Web Exclusive: Assimilation into Borg is fast, furious, complete and irreversible!

Occasional musings from a self-professed geek!
By Prabhakar Tripuraneni, M.D., FASTRO

My first computer was an Epson Qx-10, bought in Madison, Wis., in 1983. And like most of us, I grew up with DOS and its variations and graduated to various versions of Windows. I got an iPhone about a year ago. Within six months, our 32nd desktop/laptop in the family was Mac Book Pro 13. And within a few months, the 33rd computer was a Mac Book Pro 15. Within a few weeks, Airport Express (Wi-Fi station and automatic wireless back up of Mac to a terabyte of hard disk) and Apple TV became part of our day to day lives.

I love my iPhone. I find that I use it more for texting, twittering, facebooking, surfing the Web and pretty much any other function than using it as a phone! I love various applications. I think about a billion applications have been downloaded so far and iPhone has more than 100,000 applications, with many really good ones available for free. 

Location-based service applications are very useful. You see, with built in GPS, my iPhone knows where I am in real time anywhere in U.S., so I use my Google Maps app (Garmin sales are going down), Around Me, I Want, Local Picks (to find restaurants, gas stations, etc., you got the idea), I map my run, Every Trail, Starbucks, Tides (tide chart for me to go for hikes at the Torrey Pines Beach) and on and on!

I love a free application by Dragon that turns my speech into text and sends it to texting or e-mailing apps. And I am sure that all of you have tried Google search. But, I use Google Voice Search all the time. Simply text to Google (466453) with any questions such as weather, movies, flight times or restaurants and in a few seconds you are texted back with answers.

Now we download music thru iTunes or similar services and listen to the music. No more CDs or Tower Records. Steve Jobs has pulled the rug under Sony and Microsoft and taken the bulk of the games and music business onto iPhone. I listen to podcasts and watch vodcasts on my iPhone while driving, hiking, etc. I have The NewYork Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today news apps and several tech site info apps. I do banking on Bank of America and Chase apps.

There are also many medical applications. After trying most of them (of course, only the free ones), I settled for Epocrates, WebMD, Medscape and MedCalc. I Wish there was an application with simplified AJCC 7th edition TNM staging. There are many medical apps for a few dollars each, but I have not tried any of them.

Droid from Verizon with an updated Android operating system of Google was just  released and will give iPhone a run for the money. I love Droid’s docks. The car dock will turn Droid into a full-fledged Google navigation device with all the bells and whistles (Garmin, rest in peace). The Home dock will turn it into an alarm clock/weather display for your night stand. Droid is not quite there, but all the basic features are there and all it needs is just a bit more software tweaking and many more applications. And the applications are coming!

Just recently, Google announced that it will release its own phone, Nexus One. I can’t wait to try that out! Nexus is as an unlocked phone, and presumably, you can get service plan from any carrier. T-Mobile already offers the service plan and I would not be surprised to see other carriers joining soon. Now I have a big dilemma. I love my iPhone, but I would like to try Droid and Nexus One. I envy David Pogue and Walt Mossberg (technology columnists of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal). Right now, being a consumer technology columnist would be my dream job!

Like most of us, I love Gmail (I have my work related Microsoft Outlook from my institution that allows me a paltry 10 MB of space for e-mails. Our information technology department is so concerned about control of IT resources, data use, security and HIPAA, that they will not allow us to change the resolution on our work desktop or laptops and imposes significant restrictions on our IT related issues). And I do use Google Calendar (four different calendars to keep track of various jobs that I do), Google Tasks, Google Talk (talk and instant messaging), Google Voice, Google Wave, etc. I love it that they are all integrated and online. I find it useful to keep an offline version of Gmail and Calendar on my laptop to do work on flights. Once connected with the Web, it syncs itself!

I love Google Voice. It is one number that can ring at your office, home, mobile, or wherever, and at any one of them or some of them or all of them. Any message or text message of your Google Voice is sent to your Gmail account and to your mobile. And you can block the calls that you don’t want to take (I have not done that yet) and set up personalized greetings for each one of your contacts, if you so wish. Google Wave is supposed to replace Gmail. I have it and I am still trying to figure out how to use it. I have Apple’s MobileMe, But I still love Google’s symphony of applications that all work together.

