Tuesday, August 22, 2006

My Kiosk

Several months ago I sat in on a meeting between my new boss and some people from an area museum. They're preparing a small display on hand surgery that will open for a conference in September and then a larger one will open early next year. I suggested that I could develop a virtual hand surgery application to go along with it. I was inspired by "Operation Frog" that I played with on an Apple ][ back in grade school. But then I saw the Virtual Knee Surgery and had all kinds of plans. My work was slowed by having to do what I'm paid for. Instead of having 3 operations to choose from they only get one in this initial version. I'm hoping to add another by the next stage of the display.

Today I went over to the museum to look at the kiosk that they'll be using. It's a decent piece of hardware. Looks like it was made in someone's garage. The internal electronics are a Macintosh Quadra from 1991 and an Apple monitor of about the same age. They used to have several, but as they died they got hauled off. This one is dead but they never got around to removing it. Lucky me. As long as the monitor works I'm in good shape. I have a few extra G4s laying around my office. We'll loan them one and probably sign it over to the museum permanently.

I'm psyched. I not only get to have my program running in a museum, but I get to breath life back into the kiosk that will be showing it. The guy I'm working with is learning to develop this same sort of stuff so hopefully he'll get many years of use out of this thing.

Watch this space for the eventual arrival of my program.

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