cellio | Entries tagged with vision

I forget how I got there, but I recently found two interesting posts about my curious-but-not-very-useful "superpower". This Guardian article (from 2002) talks about animals (and people) that can see into the ultraviolet spectrum. Did you know that raptors can see into the UV? Do you know why that's important? Because rodents -- that is, prey -- emit urine trails, and urine is visible in the UV spectrum (as anybody who's tried to find and clean pets' urine stains knows).

And then there's this fascinating post from someone who sees into the UV (due to aphakia), in which he describes and shows what he sees and talks about some cool testing he did. It's hard to evaluate such things when monitor calibration is in play (do you see what I do on my monitor? probably not), but it looks like "black lights" are lighter and more purple for him than for me.

One of the ways he tested the bounds of his vision was with a simple prism. I never thought of that. Now, where can I find a prism? :-)

People in the Reform movement have been talking a lot lately about inclusion, with a particular focus right now on disabilities. ( rant alert: lots of Kool Aid, not much common sense )

When I started using computers it was via terminals -- text only, amber (if I had my preference; green was also out there), VT100s. Aside from the fact that I'd've preferred the text be just a bit bigger, I never had problems arising from that.

Technology moved on and terminals were replaced by (CRT) monitors. Those were harder on my eyes (I got headaches frequently), and eventually I connected it to the 60Hz flicker in the screen. Like fluorescent lights, the CRTs flickered visibly and that was a problem. With both lights and CRTs, it took me a while to learn that most people don't see the flicker; I thought it was just a thing we all had to cope with, but most people don't notice it at all and it doesn't hurt them. (The first time I mentioned being bothered by it to a coworker, he thought I was making it up.)

Once CRTs and display drivers got better, I could raise the flicker rate and make my problem go away. (75-80Hz fixed it for me.) Then CRTs got replaced by LCDs, a different technology, and my flicker-sensitivity problems were reduced to places with fluorescent tubes. While those have invaded some workplaces (forcing me to negotiate alternate lighting with people who sit near me), they were otherwise relegated largely to basements. It's not attractive lighting, so these fixtures don't show up in, say, stores and restaurants.

Then came the damned CFLs.

For the last couple years I've been noticing more and more problems with flickering lights in public places. It's frustrating to have to ask to be re-seated in a restaurant, sometimes more than once. Moving to the next table over rarely solves the problem; a flickering light anywhere in my field of vision (including reflections) is a problem. It's been getting worse.

And I finally figured out why -- it's because those lightbulbs are CFLs now. Proprietors of public establishments installed them a few years ago, when incandescent bulbs started to become harder to get, and those bulbs are now mid-life and flickering more. (I don't know why age should affect flickering, but it seems to.)

So the next several years are going to get more and more miserable for people like me. I sure hope that an alternate technology is affordable and seen as advantageous by the time proprietors are ready to replace their long-lasting lightbulbs again.

I suspect the answer is "no", but I need to ask my ophthalmologist if there's anything I can do to reduce the effects on me when I can't avoid them.

We do use CFLs in a few places in our house, like hallways, but not in places where I actually spend time. That's not just because of the flicker, but also because the light color from CFLs is wrong. We'll continue to use incandescents until some other technology (LEDs?) becomes practical.

Dear LJ Brain Trust,

A member of our minyan has a degenerative vision problem and can no longer use even a very-large-print prayer book. (She was absent for a while and returned this week with a guide dog.) She realized that she didn't know as many of the prayers by heart as she thought she did, so I'm spending some time with her to teach her by ear and we'll scare up some recordings for her, but memorization isn't really the ideal solution. Sure, people can and do memorize the core, common prayers, but it's hard to memorize everything, and sometimes there are seasonal changes, so you really want to be able to read the prayer book.

I once saw somebody who used a Braille prayer book, but at the time I didn't ask him how that worked and he's since passed away. Braille is, as I understand it, a letter-by-letter notation system with an extra layer (called "condensed", I've heard) where common words have their own symbols instead of being spelled out. (Like American Sign Language, except I have the impression that the balance between spelled-out and condensed is different. I may be wrong about that.) But -- all of that kind of assumes a particular alphabet, right? So how would Hebrew be rendered in Braille -- do they transliterate it and then Braille-encode that, or does the reader have to learn a different Braille language to match the different alphabet, or what?

I'd like to be able to help her get a prayer book she can read. I don't think she's ready to learn a second Braille language (she's still working on the first).

