Of babies, Motif, holograms, and a potential business idea
Hello world.
Sorry for the big old gap between posts. On March 2nd my son decided to go and be born so I’ve been out. Then after I was out I came back only I needed then more time to recover from being out. It’s a vicious cycle I know, but the good news is that life is returning to normal. Bad news is that the new normal involves being up from midnight to 3am.
The new guy is only three and a half years younger than his older sister but it was interesting to see the technology improvements that the hospital had put in place since she was born.
Listen, having the second kid was way less stressful than having the first. Plus, once my wife was all hopped up on goofballs there really wasn’t much to do for several hours other than sit around and wait. So, when you couple the complete lack of, “Oh sweet god I’m going to be dad, I don’t know how to be a dad, I have to teach her how to ride a bike, how do you teach a kid to ride a bike, etc” anxiety with general boredom I ended up with time on my hands to scope out the technology improvements.
The most obvious improvement was the availability of “free” wi-fi that I’m sure was being billed to my insurance company on a per-bit basis. That made me happy that I brought the notebook along, although it figured it would be a slow news day. The other big one was that they let you use cell phones in the rooms now. Apparently all the equipment that would explode when in the presence of a cell signal has been mothballed. Or perhaps there never was any exploding equipment. It could have all been a ruse by the $12 a day hospital in-room phone lobbyists.
Also, since there was no one I needed call, and I had already read the entire internet, I managed to watch more closely the computer that they were keeping all the chart information on. It was both modern and throwback at the same time. It was modern in that it was networked to all the other workstations on the floor and summary information was being rotated on plasma TV’s hanging in the hallway by the nurses’ station. It was throwback because it was most definitely running on some version of Unix with a Motif-based GUI.
That’s right, no fancy Web 2.0 UI here. In fact, watching the doctors and nurses use it I would best describe it as “Needing a lot of clicks.”
(And that’s putting it nicely.)
I’m usually all for the elegant user interfaces, but at the same time, the thing worked flawlessly and that’s really what you want from medical software. DOCTYPEs and Javascript and IE7 and Firefox and Cocoa and that stuff is all well and good but so long as the system allows the doctors to do all the right doctor-y stuff who cares. I’m sure the next time they’ll have upgraded to holographic doctors and levitating beds but I suspect that old Motif UI will still be there. Unless of course a holographic doctor can’t type or use a mouse. At that point I’m stuck for ideas. Good idea for a patent though, “System by which holographic doctors can interact with legacy Unix user input/output devices.” Hmm, now that I think of it, with a little polish I’ll bet I could get some venture capital for that. Um, yeah, I gotta go and, well, do some stuff.