Great Googly Moogly!
Yesterday I put up a short posting about wistful thinking, wondering what it would be like to have more than a handful of visitors to my site in a day (or week, or month). Today I know what that feels like thanks to the generosity and kindness of one man.
This morning, as usual, I clicked refresh on the Mint tab to see what my total was for yesterday. I nearly fell off my chair when the number was nearly a hundred visits higher than normal. I did fall off my chair when I realized those visits had all happened between 10 pm and midnight. And I was beside myself when I saw that today’s visits, hour by hour, are greater than I normally get in 24 hours.
Holy mackerel.
Thank you Mr. Blanc. Your random act of kindness has pasted a smile on my face that won’t soon go away. Domo arigato gozaimasu.
Last Friday, after work, I returned to the vision center, ostensibly to have my eyes measured for bifocals. In the time between making the appointment Thursday morning, and arriving there Friday afternoon, I had changed my mind - I wanted trifocals instead.
When I spoke to the technician on the phone Thursday morning, I complained about the blurriness caused by the edges of the lenses. The portions outside of the three focal zones on the progressive lenses were giving me fits. She warned me that going to bifocals would be at the expense of losing the intermediate range, which is ideal for computer use.
Typically you hold a book or document closer to your face to read, than the distance you site from your computer’s monitor or screen. With only two focal ranges, distance and near, in a bifocal, the computer screen could fall into neither range, forcing me to squint or sit much closer than normally comfortable.
After talking it over with the technician Friday afternoon we agreed that trifocals were my best choice. They provide all three distances, like the progressive lens, but without the distortion artifacts that were bothering me. Apparently many people adjust to the progressive lens and aren’t bothered by the distortion, but I was uncomfortable enough with it that I wanted to switch lens styles. Having lines on my lenses won’t bother me a bit. My last pair of glasses, before the LASIK surgery, were lined bifocals, and I adapted to them in no time.
My new lenses should be delivered by mid-week. I’ll have lined trifocals and, given the shape of my frames, the enhanced area of the lens (both intermediate and near) will be approximately 35 mm wide - or nearly the full width of the lens surface.
Even with the distortion I was able to notice an immediate improvement in reading books, my cell phone display, and my computer screen, so I am looking forward to the trifocals.
Like any self-respecting nerd with a website, I have a statistics package that tracks visits and page views on my site, and produces graphs and tables and other suitably nerdy artifacts for me to drool over. My package of choice is Mint, from Shaun Inman. (Check out the excellent review by Shawn Blanc.)
My visit numbers are amazingly consistent and, not too amazingly, small. My site is about me and pretty much for me. There are a few informational postings that have garnered visits, but the vast majority of the postings are about me as a person, or the events in my life. Still, I average five or six hundred visits a month, and have for the two years I’ve been using Mint.
Since the beginning of this year, and the adoption of Wordpress as my CMS, I have had a slight bump in these numbers. While I can’t find a logical correlation between switching frameworks and increased visits, I am pleased that I am getting more daily visits, and higher numbers overall.
All of which brings me to my point today. Every time I refresh my Mint page (always open in a tab of its own) I wonder the same thing briefly in the back of my mind, “Will this be the day that my site takes off?” And for a few seconds while the page reloads I can imagine what it would be like to see several hundred visits for the day instead of a couple dozen.
After dipping our toes into the tai chi pool last summer, Sibylle and I have been looking for some physical exercise to improve our overall body tone and fitness. Quite by accident, during a conversation with a work acquaintance, I discovered the name of a personal trainer and fitness professional, who teaches hatha flow yoga from her home studio. Both Sibylle and I were impressed with her web site, and decided to attend a class or two to see what we thought about yoga.
Neither of us has done yoga before so we didn’t quite know what to expect. There were five other people in the class, plus the instructor. Hatha yoga, as it turns out, is about gentle postures, breathing, and relaxing. While some of the poses were strenuous in terms of twisting th spine or stretching unused muscles, the overall workout wasn’t difficult. As with any new activity there was some trepidation about “not doing it correctly.” We are both detail oriented people and want to know all the tiny nuances right from the start. One of the reasons we discontinued tai chi was the lack of individual instruction, which left us guessing as to the correctness of our postures or gestures, et cetera. Fortunately, given the small class size, we got more hands on or individual instruction last Monday evening, in our first yoga class, than we did in a month of tai chi.
The mother of one of Sibylle’s students told Sibylle about the health club she belongs to. Sibylle looked it up, and found a location near to us. After reading about their offerings, including tai chi, goju-ryu karate-do, and yoga, we decided to visit the club and take a tour. The manager who led us around answered all of our questions openly and honestly, and left us with three guest passes, so we could try the club ourselves.
On Saturday morning we went in time for the nine am yoga class, and ended up staying long enough to walk the indoor track several times, try out a treadmill and the rowing machine, and lift a few weights. We both enjoyed the atmosphere and facilities very much. At the end of our workout we took time to relax in the sauna before showering.
We are going to continue for a month at the first yoga studio, and we are going to sign up for a membership at the health club. We are both committed to improving our overall fitness, and are looking forward to utilizing the club’s facilities to reach that goal.
{{ $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.)
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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.