And a related question: she has an iPad; are there Braille peripherals for that like (I understand) there are for desktop computers? Is "digital copy of the book + iPad + peripheral" a practical alternative to the massive paper tome? (She would use technology on Shabbat for that purpose.)

At my new job I was given a pair of 22" monitors. As at the prior job, I set one up in portrait mode to make it easier to view documents, code, web pages, etc -- you know, the things that have a taller narrower orientation naturally, compared to things like spreadsheets, Outlook, and assorted other things that really want to be wider (landscape). But there's some difference between the old and new setups, because even though I think the monitors were the same size, at the new job the portrait monitor is not quite wide enough. (Maybe I'm using slightly larger fonts. Maybe that's because of lighting, or something in Windows 7 vs XP, or who knows what?) So that was no good.

The "miss" is just small enough that if I could get a monitor with 16:10 aspect ratio instead of 16:9, that would be good enough. We identified a 24" 16:10 monitor (so also slightly bigger, which would help), but it's no longer available. So, my manager asked, would I accept this 30" 16:10 monitor instead? Um, sure. :-) (It's not actually a no-brainer; a coworker is experimenting with a 40" monitor and that's too big for me to see everywhere on it without moving around a lot. He said he has a little trouble with that too, but not as much and he's motivated because look at all the code you can fit on that!)

It arrived today. It turns out that, between the larger size and the 16:10-ness, I can use it in landscape orientation and still see enough code/documentation/web page/etc for that not to be an impediment. (We made sure the one we got could be rotated, just in case.) It's nice to be able to make a browser window wide enough for today's obnoxiously-wide site designs, and while there's a little adjustment (I sometimes have to move a bit for stuff near the edges), I'm really liking this "single larger screen" approach compared to "two smaller ones that individually don't work as well and together are kind of eh".

I've kept one of the others, set up in portrait mode. It sits off to the side to hold random stuff like IM windows, console logs that need to be available but not necessarily read closely, and stuff like that. Yes, I've just relegated a 22" monitor to "random detritus". :-)

Dear Brain Trust,

When it comes to eyeglasses I have complicated, finicky needs. I had an excellent optician who consistently met those needs -- but note that "had"; the place is no longer in business and the optician have moved out of state. It's now time to get new glasses, so I'm looking for recommendations.

The optician I'm looking for will be very precise about measuring, bifocal placement, the optical properties of different frame shapes, and so forth. This optician will also work with me for as long as it takes; last time we spent over an hour putting together the order. I am looking for -- and expect to pay for -- a high-end professional.

Ideally this optician either is within several miles of Squirrel Hill or has generous evening or Sunday hours. (Saturday hours do not help.) But for the right optician, if I have to go to Wexford during the work day (shudder) I'll do that. I'd just rather not.

I have a prescription already; I don't need an exam or a refraction. I just need somebody to make my glasses to exacting standards.

Any recommendations?

Some time ago a friend asked me when my birthday is because he had the "perfect" gift for me. (We don't normally send gifts to each other, but this was an exception.) I'd forgotten all about that until a package arrived recently.

It contained a very nice, hefty flashlight with a good solid grip. That was a little puzzling, but there was more amidst the packing peanuts. The package also contained a copy of the book Defensive Tactics with Flashlights, apparently written for police officers. This looks like a fascinating read (I'm not very far through it yet), and it tickles that "hand-weapon" interest that goes back to my SCA fighting days. As a pedestrian I've sometimes found myself contemplating the defensive properties of umbrellas, too. (And, I learned from Google, "flashlight tactics" is apparently a thing. I had no idea.)

Then I turned the flashlight on and was surprised by a blue beam. A very powerful blue beam (LED). Looking more closely: ultra-blue. That is, it's a "black light". Why is that interesting? Because I see into the UV spectrum, so that light does more for me than for others.

I'm impressed by my friend's ability to combine odd bits of trivia about me in this way. Nifty!

I don't have any lenses in my eyes. Some time back, somebody asked me what keeps my aqueous humor from mingling with my vitreous humor, since the lens usually does that. (These are two different kinds of fluid in the eye.) I wondered if they combined, or if they had different viscosities (like oil and water) and so naturally separated, or what. This morning I finally remembered to ask my ophthalmologist.

