Category Archives: Uncategorized

Nexus 6

My eyes suck. They’ve sucked for a long time, and not just in terms of vision, though that is the most serious problem I have with them. Most people who know me casually don’t realize I’m as blind as I am (I very nearly meet the standard for legal blindness in my right eye); I wear contacts most of the time, and rarely go out with my glasses on. The first encounter with me and glasses usually provokes odd looks — even with the ultra-expensive high-index plastic lenses, my glasses still manage to deform my face, and the lenses themselves are 7 or 8 mm thick at the outer edges anyway.

To make matters worse, my right eye is dramatically weaker than my left. Corrected, this isn’t such a big deal, but uncorrected there’s enough difference in input that I get dizzy sometimes if I don’t close one eye or the other. As I say, when I’m wearing glasses or have my contacts in, my vision’s usually OK. My contacts have been problematic for a few years — as a function of my allergies (which are also getting worse as time goes on, which is why I’m starting immunotherapy soon-ish), as a function of the lenses themselves. I managed to develop a truly shocking case of giant papillary conjunctivitis a few years ago — it’s never a positive sign when your optometrist comes along, everts your eyelids, and then calls the other members of his practice group over to look at you. I went through a period where I had a serious problem with floaters around the same time, which continue to bug me under some circumstances to this day.

Two positives in all of this: One is that I don’t have an astigmatism (yet), which frankly to my mind is nothing short of a miracle. The other saving grace was that my prescription had seemingly finally stabilized — I’d had the same pair of glasses for almost four years, which was unheard of up to this point. But in the past month or so I’ve noticed that my right eye has been a little blurry, a little less sharp; I blamed it on my contacts and didn’t think anything else of it. (I’ve been fighting with the right kind of contact for a couple of years now — the ones that don’t induce GPC in me dry my eyes out or sting; the ones that keep my eyes moist induce GPC; the ones that do neither are uncomfortable as hell.) I’d been thinking semi-seriously about refractive surgery, and it’s intriguing as hell (the cost balances within a couple of years by my math), but.. I still can’t shake that nagging feeling that maybe something would go wrong. Sure, I knew a bunch of people who had it done, who swore by it, who said it was the best thing they’ve ever done.. and yet, my data-driven soul says, “The plural of anecdote is not data.” Anyway, now that my prescription has apparently changed — one would hope, anyway, that this does not signal the beginning of the dreaded astigmatism — that option’s off the table for a while again, allowing me to defer the decision once more.

So I’d sort of planned to see my optometrist in the next little while and ask about my right eye when I went and did something much worse on Monday: I tore my corneas off.

Okay, that’s overstating it. I actually tore a couple small patches of my cornea off (think of the top of a salt shaker) and irritated the living fuck out of the other parts. Officially it’s called “punctate keratitis” and it’s officially not a big deal (though I do need topical analgesia and I’m now on opthalmic antibiotics), but holy hopping hell did it ever hurt! It might well have been the most painful thing I’ve ever felt, and I’m including the time I tried to sneeze after my neck surgery. What happened was that somehow, the cornea-contact lens interface had dried out, leading the cornea to become hypoxic and irritated. When I finally pulled the lens out, it took chunks of the cornea with it; what was left of the cornea decided that it was going to just sit there and be pissed.

Monday night was brutal — an addict’s dream combination of anti-inflammatories and high-test systemic analgesics knocked me out but did little to dull the pain. I woke up every hour or so, saw the doc on Tuesday morning, then went home and went back to bed after dumping a load of diclofenac into my eyes. (The man who invented opthalmic diclofenac deserves to be kissed several times over.) I woke up in the afternoon feeling marginally better, but with a new problem: everything was just slightly blurry.

