The March 13th online edition of the New York Times has an article looking at the 5 - 10% of people who elect to have Lasik surgery and discover that it isn’t always a panacea. As one who had the surgery and is now ruing the day I ever considered it for myself, I strongly recommend that anyone considering this surgery read this article and then have a long talk with your regular eye professional. Unless glasses are somehow injurious to you then I would suggest you not have the surgery. Not wearing glasses is not a good enough reason.
My reason was wanting to eliminate the bifocal portion of my vision, to be able to see objects up close and far away without correction. Unfortunately my eyes did not respond to the treatment and I am wearing glasses again, less than two years later.
Please, if you are thinking about Lasik, go read this article.
I look at you all see the love there that’s sleeping While my guitar gently weeps I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping Still my guitar gently weeps I don’t know why nobody told you how to unfold your love I don’t know how someone controlled you They bought and sold you.
I look at the world and I notice it’s turning While my guitar gently weeps With every mistake we must surely be learning Still my guitar gently weeps I don’t know how you were diverted You were perverted too I don’t know how you were inverted No one alerted you.
I look from the wings at the play you are staging, While my guitar gently weeps. As I’m sitting here, doing nothing but aging, Still, my guitar gently weeps. © George Harrison
Happy Birthday Mom.
The first instant messages I sent were within AOL’s “wading pool” using version 1.0 or 1.5 in about March 1993. Soon thereafter I left the wading pool and started swimming in the open, unfiltered Internet ocean. One of the first pieces of software I played with was the first version of ICQ. I still have that initial account, 292099.
From the start I made a conscious effort to use whole sentences, capitalization, and proper punctuation in my instant messages. Depending upon one computer or another for most of my written communication had already deteriorated my hand writing to a barely legible scrawl, I didn’t want to erode the only means of writing I had left with cryptic shortcuts and abbreviations.
For most of the fifteen years that have followed that decision I have been perfectly content with my no shortcuts approach to instant messages. However, a recent surge in the number of text or SMS messages I send, has prompted a re-evaluation of my stance. Typing with one or two thumbs on a cell phone keypad is an exercise in patience. Trying to use proper punctuation and no abbreviated words only adds to the laboriousness of the process. I hate to relax my stance, and my conviction, that typing correctly is worth the extra effort, but there are times when I am sorely tempted.
(On a somewhat related note, I see where some parents are now naming their offspring using SMS abbreviations or Internet inspired capitalizations. Name your child John or Sally and change your own name to the avant-garde moniker you are so fond of, i.e., pick on someone your own size.)
For now I am sticking with my full sentence, proper punctuation stance. But if text messages suddenly take on greater importance in my daily life, i may half 2 chg my thinking.
Okay, I can see where my productivity over the next couple of days is going to take a nose-dive. Adding a wonderfully minimalist aggregation site to my daily rotation may require I rethink some of the other sites in that list. That or find an extra hour or two in the day.
You can check it out yourself, but don’t say I didn’t warn you ahead of time. Alltop.
Shawn Blanc has put up an excellent review of his new 15" MacBook Pro over at his site. In the Unchanging section of the review he makes the point that Apple products age very well:
Of course, his review only further whets my appetite for a new MacBook Pro of my own.
Snap Shots, those popup windows that give a preview of the target page of a link, are to my thinking highly annoying. You can turn the feature off by visiting their FAQ and finding the link that leaves a cookie on your machine to disable the feature on any pages you visit. Unfortunately, if you clear your cookies, you get the blasted preview windows again.
I can never remember where the FAQ link is at, so I am putting it here on my site for future reference.
For the past three days Sibylle has had the good fortune to attend a piano master class at a nearby university. The presenter, head of the Yale Piano department, spent an hour with each student, listening to their piece and then helping them to mold it, or improve it in some way. Some of the suggestions are subtle, mere nuances in the sound. Others are more profound reinterpretations of the music. With three students each afternoon, anyone who attended got to partake in nine hours of world class piano theory, practice, and technique.
What is interesting to me is the utter lack of a parallel to the music master class in the programming world. It wouldn’t be hard to accomplish; rent a room with a large screen, bring a laptop or three loaded with virtualization software, and one at a time have participants load up their development environment and walk the group through their project. The moderator would then ask questions about the choices, obvious or hidden, in the code base. The group could chime in with thoughts and ideas of their own. Not a code review as conducted by some shops, but a code sharing among interested parties.