Her answer was that it's basically the latter; the aqueous humor is watery (and, by the way, exits through a duct that is often the source of glaucoma problems -- it gets plugged up, raising intra-ocular pressure), while the vitreous "has the consistency of egg whites". However, she said, the vitreous thins out as we age; parts break off and become floaters (yup, got some of those...), and it tends to liquify. So yes, in my case they'll eventually blend, and perhaps they are already. But, she said, this doesn't actually hurt anything; both exist primarily to supply nutrients to the eye and they'll keep doing that regardless. Apparently the different parts of the eye can eat each others' food, or something. (That's my conclusion, not something she said directly.)

She seemed pleased to be able to answer a question more advanced than "do I need new glasses", too. :-)

And now the new "puzzle": I wonder why the eye chart, the set of letters you read on every visit to measure your distance vision, is always the same. I understand why it was, back in the days of paper charts. But now it's all digital -- yet, on every test, it's the same set of letters on each line, in decreasing size as you go on. I have to work pretty hard to avoid memorizing this so it'll be a fair test, since I see my doctor a few times a year (not just once a year like many people). I understand why they want to have a certain mix of letters; I'm sure it's quite intentional that they use a G that can be mistaken for a C, or an F that can be mistaken for a P, and so on. But why not mix it up? Is it important that the F be on the 20/40 line and the G on the 20/50 line and so on? In the same order?

I didn't ask that question.

This morning while getting dressed and contemplating the drive to come, I made a mental note to myself to never again schedule an opthalmologist appointment on what is probably the darkest weekday morning of the year (sunrise today: 7:52AM). But as I left the house the sky lightened some, and by the time I got to the object of my discomfort, Route 28, it was light enough to see well (with headlights still, but things were no longer monochrome). We had lots of cloud cover, which I actually like.

There was an unexpected bonus: the technician did not need to dilate my pupils in order to take pictures of my retinas (that's never happened before!) and it was still cloudy when I left, so for the first time in recent memory I could drive back from the ophthalmologist without having to wear sunglasses.

I've now made a mental note to cancel the earlier mental note.

This parlor game comes via

talvinamarich:

Comment to this post and I will pick seven things I would like you to talk about. They might make sense or be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.

He gave me: Lisp, On the Mark, Accessibility, Books, Role-Playing Games, Filk, Faroe Islands (one of these things is not like the others).

( Read more... )

Dear brain trust,

I have some vision-related problems with my computer setup at work and our IT and HR departments are ill-equipped to help. I've got a configuration -- a combination of OS settings (Windows), monitor settings, application settings, and lighting -- that kind-of sort-of works, but it's all stuff I figured out on my own. There may be better ways to solve my problems, and some of my problems are currently unsolved and getting in my way. Meanwhile, IT really wants to push me to newer versions that seem to be worse for me.

I would like to find a consultant who is knowledgable in both vision stuff and tech stuff, someone who can sit with me for a few hours and give me informed advice about changes to make. My ophthalmologist of course knows the vision stuff but is not a techie; the techies I know don't grok the vision stuff. I need to find someone who can hear "photo-sensitive" and "restricted focal distance" and "astigmatism" and the rest, understand what that means, and suggest approaches that have not occurred to me from walking the application menus and Windows control panel and Firefox extensions. Technical areas will include the gamut of Windows display settings including custom color themes, CSS overrides in Firefox, configuration of Office and (if possible) Adobe reader, and monitor settings, among things. (Bonus points if this person can make Eclipse suck less.) Once I find this person, I intend to push my employer to hire that person for a consultation. I don't expect to have to push very hard, but I also don't expect to get multiple chances on the corporate dime.

The problem is I haven't been able to find that person. My Google searches have turned up many many consultants who will help employers comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act -- they're compliance people, not usability people. (Also, most of them are about mobility issues.) And I've found folks who will build you accessible web sites (they say). This does not help. Clearly I'm going about this wrong.

So, dear brain trust, can you help me figure out how to search for help with this? And in the "hey, I might get lucky" department, do you, dear reader, know someone who could provide this service in Pittsburgh?

They changed the style for the individual-entry pages. The big thing everyone is complaining about is the new comment interface; that's butt-ugly too, but my real problem is that they shrank the font for everything. Browser zoom zooms the whole page (hello horizontal scrolling) and just isn't practical -- if I set a higher zoom for LJ it'll affect all my pages and things like profiles and help requests will be affected too. Ditto for Stylish; I don't know how to have it affect all and only individual entries.

