Tales of Hoffman

More on GarageBand MIDI Import

The great thing about the Net is that there's always a person out there with the knowledge and motiviation to fix the things that you are too lazy or stupid to do yourself...."Dent du Midi" is a perfectly simple app that takes a midi file, splits it into tracks and rewrites it to your hard disk in a format that can be dragged and dropped directly into GarageBand. If you were disappointed in the lack of MIDI Import in GarageBand, go get it here: http://homepage.mac.com/beryrinaldo/ddm/

POL: Full Circle

Today, WebMD (where I work) announced that it has acquired Physicians' Online. Wow, what a long strange trip it has been! I started out in the Medical Internet field in 1995, just a greenhorn out of business school at Physicians' Online in Tarrytown, NY. Back then the service was an ingenious use of graphical bulletin board software that offered docs free access to Medline while presenting ads along the bottom of the screen for pharma companies. Yes, that's right. We were an ad supported online service before Wired sold their first banner, before Netscape went public, before Windows 95 (I can't describe to you how many times I tried to talk a doc through installing winsock).

I left POL in 1997 after helping to launch it's first email application, it's first discussion group application, it's physician recruiting business and transitioning from a goofy software platform called "Coconut" (I believe Peapod was the only other business using it. Remember, this was pre-web, folks) to all HTML. We were really the only company to make a go of it as a professionally oriented content and ISP business and I'm proud to say we provided the first exposure to the Internet for many, many doctors.

In 1996, we watched from POL as Medscape launched ("Competition! This must be a real business") and now here I am, reunited with the service that started it all. It's actually a good matchup after all this time. Medscape's industry-leading content, CME and newsletters, combined with what is still an amazingly vibrant online community of physicians. Who said there's no fun on the Net anymore? ;-)

Blog CME

Jacob has some interesting ideas here. Hmmmmm.

A Week with GarageBand

It's been roughly a week since I got GarageBand onto my TiBook. Here's some thoughts. First of all...FUN! I have to say that this app has singlehandedly gotten me back into a music making mode that I haven't been since approximately 1985. It's been too long since I've picked up my saxophone or done any recording (I was an audio engineering major at one point) and once you've got the music-making bug, you always have it...apparently.

Although some, like Alwin, have had problems running GarageBand on their rigs, I haven't had any problems doing the basic functions on my 1Ghz TiBook. I admit I haven't tried to create something with more than 7 or so tracks, but I've been able to do everything I wanted so far without being constrained by the horsepower on my computer.

I have gotten over one of my big pre-purchase problems about GarageBand, by figuring out how to get a midi file input into the app. For those of you who, like me, have no keyboarding ability whatsover, you just need to get a basic Midi player (Mighty MIDI works great and is free: http://fenix.wox.org/proj/mm.html). Then, before you launch, go to the Audio Midi Setup (it's in your Applications > Utilities folder), double-click the IAS Driver icon and check off the "Device is active" checkbox. Now, when you launch GarageBand, it'll think there's a Midi device attached and you can playback a midi file using Mighty MIDI that will play in GarageBand.

The other positive side effect of GarageBand is that I now have a sound generator for my WX7 Wind controller. As I said before, this thing has been sitting in my basement/garage for more than 10 years unused, because my brother (the REAL keyboard player/musician in the family) was the owner of of all the synths. What is it? Picture a black stick with keys and a mouthpiece much like a saxophone, but it has a wire coming out the bottom that you plug into a keyboard or other midi-capable sound generator. You blow into it and finger the keys and that makes the sounds come out of your synth. Now I can use GarageBand's "software instruments" as my sound generator, and it's pretty good.

So, what does it all sound like? Here's an example. This one is a downloaded midi file doing the keyboards, bass and strings. GarageBand loops doing the percussion, and Me playing the melody with a guitar sound by using my WX7. I know it's borderline elevator music (ok, maybe not even borderline, but it's MY elevator music!). I'm pretty impressed by how "credible" it all sounds. Let me know what you think.

The Girl from Impanema

Here's an RSS Feed That May Make Me Go Broke

Via Jenny: Apple's iTunes Music store now has customizeable RSS feeds so you can be alerted to new music via your aggregator. Great, another way for me to spend more money. Good Move, Apple.

Working...

Family + Work + GarageBand = No time to post. still working on it. Eventually I may even post something about healthcare.... ;-)

Tomorrow Never Comes

OK, tomorrow I'm off to the Apple Store (White Plains) to pick up my copy of iLife 04. Can't wait to get my hands on GarageBand. I bet there aren't too many people out there who plan to use it with a WX7 Midi controller. You play it like a saxophone and it outputs midi signals. I haven't even picked it up in probably 15 years, but thanks to Apple I finally have a reason to play this thing. I'm very excited. Probably unreasonably so....

Hillary Back to Healthcare

In a speech yesterday in New York, Hillary Clinton unveiled her plan for "The Health Information for Quality Improvement Act," a new bill she is planning to introduce to promote quality and efficiency improvements in healthcare through implementation of EMRs. Here's a link to the CNN coverage.

I believe this is a great step forward and I'm happy she's stepping up with something like this. Unfortunately, the combination of Hillary and Healthcare brings out the worst memories and attitudes that people carry around about Clinton. Before you go off on a rant about how she almost ruined the healthcare system once before, at least read her unedited comments from yesterday at Cornell Medical Center here in Manhattan. Here's a sample:

But instead of helping clinicians manage their information needs, the fragmentation of our health care system poses barriers to communication between hospitals and practices, and between practices and research facilities. With the push of a button, a doctor should be able to receive the latest scientific articles along with his patient's chart, or prescribe a medicine and send it to the pharmacy. But often, the systems are not in place for them to do so. These barriers to communication don't serve physicians, and they don't serve patients either.

I think, overall, this proposal (of course, the proof is in the actual language of the bill, which I have not yet found) is a well-reseasoned and balanced one. If the current administration, without hesitation, can earmark Billions in aid to rebuild Iraq, I think it should also step up and put some dollars into making this happen. Will we get there without government help? Yes, I think so, or I wouldn't be devoting my professional life to being in the middle of it, but we'll get there FASTER if something like this bill carries a significant mandate.

Docs and Programmers: What the Heck are They Talking About?

Jacob's got a good post on how Docs and Technical people both fall into the same trap of speaking in their own tongue when communicating with others. Actually, a big part of my job at Medscape is to be the in the middle of that equation. I know enough about the business, the users and the technology to be a three-way translator.

I count myself as lucky when I run across a doc who can speak to me like a regular human, rather than a Medline search interface. And that's coming from someone who's around medical info all day long...(doesn't mean that I understand it all)

Who Subscribes?

Dave is really on to something over at feeds.scripting.com. It's fascinating to finally be able to see who is actually subscribed to the Medscape RSS feeds. Of course, the limiting factor here is the "voluntary-ness" of the whole thing. I can understand why people would not necessarily want the whole world to see what they are subscribed to, but I really do wish there was some standard way to establish how many people are reading our feeds. This is just one more site I'll have to obssessively check to see if we are making any impact in the Medical Blog world, but for me, it's like getting a glimpse of the most beautiful place in the world through a very small porthole....you know it's there and you can guess how great it would be to see the whole thing, but you can't. ;-)