Unsought Input

My wife surprised me with an iPhone. Huge surprise. I like my Treo 650, except for one major flaw – it periodically freezes up and requires a reset. This was frustrating for me, but even more frustrating for her – if she called and I didn’t answer, she had no way to know if I would get the message in a little while or hours and hours later, when I finally realized my phone was dead.

So she surprises me with an iPhone. I check to make sure I have the latest version of iTunes and plug it in. Then, nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. Windows tries to “add new hardware” but it can’t find the drivers for the iPhone. I try manually looking for them under iTunes’ folder, but no *.inf files are to be found.

Apple is well known for their focus on eas of use, so why am I having problems? My iPhone will work quite happily with my PC, once I pay Microsoft $100 or so.

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A lot of people are buying laptops and skipping desktop computers entirely. Laptops are portable, more energy-efficient, and wifi connections are pretty easy to find just about anywhere. Today’s laptops and notebooks are fairly comparable to desktops in speed and memory. The one drawback is that desktops are still a lot easier to add on to.

So what do you do if your trusty iBook is running out of hard drive space? You could buy a larger internal hard drive and replace your old one, but then you have to deal with installing OSX, reinstalling all your applications, and moving all your old files over. This applies to Windows computers too – swapping out the hard drive of your Dell requires all the same tediousness.

If you just need more space to store your photos, music, and videos, and external storage might be the right solution. You have a few options here, and there are a few tricky details you’ll want to know about that I’ll cover below.

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I left a cliffhanger of a post in Part I of this article. This section of the article will focus more on things to help you be successful and knowledgeable in your clinical skills as a student nurse, even if you do decide to go further for your master’s or doctorate degree in nursing.

Palm Pilots

As I mentioned in the previous article, buying a palm pilot was the smartest thing that I ever did. Going on many websites, your head may swoon when thinking of all that you have to consider when buying a Palm Pilot. There are only three things that you need to worry about: price, compatibility, and memory.

Price

Most good palm pilots (PDAs) start at a range of $199 and can go as far as $499 or higher. I am not a rich person at all. The Palm Pilots (yes, plural…see below) I have bought took months for me to save up for. In my humble opinion, I would have to say that a PDA for $199-299 might be all that you need.

Before you tsk, tsk me, there are several things working for you as a student nurse. The first is that you’re a student, a poor, poor student who needs help financially. Most companies offer some kind of student discount if you order PDAs from their website like Skyscape and Epocrates. These two websites offer bundles in which you buy PDAs and medical programs together at a discounted price. There might be more sites out there, but these are the two big sites that I deal with when shopping for medical stuff for my PDA. Secondly, as I said in the last section of this article, you can always hit all of the relatives up for some palm pilot lovin’ during Christmas/Hanukkah/birthday or whatever time.

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The Nintendo Wii is a lot of fun, but it’s in a bit of a new game drought right now. While the rest of us sit with bated breath awaiting Super Smash Brothers and Metroid, some folks have made some Wii games of their own. Or at least they pretended to and put videos on the Internet.

Here’s a whole series of rejected WiiPlay games from the folks at Loading.Ready.Run.

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A few months ago I was looking at blood sugar meters and cholesterol testers for family members.  I have had my blood tested for various things throughout my life and I’ve seen the standard drugstore-issue glucose monitors in action, so I had a very basic idea of what I was looking for.  But I wasn’t exactly an expert, so I went online.

Now one of the benefits of living in the Internet age is that if you need to learn about any technological device, from MP3 players to video cards to application servers, you can quickly and easily find out all about it online.  Making a major purchase?  Some skillful Googling will lead you to novice-level tutorials, product comparisons, recommendations from normal users, and jargon-laden details from experts.

Unless you want to buy a glucose meter.  I found virtually nothing except for short blurbs on retailers’ sites.  I even had a hard time finding product info from manufacturers!

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