Category: Weblog

Funny

Here’s the funniest thing I’ve read on the net in a while:

“I think fanfic writers rank just below Everquest players and people who design webpages about their cats.”

-Squidward, on fark.com

A thin piece of plastic

Readers of this page will probably remember the trouble I am having with my eyes. Since April, I’ve struggling with my eyes due to keratoconus and the fit of my special contact lenses. By wearing the ill-fitting lenses, I got a corneal ulcer on my left eye that took a few weeks to heal.

The company that makes the special lenses I wear stopped production at about the same time. I never got a straight answer why they stopped production. When I finally got a new set of lenses in the first week of July after a three month wait, they didn’t fit. This was a ‘very bad thing’ because it meant I was going to have to order new lenses once again. Now I’m told that they may have them by the end of the month. End of the month? That’s a two month wait and there’s no guarantee that these will fit either.

Since April, I’ve been functioning only seeing out of my right eye. Glasses can’t correct my problems. I can wear glasses for a short one to two hours before I start getting a headache. It’s pretty much impossible for me to wear the glasses for an entire day. I’ve tried, and it just doesn’t work. Driving with my glasses is dangerous at best. I done it a few times to the supermarker a quarter mile away, but I would never try it on the freeway.

Seeing the world out of one eye is a pain, but not impossible. Half of the world is blurry to me. I have to be extra careful driving due to my reduced field of vision and the lack of good depth perception.

The real worry to me is if I lose or damage the contact in my right eye. If I can’t wear that contact, I effectively become blind. I wouldn’t be able to drive. I would barely be able to use a computer for more than an hour. Work would very tough If I couldn’t see for much of the day. While many others in the world have much larger crosses to bear, not being able to see clearly would have a huge impact on my life.

So it’s all down to a thin piece of plastic. As long as I can still put the plastic contact in my eye, I can function in the modern world. If something happens to that contact and I can’t wear it, my life will grind to a complete halt. What would I tell work? I can’t come to work because I’m blind?

Until the new lenses arrive, I simply have to have faith that the lens will last. Faith in a thin piece of plastic.

Blogtree

I’m waiting here for some guys from Corp IT to show up, so I think I’ll goof off for a few minutes. This weekend I saw a post about blogtree.com. It’s an interesting way to show the linkages between different weblogs.

You can see the Cruft entry by hitting the icon below.

So if you run a weblog that was inspired in some way by Cruft, you can register and add me as the parent. You can search on ‘cruft’ or use the blogid, 800. I think it would be very cool to see how all the weblogs interact.

Even if your weblog isn’t inspired by Cruft, go register.

Sunday Night

We had a great time at Casey & Heidi’s party on Saturday. Tons of good food, close proximity to the beach and a 1/4 keg of beer combined with fun people leads to a good time.

There was one tragedy though. During the party I walked up to the liquor store with Len and I happened to pick up a Starbucks Doubleshot, the pure essence of ice coffee. back at the party, I showed it off and was about to drink it when Zoe had an allergic reaction to the cats and I had to leap into Dr. Daddy mode.

She had rubbed her eye after touching the cat and it was swelling up. I cleaned her up, gave her an anti-histamine, and calmed her down. When I returned to the back where I had left my Doubleshot, it was gone. Alas, I fear another guest drank it. Drank my precious…

On Sunday I completed the upgrade of Michele’s computer.

She’s now running an AMD 1700+ on a ECS mobo with a new Maxtor 60 Gig hard drive with Windows XP. It’s smooth as glass. She’s happy. I’m happy.

The girls start camp tomorrow. We went to a parents meeting today at 5 to introduce Mira to the counselors. Zoe and Mira are both quite excited. Michele is a bit pensive over the whoel thing. She wants them to go to camp, but she has all the normal worries a mother would have the day before camp starts. I’m sure once they come home happy and smiling all will be better.

Thursday

For those keeping track, I was up to 2:30AM working on Michele’s computer. It was worth it though. The next day she was *ecstatic* about using Windows XP.

Yesterday I got involved in city politics. Here in South Pasadena, they big news is the desire of the school board to propose a $29 million bond to pay for a bunch of work on the Middle School. Michele and I talked about it and I decided to go to the school board meeting. As Michele says, I can ‘talk that bullshit’ with the best of them.

I headed out to the meeting. I walked into the city chambers and the Council just went into session. The first thing on the agenda was the public speaking where anyone could get in front of the council and talk for a minute. I was the youngest person in the room. One older person after another got up to the mic and blasted the council for the proposed traffic changes in town. I wondered when they were getting to the school bond issue. After about ten speakers, the city council was visibily tired of being called nincompoops. One guy got up and complained that the council hadn’t put the meeting notice in the local paper. Angry senior citizens nodded their heads in agreement. Hrrm, I read about the meeting in the paper in the morning. The woman next to me leaned over and said, “If it wasn’t for the school board meeting, there’d be more people here.” Huh? I asked here if the council was going to talk about hte school bond. “Heaven’s no,” she said, “the school board meeting is somewhere else. This is just about the horrid traffic plan!” Damn. I walked out of the chamber. As I did, several in the audience stared at me. Perhaps they thought it was my protest gesture against the traffic plan.

After a short walk, I entered the school board meeting. There were 4 others in the audience watching the school board (6 people). As I sat down and flipped open the info packet, the chairmen said, “Well, that about wraps it up, are we ready to vote?” Damn. After a bit of parlimentary stuff they voted to place it on the ballot. Meeting adjorned.

First lesson of city politics: Be at the right place at the right time.

In other news:

Michele has continued to update her weblog. It take my utmost self control to not edit her entry and put in paragraphs. She was inpressed with the lifewithageek page and hopefully she can emulate a bit of the text formatting there before I am driven to drink.

It appears that Brad has been bitten by the weblog bug and has a case of weblogitis. [mrburnsvoice] Excellent [/mrburnsvoice]. He’s on a cruise ship vacation, yet finds a way to update his weblog.

My other two progeny weblogs, Pat and Mike, continue to post but do not seem to be as obsessed as Brad.

The new hardware for Michels’ computer showed up and I need to find time for the motherboardectomy. I splurged $20 on myself and got one of those cool front panel connection extension.

Cool, eh? Yes, I know it’s geeky but I don’t care. That’s the CPU temperature measured directly off the heatsink. Woot!

One last thing, Matt updated Crookdimwit with a new top banner. It’s neat, but I thought the Crookdimwit color was light blue not red.