A silver lining of a frustrating week at work was that it spurred me to a prolonged jaunt yesterday (Saturday). I took a train to Kidderminster, avoided the lure of a sign to their carpet museum (with difficulty!), walked for ten minutes thru a fairly dilapidated town to a bus stop, sat at the one table in front of a café next to the stop munching a crispy bacon bap and sipping a strong coffee (Lavazza no less), took the bus out of town and beyond the next one (Bewdley) til I arrived at Wyre Forest (Fig. 1). After walking for two hours in the blue and breezy day thru this spacious but perhaps overmanaged expanse, I discovered the best bit, a ramble beside the Dowles Brook, on a steep and meadowy valley floor. I came out in the charming town of Bewdley, smack on the banks of the mighty Severn river. And then, because of road works and no phone service and despite more than an extra mile of walking to the stop for the bus back, I still had to Uber to the Kidderminster station. But even that botch-up didn’t dampen my mood. All in all, a satisfying day out. 

Perhaps in time I will view last week’s frustrations in the same light? Can but hope. After some days of chasing the mysterious reticulum inconclusively, Friday was meant to be the great reveal. When Amit from MBL would zoom in, Deus ex Machina like, and reveal at last the secret calibration handshake. But first, he would update the drivers on the borrowed PC to run the Meadowlark liquid Crystal controller; I will need this for the first trial session (Tuesday) on the multi-photon. I arrived anxious and excited at my confocal booking, 4 pm on the Friday, fired it all up, and got ready. Right on time, Amit joined by zoom. Let’s go. 

To update the drivers on the PC, Amit needs to use a piece of software called Any Desk, which allows a remote user to log on and take control. I had thought this was browser-based but in fact a small app needed to be downloaded. That’s where the fun began. The PC flat out refused to download or let me copy the anydesk.exe file. Told me I needed permissions but absolutely refused to tell me how to enter said permissions. The IT Lords here have granted me admin privileges, I have the power. I should be able to copy over the damn file, but no idea how. 

After faffing around, I said to Amit let’s move on and deal with the calibration. We turned to the confocal and got started. Fate, the Gods, Blind Chance, call it what you will, was (or were) not finished. The transmitted light detector was glitching. That detector is necessary for calibrating. The laser light reaches that detector after passing thru, first, the liquid crystals and, second, a rotatable linear polarizer. The liquid crystals are adjusted to produce light polarized more or less at an angle of, say, 0º, the linear polarizer is set to 90º, and then, the liquid crystals are adjusted so that the least light reaches the transmitted light detector. Minimum light indicates “crossed polars” (i.e., extinction). To find this intensity minimum accurately, I use the histogram function on the confocal software which provides a digital readout of the intensity.

A super bright bar, an eighth to a quarter of the screen width, was rolling down the image window. No way to measure intensity. This had happened once before: Alex (local instrument guru) had no idea how to fix it and we turned everything off. And then back on and hey presto! no more glitching. I tried that Friday: there was neither hay nor pesto. Glitch glitch glitch. Nothing for it but to close up shop. I apologized to Amit for wasting his time.I can come to grips with calibration over the coming weeks. But I need to have those drivers updated by Tuesday morning. I put in a request to the University’s IT crew for HELP! I hope they help on Monday. If any of you out in internet-land know how to coax a PC into allowing this file to be copied, I’d *love* to hear from you.