I love Picasa, a free program to sort for basic to medium editing of digital pictures. I love their face recognition feature that allows me to sort through a whole album for any person. In the past, I used to have two or three external hard disks to back up all our digital pictures. Now, I upload them into Picasa Web Albums at the full high resolution. I have about 12 GB of pictures, so I bought an additional 80 GB of space on Google for $20 a year in addition to their free 10 GB. I can access them from anywhere with Web access. I can also send links to friends and family. And I don’t have to worry about long-term storage at home.

Google Docs can store any document, presentation, spreadsheet or a form. I upload most of my files that I will need to access or store for a length of time onto Google Docs. With Web access, I can access them from anywhere, and I can give access to selected documents to whomever I need. And, several people can collaborate and work on the same file on the Web using Google Docs. That additional space that I bought on Google comes in handy to store all sorts of documents. I also subscribe to Google Alerts on several topics, such as IGRT, protons, ASTRO or whatever. Google Groups comes in handy for our hiking group to communicate with 12 people in one e-mail. Google Reader automatically updates the sites to which I have subscribed, such as digital photography news and NPR 7AM news.

I love MiFi, a tiny credit card sized personal portable password protected wireless hot spot from Verizon or Sprint that up to five people can access at any time. This is great for my frequent travels and saves me $10 to $15 a day for Web access while on the road. Microsoft’s search engine Bing has a cool feature of pop-up previews while searching. But, like I said earlier, I love the voice search feature of Google on iPhone. Readability resides as a button on your Web browser tool bar and when you click it, it eliminates everything except the text and photos. Gets rid of all the ads etc. and works reasonably well. Worth a try!

For free TV episodes and movies, try Hulu. If you have a Netflix account, you can watch most of Netflix movies via online streaming at no additional cost.

For business searches, I am starting to use Yelp. Now, instead of Craigslist, I use Craigslook. Wikipedia is a site that I frequently visit. It has our IHE Radiation Oncology info that is available to all. Pandora is an Internet radio that allows you to listen to many kinds of streaming music. Open Table is a free, instant and confirmed restaurant reservation service. Etsy is a place to buy and sell things that are handmade. If you are a newsnut, popurls is the site for you. It aggregates the news from all over and can be customized!

I am still waiting for my Fitbit to be delivered; it cost about $100 and is supposed to track your fitness and sleep. Wear Fitbit all day long and it syncs with their Web site, giving you all sort of info that you may or may not want to know!

I have had good reports of Kindle from Amazon. It is a reading tablet that you can download books or newspapers to and read like a book. It is very practical and functional. Barnes & Nobles’s Nook and Sony’s Reader are a bit behind. I am very tempted to get Kindle, but I am holding my breath for Apple’s tablet, which is supposed to be somewhere between iPhone and MacAir.

Microsoft has created HealthVault, a consumer health info repository that organizes your health information in one place. You decide what goes into your HealthVault record. You decide who can see, use and share your information. Of course, Google has its Google Health that lets you upload and give access to whoever you decide. With my frequent travels, I have my medical records uploaded into both sites. And with my permission, this info can be accessed from any emergency room in U.S. or India or from any doctor's office as need be. What a useful tool!

I wish we had a universal format for all the healthcare records. Imagine the possibilities! Perhaps, we can create a template and place it on ASTRO.org. We can all use that template and create a document of all radiation treatment summaries and other pertinent information that we can give  to the patient in an electronic format so that they can use it as they see fit, inducing uploading to Microsoft's HealthVault or Google Health. That will make it easier to treat a patient who’s had radiation therapy elsewhere!

If you want to join the collective conscience, please Gmail, or Google Wave or text or call (so passé) my Google Voice. I will be happy to help you with your assimilation. Please remember, there is no beginning and no end; it is just a continuum!

Prabhakar Tripuraneni spends his time exploring all the new consumer technologies. In his spare time, he works at Scripps Clinic as head of radiation oncology and also as chief medical officer of Viewray Inc., in Oakwood Village, Ohio.