tomhudson's Journal: Freedom's just another word ....

... for nuthin' left to lose ...

I spend part of yesterday writing some code. Today my left eye burns and is bleeding inside again. That's pretty much it, I think. Nobody's going to hire a programmer who can't spend more than a few hours a day actually looking at the screen ...

I guess this is part of the "They will get worse even with treatment ..." that the specialists were talking about.

Kind of limits my career options ... I'd be really angry except that I'm too depressed about it to be more than just "gee, that's kind of disappointing." I had been hoping for a bit more time to at least give me a chance to try to do something else.

(no, zooming in on big screens isn't a solution - remember, I have twin 26 screens, and after a while I still couldn't tell an 8 from a 9, with either eye)

Reflective screens

[Eternauta3k]

Do you get this problem when reading books? Otherwise you could look into reflective displays (like those you can use out in the sun). I think those are the same thing as paper to your eyes.
And if the technical solution doesn't work... good luck in whatever you decide to do next.

Re:

[tomhudson]

Thanks for asking. Reading a book has become a bit of an exercise in frustration. I can't hit Ctl++ 4 times to zoom in like I can for browsing slashdot, and even then it's fuzzy right now. It comes and goes ... makes it very frustrating when I wake up in the middle of the night, can't sleep, and try to read a short story or two ... sometimes I can, but too often, I simply can't read the page.

Up until this morning, I sort of had the idea in my head that, somehow or other, I'd get beyond it like I've don

Re:

[kimvette]

I guess the only option left for me is to go into politics ... isn't that what we're supposed to do with otherwise useless people who can't fill a real job any more?

You could also become a teacher. . . I've known quite a few useless ones in public schools.

Re:

[tomhudson]

Teachers are being laid off left and right here ... one of my nieces is in the process of looking for a new school to teach at. There are teachers who, after 2 decades, still don't have a "permanent" assignment. It's a real mess.

The government keeps on publishing misleading headlines to accompany the stats, and most of the people reporting are too lazy to look at the actual figures. For example, one area had a monthly job lost of 72,000 full-time jobs, and a monthly gain of 71,000 part-time jobs.

The

Sorry

[RM6f9]

I have no way of knowing exactly how bad this is to you, but am sad that you will not be able to do what you enjoy in the ways you enjoy it.
I do know that as long as you are capable of inviting friends over, pushing "Mix" on a blender and pushing "play" on a dvd player, there is a potential alternative income stream awaiting you...

hang on to what you've got left

[Bill Dog]

As someone who loves coding, I feel some pain at hearing about someone having to give it up. But you've mentioned opportunities are drying up and you seem pretty fed up with dealing with the crap in that line of work. And we're not in our twenties anymore -- I'm not sure how much longer I'll be able to do this, seeing as I'll be turning 45 this year and given the effects of age and Free Trade and age discrimination in this industry. But you've evidently got high intelligence, can write well, and it sounds l

Re:

[tomhudson]

Thanks. I had been putting some work into trying to "do my own thing" and hopefully be able to "create my own job", but even that's out, except on a very limited basis. Everything is just getting too blurry too often, etc.

Doing pretty much anything in this business would require relocating (since while the rest of the country is recovering well, we're still shedding jobs here daily), and this is now going to be harder to do, and a lot more risky.

Today I see that my problem is no longer even job-specifi

Sorry to hear it's getting worse!

[plover]

I hate to think you'll waste some of your remaining monitor eyesight on Slashdot, but since you are, I'd like to offer a couple of options you probably aren't going to care about anyway.

If "reading is an exercise in frustration because you cant Ctrl+ to zoom", check out a borrowed Kindle (probably Kindle DX for the additional screen real estate.) They allow you to enlarge the text, reformatting the page to fit the display. Very nice when the eyes are tired.

For a career change, have you considered teaching

Re:

[tomhudson]

Thanks for the ideas. I've adjusted the font settings on both my laptop and desktop, bumping them up by 3 points for everything, and that helps. Also, hitting Ctrl++ 4x in a web browser makes it less irritating. It's a good thing my laptop is 17" - on a 15", I would only be able to Ctl++ twice before the layout on slashdot completely (as in more than usual) breaks.

I'm also going to try limiting myself to between 15 minutes and an hour, with accordingly longer breaks between, to see what happens.

One t

Re:

[plover]

I'm guessing that grade school is probably the most competitive field for teachers, as teaching young children is rewarding because so many of them actively want to learn. When you get to the middle and high school ages, half the students see the schools as little more than jails where time must be served, and have no drive to learn anything. Teaching them becomes hard work, and the positions become slightly less desirable. But colleges and trade schools are generally populated with people who want to be

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[tomhudson]

Part of the current problem locally is that 40 years of separatists grumbling has chased all the head offices elsewhere, as well as the best part of the IT budget.

Every time there's an economic crunch, there's another purge as businesses "rationalize" or "right-size." This last one was the nastiest yet. None of my former co-workers from 2 years ago has found another job yet.

Another part of the problem is government programs that churn out wannabe programmers and web developers. I worked with some of

Sorry to hear that . . . .

[base3]

. . . others have posted regarding options for other careers -- I'll chime in that adaptive equipment might be able to help here as well. Wishing you the best.

Re:

[tomhudson]

Thanks. I just don't think there's a solution that will work. Yesterday, I tried to do a bit of code - a couple of hours spread out over the course of 18 hours. Today, all I can do is answer a few emails and make a few posts - and even that's a problem. (and I'm posting this from a 26" lcd with everything zoomed in and bolded, so ... not so great :-(

The other thing is that while the degeneration was in both retinas, the only one that was actually causing a problem for me was the left one, but now it's