We spent a day visiting the Desert Botanical Gardens. 

I haven't been blogging all that much, still waiting for the rally to prove itself. If you read Investors Business Daily as I do, you might agree with their assessment that we are already in a rally, but I've been doubtful and sitting on the sidelines. I'm waiting for there to be more true volume on up days (and the last one was a triple-witching day).
I'm doing something right now that I don't usually do - writing a blog post on my Blackberry. I have been amazed at the dramatic reaction by Blackberry users to the recent service outage. So many bb folks took the timing of the outage - it happened on the same day the iPhone5 came out - to switch to iPhones. I didn't really notice a huge outage. I still had email and could make calls on my phone, and if I missed out on any emails or texts, I never even noticed. I'm still not ready to jump on the iPhone bandwagon. I really like my bb's qwerty keyboard, how it handles contacts, and how I can set only specific calls to ring through, so I'm still a hardcore Crackberry addict for now.
I've helped our hospital set themselves up on Twitter and they'll start tweeting staffing needs this week. It's all good, and is something I do plan on putting on my resume. We'll see if it helps improve our staffing. I'm worried because we already have short staffed days, and we're not into winter yet.
Our hospital is changing our insurance coverage as of January 1st. I've been pouring through the documentation, figuring out how much more we'll have to spend on prescription drugs. Come to find our we are on quite a few "Tier 3" drugs, and if I'm reading things right, our prescriptions are going to cost an additional 500 bucks a month. Gods I hope I'm missing something.
Lastly, I've been reading Roger Ebert's memoir, "Life Itself: a Memoir. I find his story about his ongoing battle against cancer to be so brave. Multiple surgeries have left him without a lower jaw, which has left him voiceless and dependent on tube feedings for nutrition. One of the very rare Kindle ebooks I bought at full price.
The picture is of Jazzy, napping with me while I read my kindle...
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 One of my Christmas gifts this year was a 24" monitor. I currently have a 17" laptop and a 12" netbook, and have been keeping the netbook in my office, hooking up the 24" monitor. For the first few days, my new monitor displayed a copy of my netbook monitor, but I recently found out how easy it was to have two monitors. All I had to do was hook up the new monitor to the netbook, and hit Windows-P (the "Windows" button is the one near the spacebar that has the Windows logo on it). Now I can have different programs and browswer windows open. The photo above shows my usual set up, with the IBD on the big screen, and www.stockcharts.com open on the netbook. As I read the paper, I can check out the chart.
 
I think at some point, I would like to have a triple- or even quadruple screen set up. I suppose there might be a way to attach even more monitors to my current setup, but I assume it would take another piece of hardware as there are no additional plug-ins to use.
 
I've been also trying to figure out how to use my iPod and iTunes more effectively. Right now, my main iTunes is on an older laptop that sits in our living room. My iPod gets it's greatest amount of use in my bathroom (I have an iPod dock with radio/speakers in there and I like to listen to tunes while I get ready for work). But I can't figure out how to get my iTunes in my office. I have set up the library sharing, but it doesn't seem to pull up everything in my main iTunes collection, and the network loses signal too frequently to enjoy (even though I routinely have 4-5 bars). My laptop in the living room downloads all sorts of podcasts, which I'd like to pull into my office and listen to, but it keeps dropping the signal. Of course I could just sync my ipod and use that, but then I have to hook it up to an old set of computer speakers (I wish it were possible to attach an ipod to a computer and use the computer speakers as an output).

We've had really cold temperatures the past couple of nights. Last night temperatures got down to 31 F. And of all things, our heat wouldn't cut on, so we had a couple of electric heaters which kept us comfortable. Oddly, the heat spontaneously started working tonight so we're fine now.

We ate out chinese for New Years. We just watched the ball drop at NY Time Square... watching Anderson Cooper squirm working with Kathy Griffin... Hoping everyone is having a safe and happy new year...
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I was watching Star Trek TNG early this morning... From a 1993 episode "Timescape"... Looks like he's handing Captain Picard a Kindle !

I almost never read the newspaper, and haven't since I stopped my hard copy subscription to Investor's Business Daily three years ago, switching to the pdf version. I've been taking advantage of the free newspaper trials available for my Kindle. I really like reading newspapers on the Kindle. No more newspapers cluttering up the apartment; no more black ink all over my hands.
But there are even more compelling reasons to switch to Kindle versions of newspapers. All three of my trial subscriptions are for East Coast papers, and all of them have been automatically downloaded into my Kindle by 2-3 am, which is good for me since I routinely am awake at night. When I used to get the Wall Street Journal or IBD delivered, sometime it never came, or would come so late I couldn't read it before going to bed. No more of that.
I hate reading an article, and then having to skip to a different page to finish. No more of that.
I'm not totally sure which paper I'll actually subscribe to after my trials are done. The Post and the NYT are close competitors. I was reading the Richmond (VA) paper to read about the blizzard and how it might affect my family back in my old home town, so I doubt I'll keep that one. What will probably happen is I'll schmooze between trials of all sorts of newspapers, and buy an individual NYT on Sundays. I don't think I'll be able to keep up this voracious pace of reading for long.

Once again, Santa was very good to me this year. I now own a Kindle (3G version), and I've spend the past couple of days reading more than I have read since I became a nurse. I first got into reading Kindle books back in July, when I installed the Kindle reader app on my Blackberry and both of my laptops. It was cool being able to read a book from one device to another, and since my Blackberry goes with me everywhere, I always have something to read for those unexpected minutes of downtime. The ebook collection on Amazon is now big enough to include just about every book I would think about reading. I know there are authors and publishers that haven't accepted the technology, but so far the only popular author I can't get via my Kindle are the Harry Potter books. I went to the local Barnes and Noble, and every book that I would want to read was available on Amazon.com as a Kindle book. I looked it up on my Amazon account, and and since July 2010, I've downloaded and read fifteen books. Since I got my Kindle for Christmas, I've finished one book, started another, and have been enjoying trial periods of the New York Times, the Washington Post, a Kindle blog for free books, and just generally exploring my way around on the Kindle. It's cool.