As i am having a harder time reading things up close, it seemed like a good time to get new glasses. Off to a local optometrist i went, a member of the community, and got my new prescription. I warned him i'd being going to Zenni for the frames, which he seemed to not be enthused about. Though he mentioned the reason being quality, and i do believe he was earnest in his comments, the loss of profit from selling designer frames had to be in the background somewhere.

Zenni isn't as cheap as i thought it would be. I didn't want to get the thick "1.57 Mid-Index Single Vision", base lenses, so i took the recommendation for "1.61 High-Index Single Vision" @ $19.95. As if that wasn't enough, my prescription caused an "extra fee" of $12.00, making the upgrade in lenses a whopping $31.95. That's more than the frames! (The frames were $23.95) Once at it, i splurged for the "Oleophobic (oil and fingerprint resistant) premium anti-reflective coating" @ $14.95, grumbling internally at how (at least some of) this stuff used to be free. The sub-total was $70.85 for that pair, and i took another.

The second frame was the same frame, but absolutely nothing special about the lenses. I figure, it's really the frames that break, not the lenses. And, should i lose my glasses, it's not so bad to wear the thicker lenses whilst waiting for a new pair to arrive. That pair was a (sub-)total of $23.95, lock, stock, and barrel. Over $45 less. Sheesh! and stuff.

The glasses were $94.80 and shipping added $4.95. Luckily, i found a "15% off order over $75" coupon code which removed $14.22, and i got charged $85.53 for the two pair. Not bad, but a whole lot more expensive than i originally thought. (I figured $20-$30 for both!)

The glasses arrived a couple weeks later and work nicely. I showed (shown?) the glasses to my sister, mentioning how the thicker lenses were only noticeably thicker from the side, and even then not that much. She agreed with the former comment, took some issue with the second, and mentioned the reflectivity was different as well. I attribute that to the coating. Later, she mentioned concern that the thicker glasses might weigh more on the nose, meaning comfort could be a concern.

So, the next day, i weighed the glasses. My old glasses weigh in at 27 grams, the thicker lens glasses are 20 grams, and the thinner lens, 19 grams. Holy 1 gram Batman! Is that really real 32 bucks? I think not, and it has been duly noted. (A quick resolve to a weighty decision, you might say.)

I'm still reflecting on the coatings. Well, actually, i'm not. But i kind of think that i might want to think about them at some later time before having to make a decision about a subsequent order. Add a few more words and that might actually represent what i'm feeling. You know what i mean, right?

I called joke-a-day some years ago and remember two. Q: How do you make a cheesepuff? A: Chase it around the block. A cop stopped someone for speeding and asked for his license and registration. Reviewing the license, "Hey, it says here you need glasses." The driver responds, "I have contacts." The cop screams back, "I don't care who you know, you still have to wear your glasses!" Cheesy, punny jokes, who could ask for more?

(Did i just end two paragraphs in a question?)

(Was that three?)

(Stop it already!)

I tried contacts some time ago and didn't like them. Anything trying once is worth trying twice, right? So, i opted for the more expensive exam and a couple weeks later received my Acuvue Oasys lenses. (I picked up the contacts on Monday on the way home from the office, and the new glasses had just arrived in the mail. What luck.) The lady up front showed (shown seems wrong here) me how to put them in and take them out. (No hokey pokey though.) I had a much easier time putting them in, as she put it, i didn't have an issue touching my eye. Taking them out was a pain. She showed me by dragging them down with one finger and then picking them up from the bottom of the eye. I remember pinching them off. And youtube videos show that, and the optometrist confirmed it. Pinching is the way to go. And oh, so much easier.

She told me to wear them 2 hours the first day, and increase by 2 hours every day, for 8 days. This would help me get used to them. (The optometrist told me later the first day could (should?) be 4.) I wore them home for two hours. Things seemed brighter and crisper, but not as clear. The next day at work i realized i could only read by blinking a lot, as things got blurrier immediately after a blink. My right eye has a harder time reading (optometrist suggested it could be due to a bad prescription when i was younger, causing my brain to develop it only so far) but reading on the computer was hard. I could do it when i leaned close(ly?) to it. Large or further away letter were not such a problem. I looked online, i scheduled an appointment, and saw the doctor the next day.

