I recently had surgery to fix a detached retina and, as of this writing, I am still recovering from it. This is the first of several posts where I will discuss the surgery and, primarily, the recovery. The recovery is quite an ordeal, but at the moment, it seems to be going well, and the retina seems to be in place.
I’ve had a tear in my retina for years, but it somehow stopped itself with a ring of scar tissue. It went unchanged for years, but apparently decided to give way recently. I didn’t have the flashing or the gray curtain that so many people report when their retinas detach. Instead, things looked a little funny in my center vision, with straight lines not being exactly straight. It also seemed that things weren’t exactly where they should have been, which, I presume, was a sign that the whole retina had detached and the focal point was in the wrong spot. The other telling feature was a something that looked like a bubble on the lower right side of my vision. My ophthalmologist took a picture of the retina, and that area looked like curtains, so it had really lost its shape. It was still sensitive to light, so the retina was still alive and could possibly be repaired. My wife and I were hustled over to a retina specialist to get him to take a look and schedule surgery. Since things don’t just go bad a little, it turned out I also had a tear in the macula, which is the focus of detailed vision, so it was a challenging case.
The surgery apparently involved micro-scale instruments being inserted into the eye so the surgeon can place the retina and then use lasers (in my case) to tack it down. It is called a vitrectomy, because the vitreous jelly that fills the eye is removed. In my case, a gas bubble was then put in to keep the retina in place during the healing process. The gas bubble floats, and the retina is at the back of the eye, so, if you are good at mentally visualizing that situation, you can guess why the recovery period is so unpleasant. I have to remain face down all the time, except when I’m getting drops put into the eye. All the time! I was initially told 2 weeks, but when the 2 weeks were nearly up, I was given 2 more weeks. I’m not done with those two weeks as of this writing, but I expect more face down time. Future posts will cover the setup I used to make my recovery as comfortable as possible.
Initially, I was supposed to be partly awake for the surgery, which sounded kinda cool, but also horrifying. It turned out that I started snoring in the twilight sleep they put me in, so the anesthesiologist decided to put me all the way under so my snoring didn’t vibrate my head and mess up the surgeon. The surgery apparently went well, though my vision will be messed up for quite a while, so I won’t know the final outcome for a while. The surgeon did close the macular hole and the bubble is holding it in place, so fingers are crossed for a good outcome.
Now that I’ve had a bit more time to use the Surface Pro, my view of it hasn’t changed. It is nice hardware with imperfect software that has potential to get better. I have had some other thoughts, however.
I believe Windows 8 is a turning point for Microsoft. Microsoft is becoming more and more like Google and Facebook in that their product is not software and operating systems – their product is us. We are not the consumers anymore, but the product. Data about us is what Microsoft is gathering with Windows 8. I can’t quite say who the customers are or how Microsoft will profit from it, but it is pretty clear that we are being aggregated, profiled, and explored more than ever before by Microsoft products. And I don’t think our best user experience is the main goal.
To begin with, the account you use to sign into Windows 8 is a Microsoft web account (a Live account or similar). Since I created a new one to be able to buy the Surface from the Microsoft Store, I chose to use that one. I have another couple of Microsoft accounts, including one I use at work, but since this was a personal purchase, I didn’t want to use it. I’ll discuss issues with the other one later.
So, we log into the machine with our web-based username and password. Microsoft now synchronizes all our account info to the web so that data can follow us from machine to machine. I don’t have another Windows 8 machine, so I don’t know what is synchronized and what isn’t, but I can imagine IE bookmarks, for example. I assume that none of us mind Microsoft being able to store and read our bookmarks, right?
Even more interesting is that there doesn’t seem to be an official Facebook App for Windows 8. Yes, there are lots of 3rd party ones, but I trust them much less than I trust Microsoft. So what is the solution? There is a People App that will show your Facebook friends’ updates. Good, right? No. You can’t just login to Facebook from the App, but you need to associate your Microsoft web ID with your Facebook profile, essentially giving Microsoft access to your Facebook. That’s a showstopper right there, so I haven’t done it and don’t plan to, no matter how great the People App promises to be.
And then there’s the Games App. It will be happy to link up with my Xbox Live account, except my Xbox Live ID is not the same as the Microsoft ID that I used to login to Windows 8. Any way around it? Nope, I’d have to create a separate Windows 8 user for my Xbox Live account, thus fragmenting my identity on the Surface.
So Microsoft really wants to aggregate all our information in one place, under our Microsoft ID. They want our Facebook info, our Xbox info, and who knows what else. And the system won’t work without that info, so it is required to get the best experience from Windows 8. I think I’m just going to treat the Surface Pro as a fancy touch-enabled Windows 7 machine and avoid getting sucked into the Microsoft privacy-reducing ecosystem.
Because the Microsoft Surface Pro was on sale, I bought one, somewhat for reasons I will explain in a future post, but also because I am a gadget nut and wanted a tablet designed for Windows 8.
