Problem #6 and Thanksgiving

One of my projects for the past several weeks has been trying to get our microscope camera to work. For seven months now the camera has idled while patients have gone undiagnosed. I spent two weeks working with Olympus tech support, reinstalling and updating everything we could think of, swapping out any component I could to try to get a differential diagnosis. Finally, I've reached the conclusion that the problem is in the camera itself, and I don't have the tools or the expertise to resolve a hardware problem like that. So now I'm trying to arrange a way to return the camera to Olympus for repair, but they've stopped answering my emails, and telephones are a bit tricky across so many timezones. Persistence is key.

In the meanwhile, I've been working with Dr. Joyce, our lab guru, on a temporary replacement. We had an old 3 megapixel microscope camera in a drawer somewhere that had also been shelved with a software problem. That turned out to be fairly easy to fix, so now we have very limited imaging capabilities. Unfortunately, the webcam built into most phones provides better images than this piece of junk. That got me to thinking about using a regular digital camera instead, since a run-of-the-mill point and shoot today has just as good resolution as the $50,000 camera we are trying to fix.

It turns out that some hobbyists do use point and shoot cameras for microscope photography, but they typically employ expensive adapters. I tried using a toilet paper roll to make an adapter for my point and shoot, but the image is way too small. I think the problem is that the camera has a built in lens designed to provide a wider field of view than just what is directly in front of the sensor.

Another option is to try a DSLR with no lens. We have an old full frame DSLR that was donated, but I haven't the foggiest idea how to go about building an adapter for it. I would also have to deal with the problem of camera shake from the mirror flipping up and down. We will see how it goes.

In other news, here's a cool bird I saw at Lake Manyara.

It turns out that it's reasonably affordable to visit the national parks if you have a residency permit (half off at the gate) and if you have a friend with a safari vehicle that you can use instead of hiring a guide. I went to Lake Manyara National Park (about thirty minutes down the road) with some friends last week, and had a great time. It's not far from Karatu, but the landscape is completely different because of lower altitude and more water. It's like a rainforest in some places but also has wide plains, and also it's full of elephants. Proof:

It was a fun time with a very interesting group. We had an octogenarian surgeon, a former NSA mathematician, a Maasai warrior, a cardiologist, me, and two kids. The latter two intrepid explorers were a lot of fun because they got very excited about every animal we saw. Later in the day, they didn't find the elephants nearly as exciting however.

It had been a long day of exploring...

And we had already met plenty of elephants anyway.
















We also spied an antelope with his antlers screwed on the wrong way around.

You can see what they're supposed to look like on his buddy in the background.





















Finally, it turns out that part of my job is to organize a Thanksgiving celebration for the medical volunteers. At great expense, I acquired a turkey, and then I sent off to Grandma for help on how to cook the thing. It turned out reasonably well, and I think that a good time was had by all.