Assuming that they're going to punt on my request to put it back (they usually punt on accessibility requests in my experience), could anyone reading this possibly, pretty please, write me a Greasemonkey script (or Stylish script, if you can figure out how) to put it back the way it was, or suggest some other browser customization that'll do it? Or an LJ style? (They claim they'll offer one in the future, but who knows how long?) I still have some old-style LJ pages in browser tabs so I'll harvest the source for one of them.

Big accessibility fail, LJ! Stop with the assumption that everybody in the world has 20/20 vision please.

Via

tangerinpenguin: List thirteen things that are going well for you this Friday the 13th:

1. The customer who sounded like he wanted Big Complicated Things (In A Hurry) thought my first draft was about 80% while I was assuming 25%.

2. Two significant projects (and some lesser ones) at work want me and my manager will support whatever I want to do. Cool!

3. I read a letter on the eye chart this week that I don't usually get.

4. Some more e-books that I want to read are available as free downloads.

5. Good conversation with my rabbi last night.

6. Bought gas for $3.09/gallon (loyalty card) and it should hold me for a month.

7. Cirque du Soleil is coming to Pittsburgh and this time their web site allowed us to buy tickets. (Totem -- not interested in the Michael Jackson thingy.)

8. Waking up to a cat on my feet every morning still, even though the weather has gotten warm.

9. Baldur is eating better.

10. Mesura et Arte del Danzare -- lovely recording!

11. Neighbors taking care of things along the property line that they might have been able to get away with not doing.

12. The rain seems to have ended before I have to leave for Shabbat.

13. Dani makes me happy. (Why yes, that is redacted. :-) )

( Read more... )

I don't understand the drug industry. Ok, ok, nobody does. Let me be more specific: I don't understand what's going on with one of my glaucoma drugs, Xalatan.

This drug has been on the market since 1996 without a generic option, meaning it costs more than $100 a month if you pay for it yourself (which of course most people don't, but delving into insurance-based pricing in this post would be scope creep). My co-pay is higher for a name-brand drug than for a generic, so I have personal interest in this going generic.

About a year ago word on the street was that the patent was due to expire last September, but something seems to have happened because it's now, according to the patent office, locked in until early 2011. According to my doctor, some insurance companies are applying pressure to ophthamologists, pushing them to use different drugs instead to treat this condition because of the expense. One way or another, it appears that Pfizer has about another year to collect the big bucks from customers before they have to accept that a 15-year monopoly is a pretty good run.

Given all that, I was surprised at this morning's checkup to receive not only a free sample (a month's supply) but also a card that I can use four times or up to $350, whichever comes first, getting my prescription filled. So my next four bottles of the stuff will be free. Before I use that up I'll have another checkup, at which I might score another freebie and perhaps another card. Even if the promotion is over by then, they'll have given up four months' worth of monopoly pricing on me in their final year of being guaranteed to collect it.

How is this in their interest? I'm happy to pocket the savings; I've been pouring money into keeping my glaucoma at bay for as long as I've been paying my own bills. (It was diagnosed when I was a child.) But I don't understand why I'm getting these savings at this time.

The word came down from on high at work: Office 2007 is being pushed to our machines, no opt-out. (Yes, we're slow adopters. Big companies are often like that.) We've known this for months, so since I have to customize my environment for vision reasons, I asked a coworker who already had it to give my Windows theme a spin. The result was pretty terrible, so I sought help from the IT folks. Uncharacteristically for large-company IT departments, I got routed to someone who both cares and has a clue, so he's been experimenting for a while on my behalf. He had to consult Microsoft, but he finally sent me a screen shot asking if this was acceptable. It was, so I accepted the push at a time that he'd be available to talk me through the re-configuration.

( reality wasn't so straightforward )

I've had a lot of discussions with the IT guy about how to fix this. He agrees that this is unacceptable, but there seems to be no way to make Windows, Office 2007, and my accessibility settings play well together. So tomorrow morning we will restore Office 2003 (with luck the fact that I received 2007 once will keep the auto-push from coming around again), and he will begin the approval process to get me set up with a virtual machine. In which I will run Office 2007, because sometimes I'm going to need that. Using a different theme, probably, because I won't have to live in it, just visit it from time to time, so it's allowed to kind of suck. Eventually maybe we'll figure out the right juju to make things work for real, but meanwhile, I'll keep using Outlook 2003 (the Office application I use the most and really need to work) outside the VM and, as needed, Office 2007 inside it.

