165mph winds in Scotland. http://t.co/2qzwHX49 See that link for picture of a wind turbine on fire...

December 8, 2011 8:53 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@gruntdoc

GruntDoc

FYI: I’m on Twitter, and if you hit ‘Reply” above, it only replies on Twitter, not here on the blog…

I’m a mac-o-phile, and a late arrival. Lion on the MacBook Air? Awesome!

On my iMac? HATE that they decided my scroll wheel needed to change directions so my hand motions mimic those of the touchpad. Even though I’ve used a scroll wheel for about a decade, and have to use one on PC’s, so don’t need the cognitive dissonance. And I’m old and dislike fundamental change.

Here’s how to get back to reality:

“System preferences”  -> “Mouse” -> see the pic:

And, normalcy is restored. Life is back to normal. The horizon is righted.

(Hat Tip to Nick Genes, who turned his back on Jobs just to tell me about this).

When emergency physician Harvey Castro asked a nurse to start a dopamine dose for a hypotensive patient one day, he watched the nurse leave the room, find the book that could guide her to the titratable dose, look in the index and then flip through until she found what she needed. Castro wondered, Isn’t there a more efficient way?

via Medical Apps? There’s a Doc for That.

A fellow DFW doc who’s done well in the Medical App world ( Deep Pocket Series ).

Dr. Castro was nice enough to let me play with some of his apps about a year ago, and while I never found a big use for them (my practice style, no knock on him) they were well done and approachable for me.

Kudos to Dr. Castro!

This is a pretty neat tool for docs.  I’ve signed up (free), have it on my iPhone, and will see if it’s super-useful.  Maybe not for an EM doc, but time will tell.  It’s at Doximity.com

The biggest plus I see right off is the HIPAA compliant SMS texting, which would make some communications available we just cannot now.

At any rate, check it out and see if you like it.  I find the web interface easier for adding colleagues, but maybe that’s just me.

YouTube – Doximity.

One happy thing I got from this is a list of all my medschool classmates, and where they are now.  A surprising number are in my area, and more than a few are in EM!

I’ve been playing around with a beta build of Firefox's 3.6 browser for some time, and while it’s been completely stable, its new tab behaviour has annoyed me.
via Fixing Firefox 3.6′s tab blunder: Blogs – Null Pointer – ZDNet Australia.

It’s the one think I don’t like about the newest Firefox release (3.6), opening a link from a tab puts it right next to the one you were reading, rather than off the right end like it used to (which I liked…).  Here’s a fix.

A like it: it’s simple and it works.

Recently I asked if people were still putting ICE (In Case of Emergency) information in their cellphones.  (The surprising answer was yes, showing that it’s an idea that resonates, at least with my audience).

I lamented that I have that information in my iPhone, but since it’s passcoded no rescuer would be able to access my dutifully entered ICE contact information.  (I then had delusions of retiring on just such an app).

There is a solution.  It’s brilliantly simple, and works. Polka have written an iPhone app called “Close Call” that fits the bill perfectly.  And it’s free!

I made one for this review, using a picture in my camera:

Many thanks to Ramona for finding this!

FTC disclaimer: this was completely voluntary.  I paid for my own free app.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today was the much anticipated roll-out of the new iPhone, and the newest OS for the iPhones (3.0).

It was entirely foreseeable there would be enormous demand for both.  Again, they’re unprepared.  (This was after enough tries I realized it wasn’t going to work today).

Makes me wonder at their strategy.

Update: worked perfectly today (one day after the above).  Cannot tell a huge improvement, except the landscape mail view is more than welcome.

Just my hard drive crashed. I’m in the midst of a prolonged restoration project.

No data lost, but a lot of re-installation, etc.

EETimes.com – Handheld ultrasound gets FDA approval
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Startup Signostics got approval Tuesday (May 19) from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to ship what it claims is the world’s smallest ultrasound device. The company describes its pocket-sized, half-pound Signos that sells for about $4,000 as a visual stethoscope and hopes it will someday become as omnipresent as the signature doctor’s tool.

I’d love to try one out for a few shifts. We use sonography a lot in our ED, and having it even more poratble / readily available would be a benefit.

Thanks to reader Don for the tip!

I have installed a plugin for WordPress that displays the blog contents on the iPhone on a more user-friendly way.  If you don’t like it you can click the link at the very bottom of the page and get the full view.

I’d be interested in iPhone users’ comments.

I’m throwing this out there hoping someone has a solution.

Since I got my new iPhone several months ago it’ll go through periods where it gets a lot of wrong number calls.  After several weeks of this I started asking people the number they were calling, and that’s where the weirdness comes in.

(For illustration, this isn’t my number, don’t call).  My number is (817) 555-1234’ all the wrong number calls are for (555) 123-4xxx.  For some reason the Bell system forgets my area code and drops in the middle three as my area code.

After about 10 calls from one person we figured out a fix, having the wrong number dialer enter a 1 before they dialed, and they’d get the number they were dialing.  I suppose the good news is there’s only about 1,000 wrong number combinations I could get…

I have asked AT&T to look into it (to his credit the tech I spoke with realized it’s not something amenable to the first-level tech script, and spared me that), but I haven’t seen a change and haven’t heard back from them.

Other than getting a new number from AT&T, any ideas?

Should really be when engineers have dogs, as no cat on earth would play with this.

Still, very cool!:

Note the dog understands which action of the machine means ‘game on’ and which doesn’t.

The Speculist, via Instapundit.

USB-based PHRs are Dumb Idea « Chilmark Research

We have commented many times before that the whole idea of a USB-based (thumbdrive) PHR is simply a dumb idea.

Read the post to see why they think that.

Our joint has disabled the USB ports on the boxes, so I don’t know what we’d do if a patient presented us with a USB PHR.

via symtym via twitter.

They’re very good, and my connection is pretty good, too:

Yee hah.