Cool Conferences

Kampala was awesome, but it does feel nice to be back at home in Kenya where I know my way around... The conference was basically amazing because I made friends with a ton of cool people and learned about all sorts of awesome technologies. The proceedings are at m4d.humanit.org if you are interested in the kinds of things the conference was about. The city of Kampala is also basically amazing, because it is super green and has a lot of really old and tall trees which means there are a ton of birds, and because it’s built on a bunch of hills the birds basically fly at the level of windows on the buildings even when the buildings aren’t that tall. There was also a group of migratory fruit bats which were huge and awesome and distracting.

Saturday I stopped in Jinja, which has a crazy beach town vibe, and got to visit the source of the Nile (the point where they decided that Lake Victoria becomes narrow enough to be called a river…it used to be a waterfall but then they built several dams.) On the way back, we got held up at the border for an hour or more because the police were interrogating people on my bus because of some con involving a money changer. Never really got the details.

Of course, while I was away the guy in charge of the really incredibly frustrating lab software, Freezerworks, didn’t get anything done (for my project at least), so today involved sitting with him for about 2 hours while he set up the stuff that was supposed to happen in September but that has been delayed by just about every problem imaginable. Then the program crashed…sooo we’ll try to finish it tomorrow.

Also while I was away someone apparently started making a decision about transitioning a particular project from using PDAs for data collection to using smartphones! Basically there are a bunch of projects that talk about their intentions to do this but it seemed like nothing was going to happen before the middle of next year. Also, despite the fact that we have a mobile technology working group here, the decision makers for the projects tend to not participate in those groups and so no one knows what stage any other group is at in terms of the transition. Since I’ve been thinking about mobile technology a ton, I decided to call a meeting to get everyone to update each other on the projects so that if possible people can use compatible technology and share expertise and resources.

Okay…just got back from above meeting and due to drug company pressure for monitoring a vaccine trial they have to have the whole thing set up in six weeks, including procurement, which alone normally takes several months, so for a ton of different easiness reasons they are going to use Windows Mobile. Android still makes sense for me so sadly I will be losing some immediate collaborators that would have helped speed things along. OH WELL. Gonna make it happen anyway.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that the plumbing stopped working in my office building (aka the main science building of the public health organizations of Kenya and the US here in Kisumu) so yesterday we were supposedly not allowed to use the bathroom, but today it just has a sign that says "please use responsibly" on it. INCONVENIENT.

Now for some pictures!

The source of the Nile!

Options to choose from...

A giant spider. The little brown spec on the left of the big spider is a normal sized spider. For comparison.

Traditional multiplayer xylophones! Just like I learned about in Music of Africa!

The awesome bats in Kampala (Just realized that bats in Uganda carry Marburg virus. That sucks.)!!!