A code review, in my mind, while a valuable exercises that all programming shops should employ, is at best a group check that the code nearing completion isn’t egregiously out of line with the local standards and expectations. The feedback is internal to the shop, and may have folded into it politics, business constraints, or other artificial factors. A code master class would have some theme (optimization, or refactoring, or human factors, et cetera) and the presenters would be asked to bring examples that fit the theme. The feedback from the master presenter wouldn’t be limited to the needs of an individual shop or group. Without the constraints of the local shop arbitrarily limiting the discussion, I think a master class setting would help all participants to increase their knowledge in a more collegial manner.
Unfortunately there is an air of ego that swirls around programming; it is hard to offer up your code for critique by another, much less in front of a group. However, watching Professor Berman coax, coach, and enlighten already accomplished, indeed virtuoso, pianists to find new layers in their music has me convinced that all of us in the technical realm could benefit from the same kind of master class approach to learning.
Having grown up listening to The Beatles I am hugely pleased by the “McCartney reported inks deal with Apple” headline over at Ars Technica. No time frame yet of when the catalog will appear on iTunes, but I would suspect this will make a great “one more thing” bit at this years WWDC.
Last evening Sibylle and I attended a piano recital at Park University in Parkville, Missouri. The recital was part of a three-day piano festival that the university’s International School of Music is hosting this week. Sibylle had spent the afternoon attending a piano master class, and after dinner out, we returned to the campus for the recital.
Four incredibly talented students perform works by Liszt, Chopin, Haydn, Bizet, Saint-Saëns, Grieg, Debussy, Rachmaninov and Brahms. Even to my relatively untrained ears the pieces performed were incredibly difficult; seeing them performed by virtuosos was outstanding.
Since I arrived in time for the tail end of the afternoon master class, I was aware that the piano being used was brand new; it had been delivered just that day for the music school to demo before completing its purchase. In a flight of fancy during one of the pieces I had this chain of thoughts:
Imagine the piano factory late at night, the cluster of completed pianos nervously talking amongst themselves about where they will end up. “What if they never tune me?” laments one. “Will I only be used to prop up family pictures and be used to (badly) play Christmas songs?” wonders another. The third says, “I’ve been sold already. I’m going to a chapel in Missouri. Nothing but hymns in my future.”
Imagine that piano’s delight when instead of Christmas carols or hymns being played, that Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody is played, or Saint-Saëns Danse Macabre is coaxed from its strings and keys.
Yesterday Nekko had a visit to the vet to get one of her annual vaccinations and to have a blood glucose curve test completed to measure the effectiveness of her current insulin treatments.
Her blood glucose curve was very good. I gave her a shot of insulin at 8 am, just before we took her to the vet’s office. Her initial blood glucose (BG) was 125. Over the course of the day it went up to 140 and stayed there, which is exactly what it should do. A reading of 100-120 is normal. Anything below 100 is dangerous. In the case of an 11-year old cat, anything under 200 is good, so she is doing very well.
We have noticed an increased amount of urine output and increase water intake. Since her BG is normal the doctor felt that the increase drinking and urination could be a sign of kidney disease or failure. At our prompting they did a quick blood test and urine analysis. All of her blood values are normal except for the amount of glucose, which was 215. Given that we were 9 or 10 hours into the insulin cycle he wasn’t concerned with that value. He also observed an increased amount of glucose in her urine. The doctor explained that if she hadn’t urinated in a while that the concentration of glucose would be higher.
There is slight evidence of infection (raised amounts of protein and something else in her urine), possibly in her bladder, which the doctor said is common with diabetic cats. The test is subjective (matching colors on a test strip to a graph) and he didn’t seem overly concerned by the infection.
We had three options: wait a week and test again, liquid antibiotic, or tablet antibiotic. Nekko is not a pick-up-and-hold-me kind of cat. Trying to give her an oral medication would be trying for all involved; worse it would make subsequent injections harder to complete as she would start avoiding contact at all.
When we explained to the doctor her reluctance to be handled he offered that he could provide the antibiotic in an injectable form - subcutaneous - just like the insulin. We opted to wait a week, watch Nekko for increased signs of lethargy. We’ll do another quick blood test then and if the infection indications are still present we’ll go the injectable antibiotic route.
We asked him about her occasional inability to complete a short jump up onto the bed. He said that neuropathy (disease or dysfunction of one or more peripheral nerves, typically causing numbness or weakness) is common in diabetes. This might also explain an episode earlier where she chewed or licked off most of the fur on her forelegs.
The firmness of her belly is not unusual or anything to be concerned with he said. Cats store fat in that area and it can often feel quite hard. Her weight was 14.6 pounds, up from 11 fifteen months ago, and a low of 10 when she was first diagnosed in September 2006.
All in all she is in very good shape for a cat who is about to be 12 in May, who has diabetes.