I don't understand the design intent of the various settings in Windows. If I had a model for what things are intended to do maybe I could find a path to a workable color theme, but I haven't been able to derive that model despite years of using Windows. This business with layered themes with the "superseded" one still having unpredictable results completely confuses me. I find myself wondering whether Microsoft employs anyone with my kind of vision problems and, if so, how I could arrange to have a conversation with that person to learn how he gets around.

We finally saw Avatar today. Because we dallied, our only options were 3D (digital or IMAX). To see the plain old 2D version we would have had to head off to the wilds of Bridgeville or Tarentum or the like.

Consensus on the Google-indexed parts of the Internet suggested the the odds were better than 50-50 of the glasses for digital 3D fitting over my glasses, so we opted for that. (Almost everyone agrees that you can wear the 3D glasses over glasses; they'd be crazy not to consider that need. But my glasses are thick and I didn't know if there'd be enough room.) This concern was easy to mitigate; we asked to try out the glasses at the ticket counter before buying. The other unknown for me was whether the 3D effect would work for me: do my eyes work together well enough, or would I just see a blurry movie? Only one way to find out. (The cheapo red/blue 3D glasses of yore never worked on me, at least for 3D comic books. I've never seen a 3D movie before.)

I could in fact see the 3D effects, yay. The glasses would have been annoying if they'd had any weight to them; on the ears they were perched on top of my regular ones, and there wasn't a lot of room on my nose to support them. Since they were made of light-weight plastic that was ok; I just sort of wedged them in place, and I'm not sure to what extent they were even in contact with my nose. If they'd been heavier that wouldn't have worked.

As for the movie itself... ( Read more... )

The interview parlor game is back. ( Read more... )

I attended a variety of services at the kallah (though I did not manage all three each day due to schedule complications). Here are some thoughts on some of them.

Shabbat morning had about six different options. I went to the service led by Rabbi Marcia Prager and Chazan Jack Kessler. I had been planning to go to one described as "standard renewal" to see what that was about, but I was in Jack's class all week, I was impressed by him, and he asked the class to help with something during the torah service, so I went there. It was an interesting service with a lot of good singing and a very unusual torah service. ( Read more... )

Friday night there were two options, one obviously "main" and one more specialized. I went to the main one, which was led by an Israeli music group named Navah Tehila. (Locals, they'll be at Rodef Shalom in a couple weeks.) The music was generally good and powerful, once I got (back) into the right frame of mind. I had been in the right frame of mind when I walked into the room, but something there threw me out of it and it took about an hour to recover. ( Read more... )

I also went to some weekday services. These were very much a mixed bag. ( Read more... )

A few months ago I was talking with my ophthamologist about the difficulties of sitting at a computer all day (eye-strain headaches, which I could mitigate somewhat by doing ergonomically-bad things and getting neck/shoulder/wrist aches instead). She said that's because I need computer glasses rather than trying to use one pair of glasses for everything. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that my employer would even pay for this -- cool!

The nice thing about this is that the glasses can be focused at a more-normal distance, which means I was able to push my monitor back on my desk instead of keeping it at about 8-10". It's now at about 20", give or take. (I did have to change some font settings and some apps, like Outlook, don't respect all the settings, but that's managable. And I'm used to the software world not fully supporting the visually-impaired.) That, in turn, meant that I could finally support a second monitor -- commonly available in my company, but I could never get that much screen in visual range before. But now...

My second 22" monitor arrived yesterday. My plan had been to set it up in portrait mode (which would allow me to have more than 45 lines of text visible in an emacs buffer), but my graphics card's default driver doesn't support that. There is a newer driver, but it has other issues.

But, my computer is coming up on the end of its lease, which means I'm going to have to move off of it in a few months anyway. So, worst case I wait a few months to be able to rotate my monitor, or best case maybe I'll be allowed to switch early. Moving to a new computer is a pain in the butt, especially with all the security exemptions and stuff (to install non-standard software), so I never would have expected to find myself saying "I hope I can replace my computer soon". :-) (Holy cow, I just realized this will be computer #5 for me... maybe I can safely delete the archives from #2.)