A reading test showed (bah!) what he expected, my right eye was weaker. He was surprised i couldn't read the bottom line. He looked into the eyes and saw nothing wrong with the contacts or my eyes, it was not rotating out of its orientation, and suggested i had a problem that is rare for soft lenses, and very rare for this brand. Apparently, i'm his second case ever. I forget the name for it (it's a simple name) but the lens cups up over the eye leaving a spaces between the eye and the lens. Blinking flattens it which is why it gets better. This is really an issue that crops up with hard lenses. IIRC, he said It can also be sen by the optometrist. However, in soft lenses, the effect would be too small to be seen, and as such, he has to rely on my reports.

So, he got another sample set of contacts. Different brand, though also silicon hydrogel and toric. For the right eye he found an exact match. The left eye is too strong a prescription for him to keep in stock, so he gave me something else and compensated with a lens from his drawer. (Math works?) Reading test with the right eye showed no difference, that is, the same issue existed. The left eye was showing me double vision. (Guess not.) The lens was bad. Off with its head! He got me another. The same issue existed (no, not the double vision, silly), and he had no more brands to try.

After touching upon the difference between silicon hydrogel and hydrogel lenses, he explained that silicon seems to be better (more breathable), and as it has been the product of choice for some years now, advances in anti-rotation have gone to it. Rotation is a problem for toric lenses. So the hydrogel lenses might rotate a little. Nonetheless, that was what i should try, and he said he would order two, no three, sample sets for me to try. He also went into expense, and how it should affect if i want fortnight or monthlies, but i pushed that away as i have not yet decided if i want to wear contacts or even how often. I'm trying to see how it goes, and i have too little information to go on. And now i am not sure if anything will work anyway!

So, it's back to glasses for the next week.

[After posting this, i saw the tagline: Competence, like truth, beauty, and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder. -- Dr. Laurence J. Peter Weird,

BTW, the latest changes made slashdot uglier, but i'm seeing faster page load times. Maybe it was worth it.]

From the they-would've-never-made-this-song-later-in-their-career dept:

Let me tell you how it will be
There's one for you, nineteen for me
Should five percent appear too small
Be thankful I don't take it all

If you drive a car, I'll tax the street
If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat
If you get too cold, I'll tax the heat
If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet

Don't ask me what I want it for
Taxman, Mister Moonbeam (CA-540)
If you don't want to pay some more
Taxman, Mister O (1040)

Now my advice for those who die
Declare the pennies on your eyes
'Cause I'm the Taxman
Yeah, I'm the Taxman
And you're working for no-one but me

Happy Tax Day! :)

Around the first of the year all three working computers were just about stuffed full, so I thought of sticking a spare drive in the Linux box, when the Linux box died from a hardware problem. It's too old to spend time and money on, so its drive is going in the XP box (which is, of course, not on the network; except sneakernet). I decided to break down and buy an external hard drive. I found what I was looking for in the "Seagate Personal Cloud". And here I thought the definition of "the cloud" was someone else's server!

I ordered it the beginning of January, not noticing that it was a preorder; it wasn't released until late March. I got it right before April.

I was annoyed with its lack of documentation -- it had a tiny pamphlet full of pictures and icons and very few words. Whoever put that pamphlet together must beleive the old adage "a picture is worth a thousand words". Tell me, if a picture is worth a thousand words, convey that thought in pictures. I don't think it can be done.

I did find a good manual on the internet. For what I wanted, I really didn't need a manual, but since I'm a nerd I wanted to understand everything about the thing. Before looking for a manual I plugged it all up, and Windows 7 had no problem connecting with it. It takes a few minutes to boot; it isn't really simply a drive, it must have an operating system and network software, because it looks to the W7 notebook to be another file server. Its only connections are a jack for the power cord and a network jack.

The model I got has three terrabytes. I moved all the data from the two working computers (using a thumb drive to move data from XP) and the "cloud" was still empty. Streaming audio and video from it is flawless; I'm completely satisfied with it, it's a fine piece of hardware.

