Categories
etc.

My experience with Lasik eye surgery

This post is probably only useful if you’re considering getting your eyes LASIK’ed, like I had been thinking about for quite awhile. I finally had it done yesterday, this is my experience.

I went in last Saturday for a 2 hour appointment consisting of a a preliminary exam to see if I’d be a good candidate then a longer, fully-dilated eye exam to determine my prescription and the type of surgery I’d need (LASIK or PRK).  The result was that I was a candidate for Lasik and didn’t need PRK which, as I understand, has a longer recovery time and is an altogether different procedure. After reading scary 6 page list of things that could possibly go wrong, I signed the form and scheduled the surgery to be done the next Saturday.

Marcus before LASIK
Before LASIK

The surgery itself was pretty straightforward. I got there Saturday morning at 8:30 and was out by 10:00. First I met with a doctor who inserted small plugs into my tear ducts presumably to keep my eyes from tearing up too much during the surgery. They weren’t removed at the end of the surgery, I was told they dissolve in a month which, to me, was the most disturbing part of the whole ordeal. A few minutes later I was taken to the surgery room, reclined on a table and given a teddy bear and a blanket to “give your hands something to do.” Nice.

The surgeon came in and my eyes were numbed with drops that worked very quickly – they dropped them in and pressed my eye with an instrument–I couldn’t feel it at all. Then they pressed down pretty hard on the first eye with something that felt like it had maybe the diameter of a penny. They pressed hard enough to completely dim my vision for about 5 seconds. I definitely felt this, but it didn’t really hurt, just felt like an unhealthy amount of pressure on the eye. As soon as my vision was restored (or maybe while it was still dim, I’m not sure) they sliced my cornea to make a flap, I was a little nervous about that part, but mostly just curious, it didn’t hurt at all. I could see it being pushed back and my vision immediately became really, really blurry for a few seconds. My thoughts were “cool, I’ll never see like this again!” A nurse began counting down the seconds as soon as the flap was made so I assume it can’t be safely pushed back for too long. Soon afterwards there was a series of maybe 7-10 clicks and with each one my vision noticably improved. It was pretty amazing. Once the clicks (which were made by the laser) stopped, the flap was pushed back over and I could see clearly from the first eye. They repeated it with the second eye, all of this totaling maybe 5 or 10 minutes and I was done.

Ten minutes later I was in the car and on the way home.

I was told to sleep for 6 hours afterwards, and the valium they gave me (just one) before the surgery was supposed to help with that. That worked great for about an hour, then the pain began. For the next 2 1/2 or 3 hours my eyes hurt bad. Sleep was about the last thing I felt like doing, opening my eyes was difficult and painful and while I wasn’t crying (of course!) there were plenty of tears. It felt like someone was poking me in the eyes repeatedly. I got pretty worried at this point that something had gone wrong. In retrospect, I think that pain is normal, though they conveinently failed to mention this and acted like I’d sleep for 6 peaceful hours. Maybe I’m immune to valium, I never felt it kick, I don’t know. After what felt like forever, I was finally able to sleep, with a pair of protective goggles taped to my head to keep me from inadvertently rubbing my eyes. I slept for 2 hours and woke up with my eyes feeling fine and super hungry. I could see though! Perfectly!

Today (one day afterwards) it feels like I have in contacts that are maybe a day or two overdue for a change. I ocassionally notice it but I can see perfectly. I went into for a checkup this morning and they pronounced my vision to be 20/15.

The final cost at LasikPlus was (since all the advertising is so misleading and it’s hard to find the information elsewhere) $3500 for both eyes. There was also a $3000 procedure available which wasn’t “custom.” I was told that the custom procedure was recommended if your eye has more aberrations as it is supposed to map the irregularities and give you finer tuned vision. Whether this is mostly marketing hype or it really makes a difference, I’m not sure, but in the end I decided to pay the extra $500 since they’re my eyes and I love my eyes 🙂 Was it all worth it? Definitely. If LASIK isn’t a miracle of science, I don’t know what is.

I highly recommed the Wikipedia article on LASIK if you’re interested in a much more detailed description of the process and want to have some of your doubts dispelled.

Categories
Software Technology

Ubiquity: The Next Big Thing

This is the most impressive browser extension I have seen yet: Ubiquity.

It’s a mixture of Quicksilver and Yubnub combined with functionality similar to Greasemonkey integrated tightly with Firefox as an extension for doing stuff and creating mashups. I think this could quickly become the main reason to use Firefox over any other browser. Maybe not for every user, but certainly for technical users and effeciency nuts (like me :))

Categories
Lifehacks Software Technology Web Services

All the Functionality of MobileMe for Free

How to get (almost) all the functionality of MobileMe (previously known as .mac) without paying for MobileMe

Email – Use Gmail with IMAP turned on and you can sync mail between your iPhone and Macs. If you’ve got your own domain you can use Google Apps to use a personalized email address. I use Gmail without ever opening the browser based gmail but it’s nice to know that it’s available. IMAP keeps your computers in sync with each other and with your phone and works great.

Contact and calendar syncing – Plaxo will sync your contacts and calendar surprisingly well across your Macs, Gmail and Yahoo. In order to sync with your iPhone you’ll have to plug the phone in and Sync over USB. You lose the push sync for iPhone that MobileMe offers so if that’s the killer feature for you, you might be stuck paying.

Remote File Storage – There’s a service called DropBox that gives you 2gb free and syncs really well between computers. It’s in beta but they’re giving out beta invitations and I imagine it will be generally available soon. There’s Box.net which also gives you 2gb for free and has a web interface. Finally–Windows Live Foldershare it isn’t online storage, but it will sync folders between computers with no limit on the number of files, they’ve just got to be smaller than 2gb each.

OmniFocus to iPhone Sync – OmniFocus syncs over WebDav. It’s almost impossible (but not quite) to find free WebDav hosting. I found some offered by Tomben called OFWD. You can set it up in just a few minutes and it works fine. Box.net is an oft-suggested solution but in my experience, it doesn’t work.

BackToMyMac – BackToMyMac is just VNC. One way to get around this is to turn on screen sharing in your Mac’s system preferences under sharing then use the built in Screen Sharing.app (copy it from /System/Library/CoreServices to /Applications). You can set up a friendly name for your computer with DynDNS and then configure your router give your computer a static internal IP address and forward port 5900 to your computer and you’re done. There’s a great article explaining some of this on Macworld. If all that sounds like a pain LogMeIn works really well and it’s free and easy to set up.

Gallery – Flickr is free for 200 pictures. You can upload to it for free from iPhoto with Connected Flow’s FlickrExport. FFXporter is also free. It’s not as pretty or easy as what you get with MobileMe, but it works for basic needs. The gallery is another area where MobileMe still beats free solutions.

It’s not perfect, especially if you want a push contacts/calendar sync and a gallery, but you can get most of the way there with free stuff. The reason I started looking is because MobileMe just wasn’t doing it for me. The last straw was when ALL my phone numbers randomly disappeared from contacts on my phone after syncing with MobileMe. I was able to recover them, but I decided MobileMe wasn’t worth it.

If I’m missing anything, or there’s a better way to do something than what I’ve listed, I’d love to know.

Categories
Knowledge Lifehacks Productivity Software Technology

PersonalBrain vs. Mindmapping Part II

After writing yesterday about the differences between PersonalBrain and Mindmappers, I started thinking more about what the core difference between them are.

  • Is it a temporal difference? Mindmaps tend to expire whereas information in PersonalBrain tends to be valid over a longer period of time.
  • Is it a difference in the amount of data you can to see at once? Mindmaps allow you to see possibly hundreds of nodes at once where realistically in PersonalBrain you can only deal with maybe 10 or 20 on the screen at a time.
  • Is it a difference in the way you can connect the information? PersonalBrain is more organic and mindmaps are structured.

While these are all valid points, they don’t get at the heart of it which seems to be:

In PersonalBrain each node is first class data, whereas in a Mindmap, nodes have hierarchal importance. This means that in PersonalBrain any element in the “plex” can have infinitely detailed information associated with it. You can extend any node with unlimited sub-nodes that provide additional detail without consciously structuring the data to allow for specialization.

For example, I’ve created a Mindmap of my notes for the book Linked and one of the nodes in the map is “Power Laws”. The more I research power laws and get into the details, the more nodes I’ll need to add. Eventually, one of two things will happen – either the mindmap will become cluttered and unwieldy or I’ll have to start a new mindmap. If I do the latter, I’ll then have to remember it exists and open separately if I go back to my book notes. Neither is desirable.

In PersonalBrain if I have a power laws node I’ll never run out of space under it and everything associated with that node can be associated with any other node in the system.

On the other hand, it’s sometimes beneficial to have the concept of a leaf node and the structure a mindmap offers. In PersonalBrain it’s difficult to emphasize the importance of a node since there really isn’t the concept of the “center node” that a mindmap has.

So, the conclusion remains the same–different tools for different purposes.

Categories
Lifehacks Productivity Software Technology

PersonalBrain vs. Mindmapping

When I started using PersonalBrain sometimes I was unclear about when to use PersonalBrain or when to use a more traditional mindmapping tool like Freemind or MindJet. Now I think I can break it down pretty simply to this:

PersonalBrain is for research, learning and long-term planning. Mindmapping is for brainstorming.

The two tools overlap and can be used for either purpose, but I find that generalizing helps make the decision of which software to use quick and more intuitive.

An example where I prefer Mindmapping: If I’m starting a project such as building a website I use Freemind to quickly lay out the potential navigation, what content will go where and even the contact information for the involved parties. The information I need is limited in context and fairly isolated. It’s useful in the time that I’m building the website but it’s likely that I won’t need to revisit it in the future. It also helps to be able to see it all at a glance–Mindmaps are great for this.

Examples of where I prefer PersonalBrain: Pretty much everything else :). If I’m reading a book and taking notes, I use Personal Brain. If I’m taking notes on an article or planning out my future I use PersonalBrain. Philosophical or political information goes into PersonalBrain. All of this is information I’m likely to want to go back to and that is likely to connect to other bits of information and help with me be more creative, recognize patterns, and recall what I’ve learned.

That’s how I differentiate between what goes where. If you’ve got another way of doing it, I’m curious to learn about it!

Categories
Knowledge Lifehacks Productivity

An example of flow in Anna Karenina

In part Chapter Four of Part Three of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy I came across a great example of flow, written well before Mihály Csíkszentmihályi formally identified and defined flow in 1990 and it became popular in positive psychology.

In the example, Levin, a Russian land owner, decides to go out and work side by side with the peasants who work his land. The job at hand is mowing the long grass to make hay. Levin is an inexperienced mower, but wants to try it anyway.

Initially he struggles a bit with it:

The grass was short close to the road, and Levin, who had not done any mowing for a long while, and was disconcerted by the eyes fastened upon him, cut badly for the first moments, though he swung his scythe vigorously.

And alongside the strong peasants, he begins to feel that he won’t have the energy to finish:

Levin followed him, trying not to get left behind, and he found it harder and harder: the moment came when he felt he had no strength left, but at that very moment Tit stopped and whetted the scythes.

After finishing his first row he gets a taste of victory:

And this long row seemed particularly hard work to Levin; but when the end was reached … Levin walked back in the same way over the space he had cut, in spite of the sweat that ran in streams over his face and fell in drops down his nose, and drenched his back as though he had been soaked in water, he felt very happy. What delighted him particularly was that now he knew he would be able to hold out.

Still not quite perfect, “His pleasure was only disturbed by his row not being well cut.” but he’s intent on getting it:

He thought of nothing, wished for nothing, but not to be left behind the peasants, and to do his work as well as possible.

Then, the great description of his feeling of flow:

Another row, and yet another row, followed–long rows and short rows, with good grass and with poor grass. Levin lost all sense of time, and could not have told whether it was late or early now. A change began to come over his work, which gave him immense satisfaction. In the midst of his toil there were moments during which he forgot what he was doing, and it came all easy to him, and at those same moments his row was almost as smooth and well cut as Tit’s. But so soon as he recollected what he was doing, and began trying to do better, he was at once conscious of all the difficulty of his task, and the row was badly mown.

It’s pretty cool how closely Tolstoy’s description fits with CsĂ­kszentmihályi’s definition.

PS – Yes, it’s been 10 months since my last post. Despite being pretty busy, I just haven’t felt I’ve had much to write. Hopefully there will be a few good posts coming up in the near future.

Categories
GTD Knowledge Lifehacks Productivity Software Technology

Personal Brain 4 Review

I recently discovered Personal Brain and I’m taken with it. It took me a couple hours of experimentation and more importantly, playing with Jerry Michalski’s brain to get used to it and to realize how powerful it is. For those of you who ‘get’ and use GTD, I’ll say that this gave me the same feeling I got when I started really using GTD-it’s a trusted system for all the information I want to make sure I remember. It’s more than that though–it’s a way to find patterns in knowledge and thing I’m learning, a way to create patterns, to store about anything… it’s fun, addictive (after a little over a week I have well over 1000 thoughts).

I made a video review of it (my first video review) here:

In the video I call Personal Brain “new”–really it’s only new for me, it’s been around for about 10 years.

Personal Brain is Java which means it’s available on Mac, Linux and Windows. It also means it’s not as Mac-like as most of my other favorite software, but it’s really not bad.

Personal Brain comes in 3 versions – free, core and pro. The core and pro versions are expensive. Fortunately the free version is very adequate. There’s also an enterprise version (BrainEKP) which is networked and web-based.

UPDATED: Video should work now – moved to YouTube

Categories
Technology

Defining Books

Over the last few years I’ve read a lot and explored a lot (this blog is a testament to that). I’ve come across a lot of ideas and gotten excited about a lot of things that have come and gone. Some have stuck. These are the ones that have stuck.

Passive income is the only real way to make money. If you’re working and making X dollars for X hours of work then it’s not passive and it’s not ever going to get you rich. Principal proponent of this idea: Robert Kiyosak in Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

For business there is nothing like a good system. If your business depends entirely on you or if it can’t be duplicated and run without you then it’s not a business, it’s a JOB. Principal proponent of this idea: Michael Gerber in The E-Myth Revisited.

There is no reason to get rich unless you have a reason to get rich. Having a reason to get rich is a lot harder than it seems. Principal Proponent of this idea: Stephen R. Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Time is the most valuable thing you have and you can’t allow anyone to steal it from you. Ever. Pareto’s Principal and Parkinson’s law are two of the most important time management concepts ever. Principal proponent of this idea: Timothy Ferris in The 4-Hour Work Week.

The 4-Hour Work Week is also a great book for reaffirming that you can do just about anything. Why not? Why put it off? I’ve lived in Montevideo, Uruguay for the last 7 months, why? Because one day we decided to move here for an adventure. Here we are, loving every minute of it.

Minor lifestyle changes cause major financial changes. You will never be rich if you change your way of life every time you begin to earn more. Principal proponent of this idea: Thomas J. Stanley in The Millionaire Next Door.

If you don’t get “it” out of your head and on paper your mind will never let you stop thinking about “it” and you’ll never get anything done. Principal proponent of this idea: David Allen in Getting Things Done.

For me these books are essentials. They’re books I am thankful to have been introduced to and recommend to anyone who wants more from life than climbing the corporate ladder.

Categories
Software Technology

Beautiful Software Round up

The attribute these web and Mac apps have in common is that they are all beautiful, simple and functional. They each perform a fairly complex task with almost no learning curve.

Yep is a PDF management program similar to iPhoto, but much more focused on meta-data.
Yep Icon

Yep
I love the effects in Yep, the scanning interface, the simplicity and responsiveness. What a great way to get rid of paper clutter yet still be able to find something when you need it. Everything is perfect, especially that icon 🙂

Next – CSSEdit. So much has been said about it already but it’s good enough to mention again. Who would have guessed editing CSS could be pleasant?

CSSEdit
CSSEdit’s best features are the real-time preview window and the very logically arranged panels on the right which make using the WYSIWYG functionality about as fast as typing code (minus the syntax errors and remembering the names of every selector).

Picnik is a web-based photo editor in Flash. I don’t think I could suggest a single feature to make it better. I know my way around Photoshop well, but for editing a picture from or for Flickr, I prefer Picnik for its simplicity and focus on fast and fun.
Picnik
Picnik has a lot of AJAX (html/javascript) competitors that require you to wait for a new version of the image from the server after every edit. Not so here–Flash was the perfect choice. Edits are instant. Excellent.

Tumblr – Techcrunch (and everyone else really) beat me to this one, but I’ll include it anyway. Way back when I predicted the growth of Tumblelogs and alas, it has happened. Tumblr makes Tumblelogging simple and fun and they do what so many other web apps don’t–they give you all the control. From fully editable templates to an API, Tumblr does so many things right.
Tumblr
Even I’m doing it now (check out that URL 🙂 )!

Nay, a tumblelog

That’s it for now, 2 web apps, 2 desktop apps, all as close to perfection as it gets.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

Categories
Software Technology

Learning Ruby on Rails Through Code

Devalot

Once you’ve learned the basics, I think the best way to learn Ruby on Rails is to look at apps written in Rails and learn from their source. The nice thing about Rails is that once you’re familiar with one application, you can pretty much open any Rails app and understand the structure enough to know where to go to look for the code that is relevant to what you’re learning.

This is a list of apps that have been helpful to me for learning.
1. Devalot – I wouldn’t have guessed it, but this is the one where I’ve found what looks to me to be the best code and some of the most interesting use of plugins. Check out the table_maker plugin in the app–it’s amazing! Devalot is DRY. If nothing else it’s a great example of DRY programming in Rails.

2. Mephisto – For one it’s written by Rick Olson who is part of the Rails core team. In fact, that’s enough in and of itself. Justin Palmer also works on it. What more needs to be said.

3. RadiantCMS – Radiant like an example of simple code that works well. Radiant is fairly easy to understand and this makes it good to learn from. One interesting thing in RadiantCMS is their use of behaviors which are based on Radius.

4. Beast – Good for learning to be concise and learning REST. Rick Olson also works on this project.

That’s it. Check ’em out.

Technorati Tags: , ,