T-mobile: save money on home phone calls

If you have T-mobile, they have rolled out a new way of making phone calls. You can use your cell phone to make free calls via Wi-Fi. According to customer service, your T-mobile cell phone will use your home Wi-Fi or public Wi-Fi at Starbucks, universities, St. Marys, hotels, airports, etc. . . to make calls without using your calling-plan minutes. From what I understand, this new feature is very similar to VoIP and the wireless-internet phones used at Mayo St. Marys.

It's called Hotspot @Home

Caveats:

• Cost $10/month
• special phone required: Samsung t409 or the Nokia 6086, $50 each with discount, $160 without discount
• FREE domestic long distance calls anywhere you find WiFi without using your minutes=huge savings if you have a high-minute calling plan.
• Supposedly, you can travel overseas and call back to the USA for FREE since the cost to send data via the internet from Rochester, MN is the same as sending network data from Rochester, United Kindom. However, if you're in the UK and call the person standing next to you, you will be charged international long distance since your account originates in the USA (customer service could have miss led me on this point so I won't believe it until I see it.)
• No more need for a home phone since your "home phone" now travels with you.
• Mayo discount for T-mobile suscribers is always a plus.

I'll undoubtedly be testing this new technology soon. The following website does a good job of summarizing some of the pros and cons:

http://blog.scifi.com/tech/archives/2007/07/15/peer_review_tmo.html

John

PS. We've survived almost 1 month of internship!

What do Teachers Really Make?

As I found out last night, a number of us have teachers in our personal lives, and I know we all have had some great teachers over the years, so I thought I'd share this poetry reading by Taylor Mali that I found a few days ago. Taylor Mali is the four-time winner of the national poetry slam and is considered to be the best poetry slam strategist of all time.

Friday dinner

Since we now have an opening on our Friday calender (our Friday social event was canceled, in case you didn't catch that earlier), some of us were thinking about meeting for dinner and drinks. I was thinking those who are interested could meet up at Whistle Binkies South ( 247 Woodlake Drive SE; note that there are two locations) starting around 4:30 pm (it apparently gets packed later on, so earlier seems to be better) on Friday, June 15th. I'll bring the name tags.
- Andy

Bored in Rochester

Okay, I've explored a good bit of town now that I've been here for 2 weeks. I'm starting to get a little bored. I was so looking forward to meeting new people this Friday, and then find out the picnic is rescheduled. I've become a regular at Caribou Coffee, where I use the internet daily. Ours is finally being hooked up on Thursday--Yippee! Anyway, if you're in town and as bored and without internet and cable as I am, give me a call at 405-834-0690. Nerissa

Social Event Rescheduled

I just got an email from Sharon Ihrke. The social function originally scheduled for June 15th has been rescheduled for Sunday, June 24 . I didn't see any announcements so I thought I would share the info here.

See you Monday!

John

Roommate search

Hey guys, I hope you moving is going well.
Have you checked the Oakwood? (tall building downtown) Anybody wants to share an apartment there? It is a great place and skyway connected! If you do give me a call. 954 292 6082 (Angelica)

T-minus two weeks

Anyone else feeling like this? Less than 2 weeks to go before orientation.

Want to post?

Apparently Blogger lets me invite people to become "authors," but the invitation is only good for a month. If you want to post, just shoot me an email and I'll re-invite you.
Thanks!

Furniture available

Hello fellow interns! Congratulations to everyone--we're Doctors! Who else is scared out of their minds?

Anyway, my husband and I just moved to Rochester and have a couple of things we no longer want to keep. If anyone is interested, we have a coffee table and entertainment center that was purchased at Target about 4 years ago (the Dolce collection) as well as a set of non-stick cookware that is 2 years old. All available for best offer. Call me at 405-834-0690.

Nerissa

Banking

Does anyone have any feelings on banks in Rochester? We are closing on the house through Eagle crest and they offer services, anyone know about their checking/saving/online etc?

I am a big fan of online bill pay and use ATMs for most banking, if anyone could comment on either of these, I'd appreciate it.

Long Distance Moving

I am in the process of comparing quotes for long distance movers and was wondering if anyone has used any movers in the past that they really liked or really didn't like. Thanks!

Oh, and I also used Therese Dutton with Edina Realty and it was a great experience!

Truck-Unloading Help?

Does anyone know how to find help-for-hire in Rochester? I need to find someone to help me unload a truck on Monday, May 7th. I've got plenty of help loading the truck in Kansas but my plans to bring help from KS to MN fell through. Also, what is a fair wage for this type of work?

thanks.

John

Tel/ Wireless/ Cable/ broadband services

Hi all,
Does any one know if there are any prefered providers for Tel, wireless, cable and broadband services. Does Mayo offer any discounts on any of them?

From what I've heard Qwest is pretty popular for Tel. Also Mayo offers discounts on some wireless - cingular and sprint. But Midwest has the best service in town.
Any other thoughts?

ACLS at Mayo

Hey gang. This week I completed my ACLS at Mayo, and thought I'd share my thoughts. If you can do it at Mayo, I would - it's free if you do it at Mayo, and it's a pretty well-run course. Most of the teaching is done by residents who do a nice job. If this is your first time doing ACLS, it's a 2-day course at Mayo which can be a pain unless you've already moved to Rochester. When you sign up for ACLS (at any place, as far as I can tell) they'll send you a packet of info well in advance. You have to do an ACLS pre-test, which you can be well-prepared for by going over some practice cases in the ACLS book. As far as I know there is no minimum passing score on the pre-test, and it does nicely tell you what areas you did well and poorly on so you can then focus your review. Overall reading through the ACLS book and doing the pre-test took me maybe 3 hours, but I was frequently flipping through the handbook and looking at the algorithms. At the beginning of the ACLS course (at Mayo, at least) you run through an adult BLS, pedi BLS, and infant BLS station where you get a very small refresher and one of the instructors verifies that you have the skills down. After that you practice ACLS stuff, and the course concludes with a "megacode" exam and written exam. If you've read the book before your pre-test, did OK on the pre-test, and paid attention during the course, the megacode should be pretty straight forward. You can use the handbook for the megacode, but most people don't by then as it just slows them down. You certainly do not need a perfect performance on the megacode to pass. The written exam is a the very end, is closed book, and is relatively easy compared to the pre-test.

One other thing - apparently the phone number we were sent to call to register for ACLS at Mayo was wrong - it was the number that gets called every time a code was called and the code people were afraid that we would swamp their phone line. Yikes! Yet nobody emailed me to let me know or to give me the correct phone number. So, for now I would just email Ms. Sharon Ihrke for more info about registering.

Buying a house (again)

I recently returned from Rochester, also having purchased a house. We used Terese Dutton (same realtor as Jason) and had a great experience. We second everything Jason said about her. She was great. We also used the same loan company, and were very happy with the experience. See Jason's post for contact info on both.

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter everyone!

Hopefully the moving process is treating everyone well.

We're looking forward to meeting everyone in a few months!

Jeff & family

Pockets

Congratulations all around, I am looking forward to working with you guys. My wife and I are psyched to be moving Midwest.
This is going to sound silly...
Since we have to wear suits to work (something I am not used to at all), where to we keep our cheat-sheets, books (on call, etc.) and PDAs? How often do we get to wear labcoats?
Art

Buying a house

Hello everyone! I'm on spring break and headed up to Rochester to go house hunting. I used Therese Dutton (as mentioned in a previous post) as my realtor through Edina Realty and was very pleased. She's very knowledgable about the area and has dealt with many residents in home buying. She walked us through every step of the process making us confident in our decision of buying a home. As for the mortgage, I priced out a couple of lenders and ended up going with Eagle Crest Med City Loan. Their program was the best for my situation. Therese can be reached at (507)529-6156 and Bob Baudhuin, VP @ Eagle Crest can be reached at (507)280-7254. I can't wait to move in.

Rocking out to 'aortic regurgitation'

Sometimes what I think should be really cool news stories just serve to disappoint me. Case in point: doctors at Temple are using MP3s to teach cardiac auscultation. I'm disappointed that this has taken so long to happen (I ripped and encoded my cardiac auscultation CD from 3M that came with my Littmann stethoscope sometime around 2004, and I'm guessing students were doing this as early as ~1996, a few years after the public release of the MP3 format and relatively wide availability of encoders and players), or rather, how long it took faculty to adapt to this new technology. I suppose it makes for an interesting news story, but this really shouldn't be news.

OK, I'm off my soap box for now. Let me know if you think I should keep such blabber off our blog.

Favorite blogs, websites, etc

I'm curious what your favorite blogs and websites are. I was motivated to ask this since I recently stumbled across the wonderful blog of Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Mr. Levy is extremely open in discussing all sorts of issues, including how much he gets paid and how his hospital handles various measures of clinical quality (including posting actual rates of IHI VAP measures and central line infection rates). And he has openly asked students to post him questions, which I encourage you all to do.

In case you really want to know the answers: about a million dollars per year, around 90%, and about 3 per thousand catheter-days. To figure out which is which, you'll have to read the blog!

Know of a great blog or website? Share them with the "comments" link below!