However, it WON'T do what is advertised to do, which is to be able to get to your data from anywhere. In order to do that, Seagate has a "software as a service" thing where you can connect to a computer from anywhere, but only the computer and its internal drives, NOT the "personal cloud". And they want ten bucks a month for it.

I downloaded the Android app, and I could see and copy files that were on my notebook to my phone, but I couldn't play music stored there on it. I uninstalled the crap. "Software as a service" is IMO evil in the first place, but to carge a monthly fee to use a piece of crap software like this is an insult. Barnum must have been right.

If you're just looking for an external hard drive, like I was, it's a good solution. If you want what they're advertising, you ain't gettin' it. The Seagate Personal Cloud's name is a lie, as is its advertising.

ISIS Camp in Mexico

Thanks, Barack!

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7253385&cid=49468553
Gonna be a good day, gentlemen.

A toddler was killed in Cleveland, Ohio, on Sunday afternoon when a 3-year-old boy accidentally shot him with a gun that had been left unattended in a home

Seriously, doesn't anyone give a shit about irresponsible gun owners?

Apparently not. If this "had to happen" then apparently we have to have irresponsible gun owners, whose irresponsibilities lead to the deaths of innocent people.

ICANN unilaterally made the decision some time ago to start selling gTLDs; in spite of the volume of complaints they received before hand over the consequences of said awful idea. As much as they claimed that selling them would bring world peace and universal awesomeness to all, that did not transpire. In fact, they even sold ".sucks" TLD to someone who took their game to the next level:

.Sucks Seller Accused Of Ripping Off Poor Helpless Celebrities

Now, I don't have a whole ton of sympathy for some of the victims, but this could have been prevented. If ICANN was actually concerned about the coherence of the internet - rather than just the depth of their own bank accounts - they would have realized that selling gTLDs is a terrible idea.

Pawlenty talks up Wisconsin's Walker for president, demurs on own political future

He forgot to talk up another similarity between them - they both spent years running for president only to crash and burn. I'll predict now that the Kevlar Kandidate will be the first to bow out after the Iowa caucuses. It will be fun to watch, though.

Unfortunately Wisconsin will still be stuck with him for a while after, as he will still be "governor" after losing the GOP nomination.

You got admire the sack on this bimbo:

I'm old enough to remember a day when the fiction that government works for the people was semi-maintained.

Three letter ccTLD domains

Do you realize that XP was EOLed exactly one year ago?
I know many XP machines still chugging around peacefully without problems: No XPcalypse happened. This entirely fits my predictions.

XP was a (had become) a mature operating system. I abhor the fetish of "newer is better" that reigns in our industry.

I can type at over 100wpm. Slashdot's comment timer was set to 5 minutes a few years back. So if there is a particularly interesting article with interesting comments, I can comment and reply every 5 minutes.

If I'm going at 100wpm, I could write a 500 word essay as a comment. Or what happens more frequently is, I type out a nice constructive reply to someone, and am granted the text telling me I'm going too fast.

So I close the window and go elsewhere.

5 minutes between messages on a good conversation isn't conversing. I had FidoNet conversations go faster than that. I could type up and send faxes faster than that. With a bit of practice, I could send messages over short wave radio in morse code faster than that.

Even if my comment were "you sir are a moron", that leaves well over 4 minutes waiting for the timer to run out.

If anyone wants to have an intellectual conversation with me on an old Slashdot topic (like, appropriate for the genre "News For Nerds. Stuff That Matters"), find me elsewhere. Even this comment, would still have a 3 minute timeout before I could post it.

Gleichschaltung [LONG]

This started as a response to smitty's latest JE, but got too long. From TFA he sites:

And, as a parenthetical, from the linked article for that German word:

This what is looking to be an era of attacks on small business sheds more light on the overall strategy the Left has migrated to.

