Today, Amanda pointed me to an article about a man who made his own home-made prosthetic finger-tip with integrated USB storage. A pretty simple but impressive feat, and one that may leave many geeks a little more careless around sharp objects.  I mean, how much more hardcore can you get than literally hacking your body so that you can hack your body?

Naturally I began to ponder what modifications I would make to myself if ever I decided that I was going to pursue the path of upgrades.  I’ve thought about getting a tattoo before, but there is a difference between decorating what you already have, and modifying what you already have by adding onto or taking away.  An even greater leap is when the modifications that are being added-on are things that are not naturally found on a human, like a USB stick.

A USB stick is neat, but it’s size is limited.  They don’t make them that large in capacity yet, and they are easy to break/bend/damage/scrape the pins on because of their wafer-like construction.  So if I were to become part cyborg (after all, a cyborg is nothing but the marriage of man and machine is it not?), what would my enhancement be?  I tried to think of this in a real-life, right now environment and not some far off distant future, and I came up with this.

If and when my appendix were to become infected/burst, I would bring the largest available capacity solid state hard drive with me to the O.R., and have them fasten the drive where my appendix used to be.  The power and USB cords would both be wired from the drive to my navel, which would be outfitted with a USB female and AC Adapter female port. It would be called the Appendrive.

Outfitted this way, I could bring my Appendrive with me wherever I went, backups of all my photos, music, videos, all my data with me at all times.  It would even be burried with me.  Also, why purchase an SSD drive for so much more money than a traditional HDD? Because if someone wants to copy the latest episode of Eastbound And Down from my Appendrive while I’m doing something, like swiveling around in my chair (it is, after all, the most physical exercise I get in any given day), I don’t want the hard drive scratching any of its platters.  No one wants a return visit to the O.R. for an Appendrive crash.