If your cornea is naturally very thin, you're ineligible for LASIK because the whole point is to ablate away part of the cornea. I had IOL surgery instead, which is like an implanted contact lens. The trouble with IOL surgery is that there's a 1% chance you'll get a cataract from the lens accidentally rubbing against your natural lens. This ended up happening to me in one eye 12 months after surgery. To their credit, the clinic where I had it done got me back in and gave me a complete lens replacement in that eye at no charge.

Now, a post-cataract-surgery eye is not as good as a normal eye. I would need glasses again were it not for the fact that my other eye is working perfectly with the IOL. So I have one 20/10 eye and one 20/80 eye, but to be honest it's not something I actually notice day to day; the visual cortex sorts it out for you. I do use reading glasses for long computer sessions.

If I had it to do again, I would still do it, because for me life with glasses and contacts was full of daily annoyances and constraints that I no longer have to put up with. Even if I develop presbyopia, my vision will never again be anywhere near as horrendous as it was before surgery. I had a diopter around -8, plus astigmatism. The convenience of life without glasses is worth the hassle of having one post-cataract eye.

Also, one option people often don't think to explore is that you can have _just your astigmatism_ corrected in an outpatient procedure. This procedure is quick and easy and it allows you to use cheaper glasses and contacts (no more "toric" contacts).

I've had success selling 40GB drives on my local Craigslist for $10 a pop. I sold eight drives and had to turn people away, so there's definitely demand.

Jordan's Furniture has an online room layout program. In theory it's designed so you lay out a room and then get advice about it from Jordan's, but that didn't prevent me from creating a 2D representation of my entire apartment, sizing furniture to match my own, and dragging things around for hours. Even though it's Web-based, you can save multiple layouts and come back to them months later.