availability of the iPhone on Verizon. Of course this isn’t really news as “the event” was inevitable. The rumor has been active for years now and Android has been chipping away at Apple’s dominance in the smartphone market for quite some time.

Now that the iPhone is available on Verizon, the question everyone will be asking themselves is “should I dump my current Verizon device and move to the iPhone?” It’s a good question and I’m sure many, many people will do it. Then again, I assume many ex-Verizon-switched-because-of-the-iPhone-but-now-I’m-unhappy-with-AT&T customers will simply switch back.

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RxCalc 1.2 ready for download – want a free copy?

RxCalc 1.2 has been approved by the powers to be at Apple and is now available for download in the iTunes store.  For those of you that don’t know about RxCalc, it is a pharmacokinetics calculator made by Apple Core Labs specifically designed to handle aminoglycoside and vancomycin kinetics, i.e. new starts and adjustments. I’ve been intimately involved with the development of RxCalc, and you can read more about what drove the idea and the development of it here if you’re interested.

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Top blog posts and searches from last week (27)

I always find it interesting to see what brings people to my website and what they decided to read once they get here. Most read posts over the past 7 days: An almost disastrous bar-coding mishap Cool Technology for Pharmacy – Post from before I started putting the name of the cool technology in the … Read more