And that’s how things have remained since then. I went to work this morning and managed to function fine, though I had a tough time reading the computer screens and I found myself squinting hard at ECGs and printed paper. My recently slacking right eye decided that now would be an excellent time to be even lazier and my left eye wasn’t doing much better either, so there was a lot of close focusing and turning up the font sizes where I could. It’s a little tricky — I can get around fine and I’m OK to drive, but fine discrimination is elusive. This will, I am told, improve as the swelling and irritation goes down, and frankly I can’t wait for it. Meanwhile, it’s annoying as all fuck because things are just slightly out of focus and it takes me a couple of seconds to find the hyperfocal point where everything sort of snaps into place.

(Another interesting thing I noticed today: I am noticably stupider than I usually am. I tried to do some teaching on Monday night and found myself almost incapable of forming a complete sentence, unfairly punishing my students for my own idiocy. Fortunately my Trusted Lackey helped pick up the slack and so I doubt anyone was in a position to complain. But today I was trying to explain ischemic heart disease to a patient and I couldn’t find the words. Thank god no one died today; I can’t imagine how that conversation would have gone with all the ums and ahs and ers and duhs..)

Anyway, at the moment, I have the font size in Mozilla jacked up by +3. Which is.. interesting. It’s kind of surprising how many Wobsites out there depend on fixed-width layouts so that relatively increasing the size of the text manages to seriously screw up the design. Unsurprisingly, the one site that looks exactly the way it does with a “normal” font size is Joe Clark’s, which leads me to think that perhaps I need to put a little more effort at designing for people who need to bump the text size up a few notches..

How is this news?! Part II

From page A02 of today’s Victoria Times Colonist..

Postal worker taken to hospital after being attacked by squirrel:

OIL CITY, Pa. (AP) — Letter carriers occasionally have to deal with angry dogs or maybe even a spider’s nest in a mailbox, but a mean squirrel?

Barb Dougherty, 30, a U.S. Postal Service employee, said she was attacked and bitten Monday by a squirrel while delivering mail in Oil City, about 121 kilometres north of Pittsburgh.

“I saw it there on the porch, put the mail in the box and turned to walk away and it jumped on me,” Dougherty told the Derrick newspaper, who said the animal then ran up her leg and onto her back.”I eventually got a hold of the tail and pulled it off me. No one was home at the house where I was delivering the mail, but the neighbour lady heard me screaming and came over.”

An ambulance took Dougherty to a hospital, where she was treated for cuts and scratches. The squirrel was killed.

’cause god knows we couldn’t think of anything else to put on the second page of the paper…

Quote of the moment

Ordinary Aztecs, animists from the Congo, and teenybopper fans of David Cassidy have all gushed over the central importance of their idols to their lives, and it doesn’t impress most of us at all. Maybe we should add Argumentum ad Fanboi to the lexicon of logical fallacies.
—PZ Myers

If this doesn’t sum up 85% of the “arguments” I find myself in these days, I’m not sure what would.

IT'S SO NOT A FASHION ACCESSORY.

If I had to think of a single sentence that summed up my antipathy towards BoingBoing generally and Xeni Jardin in particular, I doubt I could do better than this:

Full disclosure: Heck, I have nearly 1,000 old cellphones (some with batteries separated) in my desk drawer. But my last name is not Muhareb, and I don’t drive a minivan. Ergo, I am not a terrorist.

No, it makes you a dillho–wait a minute. You have nearly 1,000 old cellphones? What the fuck?!

Warning: Do not try to unpack this statement or determine how much of it is hyperbole. You will make blood shoot out of your nose. And nobody wants that.

Kikyomon

Hard it is to be born into human life; now we are living it. Difficult it is to hear the Teachings of the Blessed One; now we hear them. If we do not gain emancipation in this present life, how may we be freed from sorrow in the ocean of births and deaths?

Let us reverently take refuge in the Three Treasures.

I go to the Buddha for guidance. May I always walk in the way that leads to Enlightenment.
I go to the Dharma for Guidance. May I be submerged in the depth of the Teachings and gain Wisdom as deep as the ocean.
I go to the Sangha for guidance. May we all with one accord live the life of harmony in the spirit of brotherhood, free from the bondage of selfishness.