The "from" of course was the vilification of "big business", and in general (economic) success in America. So for example Slashdotters used to rail against successful, heavy-handed tech company Microsoft. Making a political movement out of the idea of cost-free software with source code included, and inventing the notion of "copyleft" to invert and subvert protection of the individual from the collective as far as software IP, was nerdy Leftists' little microcosm version of what had been the larger plan of the Left, to try to get the people to rise up against and throw out private industry. ("Big business" being just a proxy term for the actual target, capitalism.)

But that wasn't working. Capitalism, along with America's other values and traditions that the Left absolutely hates, would not be defeated in one glorious moment of destruction (and rebirth). The Left realized that our institutions would have to be corrupted and weakened from the inside, and converted to an overall system of what I'll call CINO, or Capitalism In Name Only, rather than explicitly collapsed and rebuilt. (Hence things like Obama's talk about "fundamentally transforming" America. Because the classical Lefty approach and dream was not going to pan out here, because our foundations were at the same time too far from the goal and too deep-rooted, legally and in the peoples' consciousnesses.)

The main information dissemination institutions in America were part of the first phase, and were easily compromised; K-12 and higher education, the entertainment industries (TV, movies, music), and journalism. These strategic captures were instrumental in winning the culture war in America, that, as TFA points out, they've been sore winners about since. Included in this phase was the takeover of science as thought about and practiced in this country, and the installment of policies in public sector employment to transition the bulk of government employees, and even more importantly the powerful leadership of regulating/pseudo law-making government departments, to being their people.

So unwanted turns of events as far as the consequences of democracy -- legislation -- could be undermined via the courts and ignoring by bureacrats. But then what to do about businesses. Well, Microsoft was evil to Leftie nerds because Gates (before he retired to pursue squandering millions of dollars on dumb ways of trying to save the world, and thereby becoming a Leftist himself, only differing in that the squandered millions are his own) and Balmer wanted to make money and crush the competition. Microsoft was evil for being this, until Google came along, that is. Despite being near as successful and heavy-handed, their founders were otherwise on board with Leftism. So it was entirely acceptable, in the new strategy.

Capitalism probably can't be defeated in this county, by vote. At least not until the more recent strategic component of diluting the votership with millions of immigrants from countries south of us where all they've really known and have come to accept is a low standard of living and continuing belief in and constant re-tries of the promises of socialism. So convert it to crony capitalism. Expand government's role from "hands-off until a rule is broken" to "get in bed with us and we'll help you with a leg up on your competitors" (meaning any of them not also in bed with government). Blur the public sector/private sector division with "public/private partnerships", and (sort of) NGO's/quasi-government organizations like Fannie and Freddie. Afterall, "you didn't build that". Tell the banks who they're going to buy and what they're going to do, or government will crush them. "Too big to fail", and also too useful as instruments of government policy to pass up utilizing.

The giant companies of Silicon Valley have already been on board with the Left, in its leadership positions. I'm not sure there's any large companies left that haven't liberalized employment benefits by extending them to employees' same-sex live-in lovers (can I as a man shack up with a lady and get her on my company health plan?) or who aren't regularly talking about diversity as one of the business objectives. So really the largest problem remaining in the business world is the SMB's. Big businesses have already shown good progress on and are on track toward becoming directable tools of the state. But SMB's, like still a large part of white male America (and maybe tiny parts of other groupings of Americans), still feel a sense of being independent.

We're all supposed to be in this (pursuit of a centrally planned, based on Leftist values and principles, society and economy) together, so really the biggest problem in America to the Left, as far as not quite yet having a real plan in place to deal with that is already on the path to success, is the existence of people like Tea Partiers and small business owners. The former seems to have pretty much fizzled out on its own, thanks to traditional Americans' tendency towards apathy and the inability to sustain feelings of outrage. So what's left is converting the small business landscape in America. That's where things like raids, high taxation, lawsuits, extortion measures by Left-wing groups, and government-enhanced high barriers to entry come in. Crony capitalism is the new socialism, and these are the hold-outs.

Now, I'm just dirt. Some may want to accuse me of feeling superior, but that, too is vanity. Other on here I could name, though. . .

Lefties Flock At Poultry Farm, Say Chickens Refusing Event Support âA Bigoted Bunch Of Peckersâ(TM)