Read about Featured Gadgeteer - Mounir Bashour

Gadgeteer News

January 02, 2004

Name: Mounir Bashour, MD, CM, FRCSC, FACS , DIP ABO, ASOPRS
Location: Montreal and Toronto Canada

I cannot remember any time not using gadgets.

Gaming consoles
As far as I can remember, my first game console was the Atari bought by my beloved visionary Aquarian grandfather Shukri Shamamas. I also had both Intellivision consoles from Mattel, and both Colecovision consoles as well. These first loves were eventually followed by Nintendo, Sega, Sony Playstation and Xbox.

Computers
I started off with the Casio 720P programmable calculator and learned to program in BASIC. I moved from this to the ZX Sinclair and then the ZX Spectrum using tapes to load programs. My grandfather bought me the first commercially available IBM PC with 5.25" Floppy Disk Drives and 2MB RAM for a huge amount of money when I was very young in the belief that computers were the wave of the future and he wanted me to be at the forefront - thanks Grandad. Years later I was reintroduced to computers at Johns Hopkins as a Biomedical Engineer, but did not have personal computers at home again until I was already an MD and yet again the small platform bought me back in. My aunt bought me a HP 100LX (still the greatest single computer I ever owned in my opinion), this led me back in I eventually went with Dell buying a state of the art Pentium 90 Mhz, then 4 years later a P2 400 MHZ and 4 years later again my state of the art P4 3.0 Ghz Asus board custom designed PC with Antec Case and SATA drives running in RAID. I try every piece of software shareware, freeware or major that I can, and am an amateur hacker and wireless network specialist.

PDAs
As above the Casio 720P in the early 1980s and the HP 100 LX in 1993 and later HP 200 LX I had every MOD I could lay my hands on to increase clock speed performance etc. and still tweak with these babies from time to time The Palm Pilot when it first came out was in my hands immediately, I moved to the Handspring Neon, the Handspring Prism, and now the Handspring 270 and 600. My love for PDAs is immense. I teach fellow eye surgeons annually a very popular course called the Wired Ophthalmologist at the American Academy of Ophthalmology, this year in Anaheim California (Disneyland).

Summary
Generally speaking, I am interested in all things electronic - from digital cameras ( I own the Kodak DCS-560 bought at the huge price of $25000 US now matchable by cameras for only $2000 in only 5 years!) , DV cameras (I own the Canon Elura 40) , cd / vcd / DVD... The smaller they are the better. You can find out more of what I am up to at my personal website for my annual course - http:// www.bashour.com/wired