Wasn't Aware that I Needed to Know Chinese

One of the things that I like about being here is that you get to use all of your skills. When working on the wards, you have to think creatively to try and figure out a way that you can come to the diagnosis with the limited resources and investigations that you have at hand. Computer skills apparently also come in handy.

The University at Mbarara is actively trying to increase the scope of its practice and its ability to care for patients, as evidenced by the efforts that they take to bring doctors from all over to come and help with teaching. As part of his rotation here the British cardiologist Angus is trying to set up an exercise treadmill machine that patients will be able to run on and determine if they have underlying heart disease. The machine measures their heart’s electrical activity while people are stressed by running on a treadmill. He was able to have a machine and computer shipped here from China for exclusive use by the cardiology department (one local physician with an interest in cardiology). Unfortunately, the treadmill arrived in a large packing crate with Chinese only instructions. From what Angus was saying, it was a little like putting something together from Ikea, but with the instructions in an entirely different language, it was a bit more challenging.

They were able to get the treadmill up and running, and got the computer set up to install the programs. Unfortunately, when the computer started up, all of the menus and dialog boxes were, you guessed it, written in Chinese. Angus asked me to have a look at it, hoping that I could change the menu options around. I was able to change the keyboard settings to type in English, I was able to change the currency and date formats for some programs to English, but apparently to change the menu and dialog boxes to English you need a special “multilingual user interface pack.” I searched on my netbook for ways to fix this, and it helpfully suggested in the help section contacting my nearest Microsoft office location….. Might not work when that could be on another continent.

The computer also needed an extra card installed to accept the serial connections from the EKG machine and the monitor. Having built my own computer at home, I figured this would be a simple task- open up the side, pop in the card, done. However, the Chinese apparently do not use phillips head screwdrivers to assemble their cases, they use torq heads. For those that don’t know, a torq head is a 6 headed star bit, similar to (once again) the hex wrenches used to put together furniture from Ikea. Since I only had a phillips head, I had to improvise a little, using one of my keys to wedge inside the screws and haltingly unfasten the case. 30 minutes later, I had the cover off and was able to pop in the card. Of course, I couldn’t find a driver for it, since all the options were in Chinese, so back to square one.

I was able to find a visiting IT professor from England who has a copy of windows xp, and this afternoon after rounds and teaching the goal is to wipe the computer completely and reinstall a copy of windows that we can actually read. One of the last things I expected to be doing while I was here was trying to fix a computer.