I wonder if I can get a trackball or similar pointing device, too. Not to replace the mouse -- to augment it. This is a lot of screen to move across, and I'd like to spare my mouse hand the broad traversals. (I've never been any good at fine control with a trackball or touchpad, but if I could have both that and the mouse... I assume I can plug in two USB pointing devices and they'd both work, and that trackballs etc come USB these days. Something to check.)

The Monday before last I took my new glasses back to the optician for two reasons: acutely, one lens had fallen out (heat + new plastic = bad; wash them in less-hot water, she says), and more seriously, the placement of the left bifocal was subtly off.

She measured the glasses, re-measured me, and then measured my old glasses. Verdict: the new ones are "right" and the old ones were incorrectly made. (Given all the trouble NeoVision gave me over the old ones, I'm not surprised.) The old ones had the wrong pupilary distance, she said, off by a total of 6mm between the two eyes. Why did my brain accept that? Dunno, but it probably got masked by the whole taking-a-week-to-adjust-to-new-glasses thing. My brain learned to cope with the error, I guess.

She asked if I thought I could get used to the new glasses. They were, in fact, ok for everything except working with my computer at work -- but that's pretty important, and I'd spent most of a week trying to get used to it. I asked if the bifocal could be moved without affecting the distance vision; nope. I asked if I could have a bigger bifocal, and she said that was possible. (Alas, the jump to the next size was 7mm, when I was hoping for about 4mm.)

This was about to lead to the uncomfortable conversation about who pays for this (it's not their fault the previous guys did something wrong, but we did use that as a partial baseline), but she called my insurance company and apparently they will pay for one "no-fault" remake. So I sent them back for a wider bifocal and no other changes. (I considered asking them to lengthen the focal distance on the bifocal, but decided that would be borrowing trouble and risk leaving me with nothing usable.)

I picked the new glasses up Friday morning. It took me a little while to adjust distance vision to work around the extra bifocal width, particularly when looking down. But I was able to read the computer at work more easily (after moving the monitor some). Reading paper (after minor adjustments) works fine. I read torah this morning with them. Ironically, I was having a little difficulty with my computer at home tonight, but it's gotten better over the last couple hours, so I guess I'm adapting. At one point I wondered if I was seeing worse with the new bifocals than the old, but three seconds with the old glasses told me otherwise. It is a crisper image; maybe the light is reflecting differently or something, and these lenses aren't yet as dark as the previous ones (plastic does that and transition lenses do that over time, apparently). It's almost certainly all really minor stuff, but I'm really sensitive to minor stuff. I'll get used to it.

But, as I said, it'll take a week, probably. It's annoying in the short term and better in the long term. Given that, I wonder what the optimal frequency of changes is. I used to keep glasses for, oh, 5-7 years before changing, because they were good enough, manual prescriptions were a crap shoot, and glasses were expensive. Now automation gets me better prescriptions and lenses have actually gotten cheaper in the last two decades (huh?), so it really just comes down to the transition period, I guess. Hmm.

It's the 21st century. Where are my high-tech adjustable glasses? :-)

At the end of last week I got a call saying my new glasses were in. (That was faster than I expected.) Monday morning I picked them up. The frames fit well; the side-pieces are a little more delicate than I had realized, and this is probably only noticable with lenses as thick as mine in the frame, but I think that will be ok. It was immediately obvious that the distance correction was better, and using the bifocals to read something in the office felt "different" but not "wrong".

Monday I had a little trouble with using the computer initially; I ended up adjusting the position of my monitor slightly, which helped. I know from past experience that it takes me a week or so to adjust to new glasses, so I just plugged away.

This afternoon I finally realized what was wrong about the bifocals (other than the focal distance having subtly changed); the placement of the left bifocal, relative to my eye, is a little different than on the old pair of glasses. I don't have quite as much bifocal-covered space to the left side of the field as before, and apparently it matters. Lens curvature prevents me from really comparing them "head to head", but getting them as close as I can I can see the difference. The bifocal looks fine in the lens; it's not obviously crooked or off-center or the like. But it's not quite right for my eyes, so Monday morning I will go back to see what they can do about it. (And I have learned to take a new measurement now: bridge to far edge of bifocal.)

I was going to keep wearing the new glasses over the weekend anyway (won't be using the computer on Shabbat, for starters...), but after doing all this comparing of lenses the new ones were dirty, so I washed them -- and the left lens fell out. Argh! I cannot get it to fit snugly in the frame; I thought I had it in at one point, but it slipped while I was putting the glasses on my face. I wonder what that's about. I inspected the frame with a magnifying glass and I can't see any hairline cracks. (I'm not going to try forcing things and risk creating one.) So now I'm back to the old glasses, and I can't do anything about it until Monday. And the distance vision isn't quite as clear. Bummer.

