July 2006 Archives

Step 1. Admire your child's budding creativity, in spite of his vandalistic choice of medium.

Step 2. Remove Sharpie from child's hand. A common error during this step is to kill the child; make a careful effort to avoid doing so.

Step 3. Wash ink from child's hands and face. You may skip this step, but then add Step 9 at the end (wash purple handprints from floors, walls, and furniture).

Step 4. Get a dish towel and rubbing alcohol. Apply alcohol liberally to marker stains. Rub carpet. Eventually the stains will become a large faint purple blob.

Step 5. Spray stain remover on blob. Wait 10 minutes.

Step 6. Mix a bowl of laundry detergent and cold water. Scrub the stain until it's frothing white.

Step 7. Vacuum the carpet and let it dry. The carpet should look pretty good now. Understand, however, that for years afterward you will unavoidably notice this area and convince yourself that it's still slightly purple, regardless of whether it actually is.

Step 8. You didn't set the Sharpie back on the coffee table, did you?

You may recall a scene in The Matrix where one of the minor characters, Switch, realizes that one of the evil guys is pulling the plug on her body in the real world, and that she's about to slump over dead in the Matrix. A look of dread comes over her and she pleads, "Not like this. Not like this." Then just like that, she dies. An awful way to die, no doubt.

This is what I say to myself when I flop top set or the nut straight in a tournament, get reraised by the big blind, and as we both go all-in I discover that he flopped a four-flush. I've been on both sides of this situation, and no matter what, when the flush completes I feel icky. It's a gruesome way to die.

Not that it stops me from trying to kill people this way. In tonight's Mookie, we were three-handed and I'd just doubled up with KK against TripJax's top pair, good kicker. Now 23skidoo was the short stack, and when he reraised me with his A2o and I called, I'm sure he thought he was dead. But no, I'd called with JT spades; barring a suckout, he was OK.

Then came the flop: no pairs, but two spades. Thinks skidoo: "Not this way." Turn club, no pair. River diamond, no pair. Ace-high holds up against Jack-high, and I'm back to third place. No Matrix moves today.

It was over soon after that, when my AQs caught nothing but TripJax's K7o paired the board. My third cash in the Mookie and best showing to date.

Congrats to Trip for winning and skidoo for second place!

On the way home, the anesthetic eye drops began to wear off, and I decided to shut my eyes. They began to sting a bit: not a dull ache as you might expect if someone had socked you in the face, but more of an acute pain that sunscreen might cause if it ran into your eyes. Occasionally I opened my eyes and looked around. Still good vision, with the Vaseline effect diminishing a bit.

At home, I was ready to go to bed. I put in more antibiotic eye drops, as well as some new anti-inflammatory drops, and went to sleep. I wasn't tired, but the stinging was annoying enough that I forced myself to sleep.

By the evening, the pain was mostly gone, as was most of the Vaseline effect. I assembled some Ikea furniture, thus proving that I was still a useful member of society, and went back to bed.

Next morning was 24 hours after the surgery. I was supposed to return to the doctor's office for a checkup. I felt good enough to drive myself, which I did. I noticed starbursts around reflected sunshine and a general but slight haziness in my vision. The doctor's assistant said this was completely normal, and after another round of exams sent me home to return in about a month.

Dr. Hyver promised dramatic improvement in the couple of days following the surgery, and he was right. Under ideal conditions -- daytime in natural light looking at scenes without glare -- my vision was very near perfect. But glare definitely bothered me, and I still saw starbursts around bright lights. I also saw fuzzy halos around other more subtle light sources, such as sunshine through the window at the end of an unlighted hall. Nighttime was particularly annoying; I saw enormous halos around point light sources.

Aside from vision quality, I felt diminishing discomfort in the days and weeks following the surgery. The best description I can think of is when you wake up to catch a 6:00 a.m. flight at the airport (meaning you had to get up at 3:30). You're bleary-eyed; your eyes sting and you just want to close them. That's how your eyes feel after surgery. But it's not intolerable, especially if you're liberal with eyedrops like Systane, and it tapers off pretty quickly.

Ten days after surgery you can stop wearing goggles at night (to keep yourself from rubbing your eyes while asleep), and after two months it's OK to rub your eyes if you want. Right around two months was when the daytime halos went away completely. Nighttime halos are still there, particularly around those infernal blue LEDs that have become popular in consumer electronics. Nighttime vision is also a bit uncomfortable; I feel like I'm wearing dirty contact lenses. But I can drive at night, and I can watch movies, and I can see the digital clock across the room when I wake up at night, and those are really all the functions I care about at night.

It wasn't until about four months after surgery that I stopped thinking about it each day. Until then, there was always something that reminded me of it -- usually either a temporary difference in vision between the eyes, or mild dryness that caused slight discomfort, or looking in the mirror and noticing that my eyes were a bit red.

I'm more sensitive to lack of sleep now. If I get only four or five hours in a night, my eyes are more sensitive than they would have been before the surgery. If I get a full eight hours, they feel absolutely wonderful.

What has most impressed me after six months is the accuracy of the correction. In particular, my astigmatism is gone. I can resolve letters on street signs much farther away than anyone around me, which I used to be able to do with my contacts only after blinking a few times and squinting.

If you're reading this, you may have just had surgery and are having buyer's remorse because of all the halos and dry eyes. Here's my advice:

• Buy a big bottle of Systane. Carry it with you at all times. Use it all the time. One day you'll realize you stopped using it a few days earlier, and then you'll be very happy.
• The daytime halos eventually do go away.
• It takes months to recover from this surgery. But probably 90% of the recovery is in the first couple of days. So be prepared to handle recovery, but if you have surgery on Friday and stay in bed over the weekend, you won't have to miss more than one day of work.
• Remember to wear protective eyewear from now on when appropriate! Imagine the irony if your surgery enabled you to stop wearing glasses and thus be blinded by a pebble thrown by your lawnmower!

Prepping for surgery was easy. I started taking eye drops every few hours in the couple days before surgery. I think they were antibiotics. Then on the morning of the surgery, my wife dropped me off at the doctor's office and went to have breakfast with the kids.

I put on a hair net and a gown, then went through most of the same eye exam procedures as I did during the consultation. But there was one difference: at the end I stared at a device that showed various red geometric shapes. I'm pretty sure it was a laser bouncing off my eye; it looked like a very uninspired laser light show, but with Muzak instead of Pink Floyd playing in the background.

At this point I realized the significance of something I'd been seeing while in the waiting room: every 15 minutes or so Dr. Hyver would walk into this room and take a floppy disk into the operating room. I deduced that the floppy disk contained eye-burning instructions specific to each patient. For a moment I found this unsettling. What if he set it next to someone else's disk and then picked up the wrong one? What if the write-protect got flipped by mistake and I got zapped with the last guy's profile? This wasn't like Taco Bell where an off-by-one error means you get a 7-Layer Burrito instead of a Chalupa. But after some thought, I decided it was probably no more unreliable than any other method as long as (a) there were information embedded in each file identifying the patient, and (b) the file had integrity-checking data. Moreover, having the data on a physical token like a floppy disk probably prevented certain kinds of bugs that might affect a networked system. Anyway, I had enough to worry about already, so I put it out of my mind.

Next I was on the table. Lots and lots of eye drops, lots of swabbing of iodine. Dr. Hyver told me to stare at a blinking light above me and not move my eye. Then he put a thing on my eye that looked like a big ring, and as far as I could tell stepped on the ring with his foot and jammed his entire leg into my eye socket. It didn't hurt, but it really felt like he was squashing a grape that I happened to use for seeing. He then announced in a booming voice: "I NOW HAVE CONTROL OF THE EYEBALL." My vision dimmed, then went completely blank. (I think this is actually an interesting side effect of the motion-based physiology of our vision; if your eye ever stops moving completely, your brain basically figures you're idle and turns on the screensaver.)

Dr. Hyver narrated what was about to happen in perfect detail throughout the entire procedure. He didn't specifically talk about the leg in the socket, but he did mention something about pressure. So though some of this sounds scary, actually none of it was surprising.

Next Dr. Hyver put the slicer on me. This is a little robot that makes deli-thin slices of your eyeball, leaving a flap that folds out and leaves the juicy interior of your cornea exposed. They do this because during the laser process they actually burn off some of the inside of the cornea rather than the top. Then they can fold the flap back and use it as a natural (and transparent) Band-Aid. Quicker healing and no interruption in vision. If only we could arrange all our scrapes, cuts, and burns so elegantly.

Off came the robot and the ring, and I could see again. Dr. Hyver folded back the flap and things were pretty blurry (even more so than my usual bad vision). Then he fired up the laser and told me to keep looking at the light. I heard dozens of quick arcing electrical sounds and smelled what I now know to be the smell of vaporizing eyeball. This part took about 20 seconds. Then more eye drops, flap replaced, and more eye drops. I could see, but things were still really blurry.

Next eye: same experience. Then they walked me over to a chair and let me sit for a bit. I could already see better, but it was like good vision through Vaseline -- hints of sharpness through overall murkiness.

One of the assistants called Mary on the phone to say I was done, and they gave me some very dark glasses as well as a bag of other stuff. They let me walk out by myself to the car.

Part Three next.

I had laser eye surgery about six months ago. Here's my story.

I've been very nearsighted most of my life, starting to wear glasses in 4th grade and switching to soft contact lenses in eighth grade. My last contact lens prescription in 1993 showed a bit of astigmatism, as well as severe myopia -- around 7.5 diopters. My eyes stayed pretty much unchanged since 1993, though I think they got a bit worse in the last few years as a string of busy software engineering jobs took its toll on my vision. Rather than get a new contact lens prescription, though, I just switched back to eyeglasses, which were comfortable and convenient.

But the arrival of my kids changed things. Jumping on Daddy often includes the bonus of getting to grab his glasses and fling them behind the couch. Waking up in the middle of the night to round up my wandering daughter was annoying if I didn't find my glasses on the nightstand on the first or second or third try. And as we discovered the neighborhood swimming pool, I found myself taking too many timeouts to wipe water drops off my lenses.

After researching all the jokes on The Simpsons about sudden blindness following laser surgery, I tentatively decided to do it. Then one day in the fall of 2005, my work's HR department announced that open enrollment for the coming year was starting soon, which I realized meant that if I wanted to participate in the flex spending plan (meaning I got to pay for the surgery with pretax dollars) for 2006, I essentially had to schedule surgery right away for the coming year, and to take maximum advantage of some quirks in the flex plan, I wanted the surgery to be as early as possible in 2006.

I made an appointment with Dr. Scott Hyver, who was recommended by several colleagues at work. I expected his price to be non-competitive, given that (a) he advertises a lot on the radio, and (b) he doesn't advertise his price, but I wanted someone with good cash flow in case he and I ended up in a plaintiff-defendant relationship.

The consultation was about half an hour, mostly consisting of an assistant to Dr. Hyver shining lights into my eyes and poking them here and there. At the end, Dr. Hyver came in the room and said that I was a good candidate for surgery, in particular because my corneas were pretty thick.

Dr. Hyver recommended wavefront lasik, which involves the creation of a map of your eye and a corresponding plan for correction specific to both high-order and low-order defects. There were several reasons for this recommendation: (1) it gives generally better results because it's more accurate, (2) it was the only realistic option for someone with big (high-diameter) corneas like mine, and (3) it would reduce nighttime halos by correcting as much of the corneal surface as possible. I'm sure it also helped that it was the most expensive laser surgery he offered, but oh well.

I'm naturally suspicious when someone offers an opinion but stands to benefit from having a specific opinion, so I attempted to get him to rate my suitability on a scale from 0 to 10. He answered that this is elective surgery, so there isn't any sort of tradeoff that makes even marginally suitable candidates worth pursuing -- either you're 100% suitable, or don't risk it. He did say that a better candidate wouldn't have such bad vision in the first place, but I was still well within the range of suitability. I liked his answer and made an appointment for Friday, January 6, 2006.

More to come.

I spent the morning hacking on my Movable Type CMS. The goal is to make it a tiny bit harder for low-life comment spammers to fill this blog with crap (which is my job). It should be unnoticeable to human users.

Help me test! If you're a well-intentioned human, please leave a non-spam comment on this entry. Otherwise, please don't leave a comment.

BB (t1690)
UTG (t2470)
MP (t2790)
Sowbug (t1380)
Button (t5240)
SB (t1410)

Preflop: Sowbug is CO with 7s, 2c.    
1 fold, MP calls t30, 2 folds, SB completes, BB checks.

Flop: (t90) 7h, 2s, 7c (3 players)

This article documents my installation of an auxiliary audio jack in my 2007 Honda Fit.

First of all, if you're thinking of buying a Fit and are trying to decide between the Base model and the Sport model, you should probably buy the Sport. You would have to be crazy to go through what I did to add this Sport-only feature to a Base model, even though the price difference between the two trim lines is over $1,000. If your time is worth anything at all, this modification isn't worth it. In my case, it was a challenge that appealed to the hacker in me, so I enjoyed it.

And second, you're probably asking why I bought the Base model if the higher trim line had features I wanted. The reason is simple: the Sport is not just a fancier version of the Base, but rather it's a car with an entirely different character.

The Base is an inexpensive, sensible, compact-yet-roomy car. It gets good mileage, but I can easily carry oversized boxes in it. Typical Honda. I suspect that people who miss the old Civic wagon will love this car.

The Sport, however, is tricked out with a bunch of cheeseball features that I don't want on any car I drive. It has a spoiler on the back. It has a leather steering wheel cover. It has steering wheel paddle shifters. It has alloy wheels. And so on. Pretty much all the goofy ads you've seen for the Fit are supposed to appeal to people who dream of paddle shifters at night. (Rather than people like me who dream of dollar-cost averaging index fund purchases in their Roth IRAs.) Honda attempted to reach two different kinds of people through different trim lines for the same model. So non-sporty personalities like me who want basic creature comforts like remote keyless entry and cruise control are out of luck. I chose to buy the car that matched my personality (boring, economical, etc.) and add the couple missing features I wanted.

That takes care of why. Here's how.

First, I ordered part 39112-SAA-J02ZA, the OEM aux jack itself, from my friendly neighborhood online Honda dealer for about $30. I won't mention who they are because they turned out to be not so friendly; moreover, the online price after shipping and a mysterious "handling" charge was more than I'd have paid buying it list from a local dealer.

Next, I took apart the console in the car. This was fairly easy; there are two clips in the front and two screws in the back. You have to shift into neutral to get it out. Don't forget to unplug the cigarette lighter.

My hope at this point was to find a nicely taped-up plug waiting to be inserted into the back of the aux jack. No such luck. Honda didn't foresee adding this jack as an aftermarket option, so they actually have a different dashboard wiring harness for the Base. What a pain in the neck.

Next I used the online MusicLink installation instructions to tell me how to pull out the radio (or "tuner assembly" in the local lingo). My naive hope at this point was to find either female RCA jacks or a 3.5mm audio plug. Instead, I found a different receptacle that looked unlike anything I've ever seen on Planet Earth. The pain in my neck had now migrated down to my ass.

Several weeks of browsing Digikey and Jameco catalogs followed. I found nothing resembling the right connectors. I wrote various car-audio stores on the web, and the few shops that wrote back said they'd love to hear it if I solved the problem.

Eventually, I decided to take matters into my own hands and soldered ten RS-232 female headers (about $4 for 100 at Fry's) onto the ends of five wires from a cat-5 cable. I wrapped each in electrical tape to prevent shorts. Using some info I found on the web, I concluded that the following pins matched up (5-pin on the aux jack, 20-pin on the radio): 1-15, 2-5, 3-3, 4-13, 5-14. (For the person who buys my car in a few years and wants to know which wire is which, the colors going into the aux jack are 1-O/W, 2-W/G, 3-G/W, 4-W/B, 5-B/W, O=orange, G=green, W=white, B=blue, and "O/W" for example means "orange wire with white stripe.")

Next came the hard part. I pulled out the head unit far enough to reach in behind it and held a mirror in back. Then after approximately 1,000 attempts I successfully pushed all five headers onto the right five pins on the back of the unit. Same with the aux jack, but that one was easier because I could look directly at it. I plugged in my MP3 player and confirmed it all worked, and then carefully reassembled the car (in the process breaking part 83442-SAA-003ZA, list price $3.20, and discovering that I must have broken two of part 91550-S50-000ZL, list price $1.68 each). I also dropped a screw down into the netherworld of the shifter assembly and spent about 45 minutes fishing it out.

I put on a motorcycle helmet and kissed the family goodbye, then drove the car around the block to make sure it still worked. No explosions or parts falling onto the road. The end result is identical to that of an OEM Sport, so I didn't take any pictures for you to see.

As I said earlier, don't do this. Just buy the Sport. But if you think as I do and decided that the Base model was right for you, but still want to play your MP3 player on your car stereo, this method definitely works. Final cost with parts (including replacements of the ones I broke) was about $50.