{{ $image := .ResourceGetMatch “lens.jpg” }} As the image to the right shows, the layout of the different focal areas on a progressive lens introduce some interesting geometry into the lenses structure. In an effort to produce a lens that mimics natural, un-corrected vision, without lines, the optimal corridor of vision can be rather small. Not to mention the size of the near vision portion at the bottom of the lens. When I ordered my new lenses we had the lens upsized to the largest lens the frame would support; I cannot believe that I would be able to wear glasses with a smaller progressive lens at all.
{{ $image := .ResourceGetMatch “lens.jpg” }} The portion of the lens that I believe is giving me trouble is the unlabeled portion on the image; the part to the left and right of the intermediate vision corridor. What I want in my lenses are what is known as an executive, or Franklin, bifocal.
(Images are from All About Vision.)
{{ $image := .ResourceGetMatch “google_trends_politics.jpg” }}
It seems the Google searches for candidate names leading up to the recent primaries and caucuses, accurate predict the winner. Via Advertising Lab.
This afternoon, after two weeks of anticipation, I picked up my new glasses. The frames and lens shape and size fit my face perfectly. Both Sibylle and I are very pleased with how they look. Unfortunately i am finding it hard to see through them.
Because I needed astigmatism correction as well as help with my near vision, my lenses are progressive, or “no line,” bi-focals. Little did I know when I agreed to this style of lens what I was getting myself into. When I first put them on I was delighted to suddenly have near focus again. The sample text at the fitting desk, which I could only read at arm’s length, was clear and crisp through the glasses. I was too giddy with the sensation to notice that the progression in the lens, from top to bottom, and from the outside edges inward, caused significant distortion of the periphery of my corrected vision.
After I got home and started using the glasses to work on the computer I immediately noticed some odd visual artifacts. The area of greatest magnification in the lens is tiny, perhaps only as wide as the tip of my forefinger. Reading a sentence, whether on screen or in a book, requires that I turn my head - I have to continually move the spot of focus along the line. As I turn my head the area of vision defined by the outer rim of the lens distorts, wripples like someone was twisting the screen or book. Imagine the funhouse mirror and you’ll have an idea what I am seeing evertime I turn my head.
I called my Dad to see if he had progressive lenses in his glasses. Nope. Just old fashioned tri-focals, complete with lines. Next I called Ted, who it turns out, does have progessive lenses. Has had for nearly a year and is “still getting used to them.” He takes them off to read (not an option for me) and is considering getting lined bi-focals on his next trip to the optomitrist. Not encouraging.
Sibylle did some web searches and together we found several articles about the challenges of adapting to progressive lenses, including this one. All indicated that it could take two or three weeks for the wearer to adapt. They also indicated that great care had to be taken in selecting the right type of progressive lenses, based on the wearer’s activities. Heavy computer use or reading would require a different lens structure than non-hevy use might.
Finally I got out my old lined-bi-focals and wore them to see if the fun-house mirror problem existed there as well, and I had forgotten about it. No distortion whatsoever. Tomorrow I am going to return to the vision center and initiate an exchange to get lined bi-focals. Spending as much as 10 or 12 hours a day using a computer or reading will be miserable if I have to wear glasses that make me dizzy when I turn my head.
There seem to be two schools of thought regarding comments on personal blogs. Prominent sites like Daring Fireball don’t allow comments, and moreover, explain why. Other equally prominent sites have huge comment threads on nearly every post published.
Zanshin.net is by no means prominent. After nearly eight years of having a blog I have only a handful of comments. For several years, prior to switching to Wordpress, I had comments completely disabled on my site to avoid dealing with comment spam. I eventually renamed the functions that supported comments and trackback pings, as my referer logs were full of crap, and my commnets were all link bait for stuff you’d expect to get from a guy wearing a trench coat in the alleyway, who starts his patter with, “Psst! Hey, buddy….”
Since the widely available themes for Wordpress all seem to include the comment form, and since Wordpress provides the Askimet spam plugin, I decided to enable comments once again. Part of my daily routine now is to periodically visit the administration pages for my site and check to see if there are any comments waiting for moderation and if there are any commnets caught in the Askimet spam filter. Mostly I get spam comments in the filter.
The caught comments are usually obviously spam; links to prescription drugs or male member enhancement products, or online gambling. However, once in a while there is a borderline comment, like this:
What if I kept the comment but removed the objectionable link? The site is mine after all. I don’t have much of a comment or privacy policy here, and to me that is now the problem. If I had a page that outlined what was and wasn’t acceptible, and the consequence of violating those terms, then I would feel perfectly justified in editing the comment to remove the link. Without the terms already in place, however, I can’t justify altering the comment author’s thoughts. I wouldn’t like it if someone copied my thoughts and then took them out of context (i.e., changed the copy in some fashion), so I don’t think I should engage in that behavior.
As much as I’d like to accept the comment quoted above, I can’t without altering it through the removal of it’s associated link. (Yes, I recognize by using it as an example in this posting I have in effect, published the comment. Some hairs are easier to split than others.) In order to avoid this problem in the future I have crafted a privacy policy and some terms of use for zanshin.net, that includes a section on trackback pings and comments.
{{ $image := .ResourceGetMatch “obamastandardicon.jpg” }} If your state has already held it’s primary or caucus, I hope you participated. If you are part of the enormous collection of states casting votes tomorrow, please exercise your franchise. The future of America will be decided by those who show up. If you don’t participate then you can’t complain about the results. And if your opportunity is yet to come, please find out all you can about all the candidates, and cast your vote when your turns comes around.
While Sibylle and I were in Manhattan yesterday, so that she could teach, the Lexus was backed into. Again. Regular readers of zanshin will know that in August, while moving into our townhouse, someone visiting the neighbor backed his mini-van in to the right, rear passenger side of the car, doing roughly $1968 damage. On that occasion I tried to be a nice guy and didn’t call the police. We just exchanged contact information, and I got a copy of his insurance information. When it later turned out that he was uninsured, and penniless too boot, I regreted not having called the police. (I am still short the $500 deductible required to have the car fixed.)
When we discovered that the car had been hit again, and it almost the same spot, I was stunned. After Sibylle had finished her teaching we decided to take a short walk through Aggieville, the student portion of town. We window shopped and enjoyed the late afternoon sunshine. On our way back across the parking lot toward the car, we noticed someone backing out of a space opposite the Lexus. From across the rather large parking lot it looked like they were close to the Lexus, but it was hard to tell. When we got to the car we could see that the right corner of rear bumper, where it wraps around the car, was marred. The outer layer of plastic is broken and scratched, and there is white (paint from the other car) clearly visible on the car.
The car we had seen backing out, which and then driven right past us, had hit our car. And then just drove off; no note, no attempt to do the right thing, just a total abdication of his or her responsibility. What an ass.
Sibylle called the KSU campus police, who came very quickly, and we filled out an accident report. Since the other driver was no where to be found, I will once again be stuck with the deductible cost in order to get the car fixed. The only upside is that for a single $500 deductible I can now get both accidents fixed. Actually, I can get all three rear bumper/quarter panel injuries addressed. Since this new accident directly involves the rear bumper, which is covered in flakes of maroon spray paint, the replacement bumper would eliminate that damage.
Based on the $1968 estimate for the August accident, I am willing to bet that yesterday’s incident will also be in the $2000 range, especially if we have the trunk lid repained to eliminate the rest of the paint damage. My $500 deductible is now getting me more value on the dollar.
Along with mileage palindromes, I am also fascinated with those times of the day which are only expressed using the digits 0 (zero) and 1 (one). If you use a 24-hour clock you can produce all 16 values valid in a 4-digit binary string. Like so:
After trying to enable remote access to my home network and discovering that AT&T doesn’t really allow inbound connections, I’ve resorted to a different solution for access-from-anywhere-version-control.
Roundhaus, has this to say about their subversion offering,
I also considered Beanstalk as a remote version control platform, however difficulties with accessing the repository unfortunately put them in second place.
My objective was to house the three hand-coded sites I maintain under version control to allow development work from any machine, without the constant worry of which machine holds the current version. To get started I downloaded the source code from the three sites to my Powerbook; the live source being the truth of those sites.
Next I created a working directory on my laptop, and put each site in its own sub-directory. Having the three sites under a common parent directory allowed me to import the parent in to my project trunk on Roundhaus. From the command line in Mac OS X, I first navigated to my working directory, and then issued this subversion command to get started:
$ cd websites$ svn import -m "initial import of sites" . https://path-to-roundhaus-project/project/trunkWith my source imported into the repository I was able to delete the working directory and create a new, empty, working directory. Changing to that directory I was able to issue the subversion check out (co) command to retrieve revision 1 of my project:
$ cd sites$ svn co https://path-to-roundhaus-project/project/trunkRoundhaus has been extremely easy to work with and, so far, very reliable. In the few days since I’ve started using it numerous changes have been made to the code base without any hiccups or issues. Best of all, I no longer have to worry about whether I am working on the correct source.
It turns out it is possible to configure Wordpress to make leaving comments almost impossible. Without realizing it, I had done just that here at zanshin.net. The configuration has been updated, so any one should now be able to leave a comment or three, if they so choose.
General Options: Membership
On the Options page, for the Membership setting, I had “Users must be registered and logged in to comment” checked. It turns out that this required anyone desiring to leave a comment to register themselves with my site. Not a bad idea, in and of itself, but one that created a roadblock. Prospective commenters were presented with a log in page, no instructions, and a tiny “Register” link to follow. By turning this option off, visitors now only have to provide a name and email address in order to comment. And I still, through the Discussion Options, get to moderate comments before they appear on my site.
The lesson reinforced here is to test everything and assume nothing. Had I not asked Sibylle to leave a comment (to test a feature of my site’s statistical package), I never would have known that my combination of configuration choices had made commenting next to impossible.
From time to time it would be convenient to access one or more of the computers at home remotely. One of the projects I have going presently is to create a version control repository of all my code on the iMac, so that I can work on our hand-coded web sites from any machine in the house. Since the other two machines I use on a regular basis are laptops, it would be ideal to open a port on my router to allow an inbound connection to the version repository on the iMac.
When I was a cable broadband customer this was relatively easy to accomplish. I simply went to the routers configuration page and mapped a port to the IP address of the machine hosting the repository and I was done. By inputting the IP address of my cable modem followed by the port number I’d assigned, I could remotely connect to the machine at home.
Today we are DSL subscribers and, as I discovered last evening, remote access isn’t really feasible with DSL. Inbound connections (from the wild and woolly Internet to your LAN) are blocked by the modem. In order to configure the modem for remote access you must first unlock it using a 10-digit code stuck to the bottom of the modem on a bright yellow sticker. Repeated attempts to enter the code failed, and so I started a support chat session with AT&T.
The online chat support representative was friendly, but ultimately unable to help. (As an aside, both Sibylle and I have noted that online chat support makes heavy use of pre-programmed or canned messages, which make for a rather stilted conversation.) Once I was connected with a technical support person over the telephone, I was instructed to reset the modem. As the universe tends toward the ironic, this is when my phone connection with technical support died. Oh, and the modem was no longer talking to the Internet. And, I couldn’t log onto the modem.
The next technical support person I was connected to was able to show me how to re-apply the user id and password necessary for the modem to resolve it’s connection to AT&T. Our Internet connection was restored.
Revisiting the remote access configuration, the original problem, I discovered that resetting the modem had updated the configuration page. Inputting the remote access code worked! Yay!
Unfortunately, AT&T thinks we shouldn’t have continuous remote access to our home network. Remote access only lasts for 20 minutes of inactivity and then it automatically resets. Boo! Perhaps I’ll call them again to see if there is a way to open that access window permanently; otherwise DSL is useless for remote access, at least as I define it.