A while ago I asked about opticians. Thanks for the pointers. On the basis of the feedback I got from a coworker, this morning I took my prescription over to Optometric Associates of Pittsburgh, who seem to have the right amounts of customer care and attention to detail (and proximity doesn't hurt). So far, thumbs-up. (Of course, the real evaluation won't be possible until the glasses come in.)

The optician I met with, Jan, asked me what I was looking for in frames; I said my priorities were lens size/shape, fit, and "not garish", and all other properties were solidly second-tier. I said I wanted lenses no smaller than my current ones because these are my do-everything glasses (not into separate reading/computer glasses), and asked her to turn those comments into recommendations.

I was pleased that for every frame she pulled, she started by having me put it on so she could check the fit of the bridge and withdraw any that weren't right. (I have a small bridge, apparently.) Of the four frames she handed me three were good candidates, and my explanation of why the one wasn't led to some of the other options.

She had been doing this much just by looking. At this point she measured the lenses on my current glasses and the top candidate; the new ones are exactly one millimeter bigger in each of length and width. Score; the current ones turned out to be 1mm smaller than specified. :-) (We had been talking about the size-weight tradeoff; too small and I wouldn't be able to see, but I was mindful of being too heavy, too.) The shape of the new ones is pretty similar to that of my current ones.

I told her that bifocal placement was very important to me (had problems with that in the past), and that one of my current lenses is good and the other is a smidge high. She said the difference was obvious, though the folks who made the glasses had claimed it didn't exist; it turned out to be a difference of half a millimeter. She measured the distance between my pupils with a machine rather than a ruler, explaining that it was more precise. (Having now read a bit about it, I'm glad to see that it "reads" my eyes rather than depending heavily on my maintaining focus in one area. One of my eyes wanders and is hard to keep on target sometimes.)

She was very friendly and accommodating when I explained past problems I've had and would like to avoid. She explained the quality-control process ("you won't even see the glasses until I've confirmed all these measurements are exact"). Even if that's just part of the patter, I left feeling confident. Now I just have to wait a few weeks.

( stats )

This morning at my ophthamologist's office, through the collection of lens parts that she used to mock up a new glasses prescription for me, I read a letter from the 20/30 line. I have never done that before. Woot! Yeah, office conditions are probably optimized compared to real life, but even if the raw numbers don't matter the deltas should. And yeah, it's only one letter, but it still passed a threshold. (If I understand correctly, this would mean a rating of 20/38 on that single test.)

Now if I can just find an optician to correctly make them for me. I had rotten luck with that last time around. (The guy I used before those guys was excellent -- but he retired, which is why I went to someone else.) Locals, any recommendations? I have a complicated, finicky prescription and complicated, finicky needs on things like the precise placement of the bifocals. I need someone skilled and detail-oriented who (1) is that scrupulous about what comes back from his lab and (2) can work with me on this. I recognize that this is a non-standard level of service for which one should expect to pay extra. (I would also like someone to advise me on frame shape to optimize my vision; most places want to optimize their bottom line or some sense of "fashion".)

Bonus points for proximity to either Squirrel Hill or South Side Works, because even if he is excellent I'll probably have to make a couple extra trips as part of this. My glasses just don't happen as one-shots. So running up to, say, Cranberry at lunch time (because places aren't open at 8:30AM) would be a challenge, though doable if absolutely necessary.

( geekiness for the curious )

The interview meme is making the rounds again.

( singing, adaptive technology, trope, food, retirement )

Monica

things I learned on the way to looking up other things

inclusion: doing it wrong

that damned flicker is everywhere now

Braille + Hebrew?

ah, that's better

seeking excellent Pittsburgh optician

nifty gift

a belated answer and a new puzzle

what a difference a few minutes can make

parlor game: let's talk about...

where do I find this kind of consultant?

new LJ style: ow, my eyes!

triskaidekaphilia

parsing a glasses prescription

pharma mystery

Office 2007: accessibility problems

Avatar

interviwed by devreux

kallah: (some) services

cascading effects

new glasses, take 2

new glasses, take 1

ordered new glasses

a first

interviewed by hlinspjalda

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