My impressions so far are that the Surface Pro is a very solid, speedy machine. The “Type Cover” with the real keyboard is essential and makes typing far superior to an iPad, even an iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard (I recently bought the AmazonBasics one and it works quite well with my iPad). The screen is great, and the pen is a nice addition that I’ve missed from the TabletPC days.
Sadly, there are lots of “almosts” too. The power connector is so similar to Apple’s magnetic power connector that I’m surprised Apple’s lawyers aren’t sharpening their knives, but it isn’t nearly as good. The Apple connector is foolproof and seats itself properly with ease. This one takes lots of fiddling to get it to engage, then usually isn’t quite in the slot, so a little sliding is needed. And that power supply brick is about twice the volume of my MacBook Pro’s one.
The Windows 8 interface is quite good, but some of the apps tend to get confused, particularly Internet Explorer. IE tries to touch-enable websites, particularly MSN, but I was trying to show my wife a story with a slideshow and the browser just stopped responding. I had to kill it (drag a finger from the top of the screen until the app detaches, then drag it to the bottom). IE also can’t seem to load my very generic WordPress website well. It stalls after loading the top of the page. If I hit the stop button, then usually the rest of the page draws and I can continue managing of viewing the site. (As a followup, a little debugging led me to discover that Amazon’s Send to Kindle widget was causing trouble for IE. I’ve disabled it for now.)
Other included apps are often quite finicky about touches of their supposedly touch-enabled buttons. These are minor complaints, but both Android and iOS have better behavior and consistency.
Windows 8 was able to find my printers and configure them without a huge fuss. The Surface Pro works well with my 5GHz WiFi network, which is more than I can say for my Nexus 4 (keeps forgetting to use the 5GHz radio) or my HP laptop which doesn’t even have a 5GHz radio, though it is only 2 years old.
Overall, the Surface Pro is pretty nice, and it should keep improving as Windows 8 is updated. I’m not quite sure I’ll be developing much code on the Surface Pro, but I like having the option to carry an Eclipse development environment around with me.
In addition to the Endeavour, we saw some other spacecraft at the California Science Museum. Exciting to have all this space history in one place so close to us!
The Space Shuttle Endeavour was in a temporary facility when we went to see it in January at the California Science Museum near USC, just south of downtown Los Angeles. It was exciting to see it, and, though it was crowded, we didn’t have to waste too much time getting in to see it. We had tickets with reservation times, but there are lots of exhibits to look at while the crowd moves through to the the shuttle. Those were somewhat interesting, though some of them were very tailored to kids.
Rather than lots of description here, I’ve put short captions of the pictures below, so click through and take a look.
Used shuttle tires! Part of the exhibit on the way to the main attraction.
Note the spelling of “Endeavour.” And the control jets.
Near the entrance to the hall, we stopped to pose in front of the Endeavour.
The photo of my wife is better lit than the one of me, because of the ability of the respective photographers.
One of the tiles looks broken, and many look a bit worn.
The view along the shuttle’s side.
The tiles are all individually numbered, and some have to be oddly shaped.
The bay door hinges are visible on the side of the shuttle.
A close up view of the skin above the thermal tiles near the start of the wing. Short people would have trouble taking that picture.
I like how they painted the flag in the direction it would go if it were “flying” while the shuttle moves.
It’s pretty amazing to walk under the Endeavour! It is mounted tall enough that even I could walk under it. I could have reached up and touched it, but didn’t because I didn’t want to be thrown out.
Tiles on the underside.
There doesn’t look like enough room for the landing gear can fit in there
That looks like an access port for servicing, perhaps.
A closer view of what I think must be a service access area.
The main engines and the very tall tail.
I don’t know if that’s a hinge on the tail below the main engines, but it sure looks like it could be articulated.
The nose without any annoying people in front of it.
It’s hard to get the whole thing in the frame without a wide angle lens and in the small space. This is the best I could do.
My wife and I went to the California Science Museum in January to see the Space Shuttle Endeavour. Pictures of that will come soon, but there are other wonderful things to see there, including the aircraft shown below.
Next to the parking lot was a Lockheed A-12 reconnaissance aircraft, a predecessor to the SR-71.
A-12
Then we see a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter mounted on the side of the one of the buildings.
F-104
In the large hall that led to Endeavour, we see the Northrop T-38 and F-20. As I joined Northrop as an avionics engineer, the F-20 program had just been killed. It was designed to be a cost-effective fighter to compete with the F-16, particularly in overseas sales. It seems that the government used it as leverage against General Dynamics to cut the F-16’s cost and then left Northrop in the cold. Of course, foreign governments backed away as soon as the US government decided against purchasing the F-20. Did I mention that the F-20 project was funded internally by Northrop? Indeed, Northrop felt that the F-20 was such a winner that they self-funded it. Well, it’s still a good looking airplane.
We went out to our favorite Mexican food place (Avila’s El Ranchito) last night, then took a nice walk on the beach. It was supposed to be a lousy, cold, overcast day, but it turned into a delightful evening. Click the pictures to see a full-sized version. All taken with iPhones, so expect noise in the low light images.
