Almost two years ago, in March 2006, I had LASIK surgery done to my eyes to eliminate the need to wear bifocal glasses any more. The goal was to allow me to see without corrective lens whether I was reading a book, looking at a computer monitor, or driving the car. Given my age at the time (45) the LASIK option that sounded best was “mono-vision.” As we age our eyes lose some of their focal range. You might be able to see fine up close, but not far away. Or the other way around, but not both ends of the scale. By adjusting, surgically, one eye to see up close and the other to see distance, you can increase the range of unaided vision.
Unfortunately this has not worked out for me. Following the first surgery my near eye was able to focus out to about 8 inches. The doctor explained that it had “healed too strong.” After waiting three months for the eye to heal, I under went a second surgery to adjust that eye. It now focuses about 24 inches from my face, but no closer. It had, again, healed differently than the doctor expected.
The doctor is reluctant to operate on that eye again, feeling that (a) two surgeries is enough, and (b) that there is no guarantee how it will heal the third time. His option was to adjust the distance eye - something I am not going to risk.
I’ve tried living with the quirks of my new vision, but I am frustrated on a daily basis by not being able to see up close anymore. Prior to the surgeries, I was able to see, read, and do things inside of arm’s reach. Today I have to hold books at arm’s length in order to focus on the words.
The last post-operative exam, a little more than one year ago, was also highly dissatisfying. My near vision wasn’t measured at all. It seemed that the clinic was more interested in seeing what my overall vision “score” was, than measuring the absolute parameters of its range. My combined vision is 20-20, but I can’t read or focus on objects inside of two feet.
So today I am seeing a new doctor, to get a complete evaluation of my eyesight. I expect that I will need some form of correction in order to regain the near vision I miss and desire. Whether that will be in the form of glasses or contacts, I don’t know yet. After the dilation wears off, I will post the results here.
Recently at work I added all the conference room calendars, for the building I work in, to my “Other Calendar” list in Outlook. This way I can click on the checkbox for a conference room and see its availability quickly; something useful when trying to schedule a meeting.
Today I wanted to add all the conference rooms for our other building (and the one I am moving to in three weeks) to the same list. I’ll be heading up a project team whose members all live in the other building, so it only makes sense to schedule meetings there. Easier for one of me to walk five blocks that it would be for eight of them.
Try as I might I could not remember how to added calendars to the list. The only hit on Google that was even halfway close was one of those “you must be a member and signed in to read the rest of the article” sites that I refuse to use. I even tried Microsoft’s support site and learned all the neat things I could do with a calendar once it was in my other list, but not how to actually put it there.
Finally I stumbled across the solution, which had been staring me in the face the whole time. Below the “Other Calendars” portion of the navigation panel in the Calendar view in Outlook, there is a link titled, “Open a Shared Calendar.” Turns out by “shared” they mean “other.”
Now I’ll go bang my head against the desk so I’ll remember this trick in the future.
The uptime command, in the UNIX world, displays how long a particular machine has been “up” or running. Recently I have been applying that term to my daily lower back exercises. After reading a getting things done article that talked about Jerry Seinfeld, I have been working on better uptime for my exercises.
I’ll explain.
Jerry said he gets things done by getting a large year-at-a-glance calendar, and by putting a mark on each consecutive day he works on new material. He said that seeing a continuous string of marks is a powerful motivator for not breaking the chain. When I first read this I thought to myself, “it is so simple it would probably work.”
I weigh myself every day, and record the weight on a chart on our bureau in the bedroom. At night I do my exercises in that room, and I’ve started putting a little plus sign next to the date on my chart, to indicate a successful completion of my exercises for the day. A chain of one or two pluses is easy to break. Longer chains are much harder to ignore.
Presently I’m at 16 days in a row. Knowing that a miss now would mean starting all over again at 1 is a surprisingly powerful motivator. To use the UNIX term, I’ve got a 16 day uptime.
In the previous two Presidential Election cycles I made good use of the resources found at Project Vote Smart, especially the “political courage test.” Over the weekend I took some time to poke around the biographies of the major candidates for 2008 and was dismayed to discover that none of them have completed the test. C’mon candidates, be grown-up and provide us some answers already. Otherwise I’ll be forced to cast my vote based on your favorite food.
And since there is one candidate whom I like, who lists chili as his/her favorite food, I guess I’m all set for November.