Entries from February 2009 ↓

A Romanian colleague at work brought a little microscope in to show it to me.  I offered to clean it up and overhaul it.

The cleanup operation went smoothly.  I was able to disassemble the eyepiece cell and clean the lens very well.  It is about the size of a split pea.  How someone can make a proper lens that small is a mystery to me.  There was no way to disassemble the objectives without destroying them, so I just cleaned them in place.  They came out pretty well.

The body and hardware was pretty easy to clean and re-lubricate.  It works very smoothly now.  I had no slides to actually try out the optics, but I was able to look through a cleaning paper and see the microfibers very well at 100x using only the reflected light from an open window next to the table.

I couldn’t find this exact scope on the internet, so this is the first one (probably not).  I return it to it’s owner on Monday, so I thought I’d get some pictures of it before I gave it back.  I hope she enjoys it.

Update (March 4):  With more people searching, we are getting very confident this is the only example of this exact Eikow model on the internet.  Also, the owner is very pleased with the results of my overhaul, both cosmetically and functionally.  I am glad it will be put to use.

Now, I have to get one of my own.  I’m finding all sorts of small stuff I’d like to examine and have no microscope to do it.  I also want one for my two boys’ education over the next 17 years.  Any suggestions?

We took Tom Flynn’s advice and completely gave christmas a miss this year.  It was great!  Thanks, Tom!

Our annual big day was Darwin Day, February 12.  For our Darwin Day equivalent of the christmas feast, we had spaghetti and meatballs in a tip of the hat to the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

The big gift for my five year old boy was a stereo microscope.  10X and 30X, with a set of 15X eyepieces as well.  I didn’t buy a cheap toy scope, but a proper dissection microscope.  It will serve us for years, I’m sure.  I also got him a box of insects cast in resin.  The cast quality isn’t that great, but they are adequate.

Something I noticed about all the bugs is the two hooks they all have on the ends of their feet.  Wasp, cricket, locust, spider, housefly, flower bug, scorpion, and ant.  All have those nice two hooks on the end of each foot.  Seems like the common bug ancestor must have worked out that two hooks pretty much get it on our planet and the design seems to have stuck.  Obviously, my tiny collection isn’t enough to draw too many conclusions, but that sure seems like a positive correlation to me.

Today, my boy proudly told us he wants to poo on a plate so he can put some under the microscope to look at it.  I guess I better get some slide making materials.

I wonder if anyone else celebrates Darwin Day as their big annual christmas replacement therapy day.

I wanted to mention I got the inspiration for my site name from the Skepbitch.  Also, from the Skepchick and Skepdude calendars.  I always thought the Skepdude calendars should have been titled “Skepdick” calendars.  Rhymes with Skepchick, you know.

The Skepbitch gets first place in my links sidebar.  Thanks for the inspiration, Dr!

What did we do?  Nothing.

My boy ate another couple bits of sweets from school.

That I love my wife has nothing to do with praying to some saint for it.  I ran into a news article yesterday telling that apparently Valentine is the wrong saint for lovelorn singles.  Sorry, I can’t remember the correct saint or where I read it.

There is a package out there to “install” MySQL v 5.1 onto my 10.5.6 Mac.  Big mistake.  It wouldn’t start.  It destroyed my old MySQL data (with some help from me).  After fighting with it for the evening, I did a system restore using Time Machine (WAY cool).  I didn’t go back far enough and the next morning (the system restore takes a LONG time), I had the same problem.  Did another system restore.  Then, Apache wouldn’t start.  Time Machine didn’t restore the /var/apache2/ directory for log files.  Add the directory.  Installed the latest big update from Apple.  Re-loaded this blog.

Here we are again.  Now to start working on content.