Occam's electric razor

CBC: Government accused of anti-female bias

A political science professor at Simon Fraser University says the Campbell government has an abysmal record in its dealings with female-dominated trade unions, including the B.C. Teachers’ Federation.

Women currently make up about 70 per cent of the BCTF membership who have been out on strike for the past two weeks.

Marjorie Griffen-Cohen, who teaches women’s studies and political science at SFU, notes this isn’t the first time the Campbell government has tangled with a female-dominated union.

She points to the fight with the Hospital Employees’ Union over the past few years as an illustration of the government’s real attitude toward women workers.

…

Griffen-Cohen notes that the B.C. Medical Association – a male-dominated group – has fared much better in the past in their negotiations with the government.

That’s one interpretation. Another might be that (a) the BCMA isn’t really a union and (b) members of the BCMA are more likely to vote for the Liberal Party rather than members of the HEU or the BCTF, and in politics, it tends to be hard to fuck over your supporters and have them still support you (current counterexamples to this theory notwithstanding). At the time I remember wondering exactly why the Liberals felt it was a good idea to alienate one of their natural support groups, and perhaps that logic finally penetrated through. Or, you know, maybe the government’s just a bunch of bastards.

Lookit: The BC Liberals do not like labor unions. Period. There’s plenty of reason to get pissy about this, if you’re so inclined, without having to drag sexism into it.

Rantlet

I periodically run into people in my line of work who absolutely insist on mangling the pronunciation and/or spelling of perfectly normal words for absolutely no reason whatsoever. 95% of the time, it’s like nails on a chalkboard. Ok, I understand if you’re not from around here, or if you trained somewhere else, and I don’t even get bent out of shape over people who absolutely insist on spelling it “anaesthesia” and “paediatrics” (this is Canada, after all). But what in the name of all that is holy is a fricking sontimeter? (Answer: A centimeter measured by someone who has hung around with too many obstetricians.) I remember the first time I spent any time in the OR, and the anesthetist I was hanging out with insisted on talking about sontimeters of water (cmH2O) for airway pressures. Part of me wanted to know whether he measured blood pressure in millaimeters of mercury. The origins of the sontimeter are confusing and mysterious, but I suspect it has something to do with the French, since it’s sort of halfway to being a “sontimaytre,” which would be the proper way to pronounce it. I’m not normally one to go on a tear about French, but in this case, they’ve gone too bloody far. (Can you tell I spent a chunk of the recent past listening to someone who continually referred to sontimeters? Grrr!)

It’s the same thing as people who refer to the “cervyecal spine” instead of the “cervical spine.” I’ve heard this rationalized as being unrelated to the part of the female reproductive tract, but since cervix itself means “neck,” it’s a pretty fair bet that the female reproductive chunk was named after the thing that holds your head up, not t’other way around. Cervix is sir-vicks, not sir-vikes; it’s sir-vi-cal, not sir-vye-cal. Why this eludes people eludes me.

On a totally unrelated note, I stumbled on this again earlier today. “Can you imagine what the net’s raw content will look like when all the half-literate morons in the U.S. can publish any text that their tiny minds ooze? The very thought makes me want to refill my glass with the ’56 Chateau Lafite. America’s Intelligentsia will need some serious Digital Butlers guarding our Offramp on the Digital Highway’s Mailing Lists (damn metaphors) when this comes to pass.”

Umm, I dunno. A lot like blogger.com?

Mixed messages

I have to say I love the idea behind this contest. Back in the 80s there was a thing where you committed to do 15 minutes of aerobic exercise and phoned it in, with the object of being the least-lazy community in Canada; this is almost better, since it requires basically no effort on my part, or anyone’s part, for that matter. And literacy is an easier thing for me to support than non-fat-assery. Read for 15 minutes? Hell, I’d read enough for ten people on that day (thank you, annoying academic programs!).

But I had to take a moment and check myself when I saw the prizes. Um.. are the CPL guys sure this is sending the message they want to send?