eric135

What rally?... Blackberry... Twitter... Open enrollment... Roger Ebert's "Life Itself"...

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...

Jury Duty: Maricopa Municipal Court

  Once again, I did my civic duty by participating in jury selection today. Usually, I go to the Maricopa Superior Court, but this time, I was a couple of blocks over at the Municipal building.

The whole process went pretty smoothly.

• I had to be there by 8am and I thought I had left early enough at 705am but ended up not checking in until about 810am. There were other stragglers, and they were cool and didn't make a big deal out of it.
• There is a parking garage across the street from the court building, and if you get your parking stub validated, parking is free. The GPS coordinates for the entrace to the deck is: 
  
              33.44797,-112.078944
• The jury center is very well designed. They have one large room with theater seats where all jurors would meet, and movies were played throughout the day on about 6-7 large flat screens throughout the room.
• This large room had plenty of theater-type seats with attached tables for laptop use, with power plugs near by.
• There was a separate "quiet area" lounge with large cushioned chairs for quiet reading. There were power plugs throughout the room, and a large work table.
• There was a kitchen area, where folks could gather to talk/chat. There was a refrigerator, vending machines, coin machine, coffee/latte maker (all the products were free), water and other food amenities. There were more tables here for folks to eat, or work away from the movie but not in the quiet room.
• Lockers were available, with unlimited free tokens available.

I never got selected for a Jury, and was never even called into a courtroom for Voir Dire.

My group was excused for lunch from 1145a until 130p, but I ate my lunch in my car in the parking deck rather than walking all over downtown looking for a place I would like.

All in all, not a bad experience. The crowd had thinned out nicely by the end of the first hour, and I had enough to do to keep me from getting too bored.

Safe for another 18 months!

CF Industries; MA Mastercard; MKTX MarketAccess

According to Investors Business Daily, we're in a confirmed uptrend, and have been for the past couple of sessions. I'm not totally convinced, as volume hasn't been present since the follow through (although some stocks have progressed upward). Some I'm keeping an eye on: