*WEDDING.BLOG.LINK*

Since the iPod first came out I have been advocating it's effectiveness as a highly portable (read battery powered and encased in stainless steel) and fair sized hard drive. (I guess this applies to all hard-drive based players)

In fact when I was working for the university's tech department two summer's ago I did some work for the music department, that required shuffling huge disc images (2GB+) around campus. Since I knew that someone else was going to have to live with my solution when after I got it set up I wanted it to be easy to do this as well (which we all know is just plain old NOT fun to do over any network currently available at a Canadian university).

My suggestion was to use some of the budget for the project to buy an iPod to go along with the machines, MIDI keyboards, etc. This allowed them to have a pretty big (20GB 3rd Gen. iPod), highly portable, hot swappable (thanks to the magic of FireWire) hard drive, that could also be leant out to actually use as a portable music player as well, so the kids could take a recording of their performance home to study (or whatever), or they could move their MIDI projects all over campus to give presentations, or work in different labs, etc etc etc. It didn't take me long to convince the man in charge of the money that this could turn out to be a good move. (It did turn out quite well by the way)

Now I know this was only a small example of the somewhat emergent properties iPods have that allow them to be used like gigantic floppy discs, but today there's news of more important uses in the same vein.

Some radiologists in (of course) UCLA, (as well as counterparts in Australia and Europe) are using their iPod photo to bring radiology images around with them while they're on the job.
Think about this for a minute.

• They are using iPods to carry x-ray pictures around, in full colour, full resolution
• They can view the pictures right on the iPod, and show their colleagues to get alternate opinions
• They could have a different album for each patient
• They can carry around textbook images of common ailments around to compare with images they're taking of patients to compare
• They could duck into the staff room to view the images on the TV (or maybe they'll institute special viewing rooms - or better yet maybe they'll just put LCD TVs in the exam rooms)
• Plus they can carry the full-sized image around in full resolution to any computer anywhere in the hospital.

I think this is fantastic. Anyone who knows me knows I'm all about smart convergence like this, and especially the emergent uses that come out of it unintentially. Also, those same people will know that health care is an issue close to my heart - as is the iPod. The combination of the two is like an early Christmas present, that comes with a bonus, prewarmed, super fuzzy blanket. (I wish I had a picture for THAT)