Firepit and heater at the restaurant
Me at the top of the cliff
My wife thought it was colder than it was
It was a delightful time to walk on the beach
Other beachgoers watching the sunset
Some paddleboarders and surfers out there too
Trying to keep my eyes open while looking towards the setting sun
The sun is almost gone
And I even got a movie of the sun sinking beneath the waves.
Amazon has come out with a nifty WordPress plugin that allows users to send posts from blogs to their Kindles. Of course since I love new tech things, I’ve installed it on this site, though I can’t imagine much demand for it! Sandly, the plugin does not seem to capture images, even though it shows them in the preview of what will be sent. Perhaps that is a bug or a settings problem…
I like my Kindles very much, so as this spreads around the web it should make them even more useful. I imagine recipe sites would be a great use for this functionality, and perhaps some tech sites, though the utility of saving news in a fast-changing environment may be questionable.
Having all our stuff stored in the “cloud” seems like a great convenience. We can access our movies and sounds via iTunes Match or Amazon’s Cloud Player. While I always download songs when I buy them, it is nice to be able to access them even when I’m not at home on my Mac that holds my iTunes library, so I appreciate these new capabilities. But there is a downside – you don’t control “your items” in the cloud.
The particular instance I am writing about is from the Amazon Cloud Player, but the same problem can and will arise with any cloud provider.
I buy lots of the 99 greatest song compilations when the go on sale on Amazon for $.99, so I’ve amassed a nice collection of classical music. And, as I said above, I always download the songs as soon as I buy them. This is a good thing, because when I looked at the Amazon Cloud Player yesterday, many of those 99 song collections are now closer to 80 or 85 songs. Yes, indeed, there are songs missing from the cloud versions of my albums. How is that possible? Perhaps a publisher decided to pull the songs or something, but the point is, we don’t own our data in the cloud and it can be taken away from us at the whims of the publisher.
Note: I can’t imagine Amazon would be responsible for removing the songs without some pressure from the publisher, because they need to make customers happy, and this clearly does the opposite. Publishers, on the other hand, are in the business of preventing customers (read: annoying likely pirates) from doing anything with anything, as far as I can tell.
The difference here is with virtual goods vs. real goods. Amazon and others can take away songs or movies (try to find Cowboys and Aliens streaming on Amazon or iTunes. Nope, it’s gone), but they can’t take physical goods from you. Steam, for example, can prevent you from playing a game you bought if you just have a Steam client logged in on another computer. Remember Amazon’s Orwell book fiasco? That doesn’t happen with physical books, CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays, game discs, etc.
So we have a major disadvantage when paying real money for these virtual goods, in that their availability can be limited in the future without us having any say. We do this because of convenience of the network-based delivery of these items. For the most part, we pay the same price as we do for the physical thing, too, so we’re making bad choices and the publishers are making way more money because they don’t even need to ship a product.
And it is getting worse. How many games on physical disc now require you to register via Steam or Origin or their own web service, which then limits your rights to play the game where and when you want? Almost everything I’ve bought recently for PC is that way. The consoles are still mostly free of that oppression, but it is coming, so publishers can stop the used game market, since they don’t get any money from that.
So what do we do? First, we need to beware of virtual goods and be aware of their limitations. Second, perhaps we should push for more rights for consumers when it comes to virtual goods licenses. Transfer of licenses, as you can do with real property would be a start. Demands that services like Steam should be able to prevent simultaneous use of a single game while allowing different purchased games be played on different machines under the same account. We should get our rights back, rather than being treated like criminals by these publishers and virtual goods providers.
Today quickly switched from a pleasant Sunday to a little too exciting when my wife arrived home from grocery shopping and yelled “Fire!” At almost the same instant, I could smell smoke and there was a helicopter flying over the house. Once my heart started beating again, I saw that the fire was south of us and that the helicopter was fighting it with water drops. We walked to a hillside sort of above the fire as the smoke enveloped us and ash fell. Before long, we returned home in case we needed to evacuate. It turned out that the helicopter was refilling on a ridge near us, so we got some amazing views of the thing roaring over us. A newspaper report details the fire: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/fire-371632-beach-brush.html
I took a bunch of pictures and here are the best ones:
Our first view of the smoke
We couldn’t directly see the fire, but it was behind that ridge
The fire attack chopper made many runs
Here it is flying into the smoke
And here it is coming back out to refill
Getting closer
And right over our heads!
The smoke was really thick, so those pilots had to brave terrible conditions
Yes, if you look carefully the chopper really is in there
Flying to the ridge for a refill
Just about at the refill spot
Coming straight at us after another pass on the fire
Getting closer
Just about to fly over us!
I also took some movies.
This one shows the chopper flying up a canyon on its way to refill.
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The Space Shuttle Endeavour was in a temporary facility when we went to see it in January at the California Science Museum near USC, just south of downtown Los Angeles. It was exciting to see it, and, though it was crowded, we didn’t have to waste too much time getting in to see it. We had tickets with reservation times, but there are lots of exhibits to look at while the crowd moves through to the the shuttle. Those were somewhat interesting, though some of them were very tailored to kids.
