Farcebook

Category: Health

  • Please read the top line for me…

    Please read the top line for me…

    Went for an eye test last weekend, mostly because we were sent a £10 voucher through the mail and I’ve never had one. Everyone else in the family has glasses and they seem mystified that I don’t. “We all wear them, bet you need a pair, get your eyes tested and find out”.

    So I did, they’re fine. Well, the right one is a bit oval, but only a bit. The only thing the optician said was that my eyes are very dry and that I should use eye drops. Squirting those in my eyes is a new form of torture I’ve discovered. They don’t hurt, I don’t dislike it, but the reflex to shut my eye when they see objects moving towards them takes a lot to override. This is a reflex that can detect pieces of Dremel cutoff wheel flying at my face and deal with it before I’ve even noticed the blade has snapped. A droplet of water must be comically slow by comparison.

    The eye test itself was kind of interesting, I had a 3D scan of my eyes done too which involved looking into a machine that scanned a red line up and down each eye. Then there was the other machine with the balloon in it that did some focus testing and then blew fucking air at my eyeball from a point blank range. “Oh this might make you jump a bit but it doesn’t hurt” the nice lady said as something started extending towards my eyeball. “We use air to test the pressure of your eye”. Aha, well after having it done multiple times I think my eyes are fine, they’ve not popped.

    The actual optician (optometrist? which one is it?) also had a good peer around inside my eyes using the brightest light I’ve ever seen. You think the sun is bright? Go get an eye test. “Put your chin on here, look at my left ear, this is going to be a bit bright”. No shit. At one point he was fiddling round with a microscope having a really good look at the back of my eyeball and everything lined up perfectly so that I could see a perfect image of my own retina. I’m sure nature never intended on the light sensing part of an eye to see itself.

    We also had the traditional reading of the letters game, and some fun with different lenses being stuck in front of my eyes. “Tell me which number looks clearest… number one… number two?”. After a while I just got confused as successive lenses looked identical… “Number four… or number two?” … “err? I can’t tell? Same? is that a valid answer?”. “Ok, when I do this does your vision get worse or better?” “Nope, worse, it’s all blurry”… “Hmm, and this way is clearer” “Yep”.

    I guess I must have been consistently confused to get a reading of zero for both eyes. I am quite sure the way this is done removes any bias I might have towards glasses or not. Like when immigration asks you the same question six different ways just to check you’re not lying.

    For all the science behind distance sight testing, close up testing seems to involve being given a sheet of paper with writing on and being asked to read the tiniest text on it. “Can you read the smallest text on this page OK?” … “Yep, looks fine”.

    So yeah, eye drops and “come back in two years, you might need some then” was the verdict.

  • “Good” Morning?

    “Good” Morning?

    I sleep with my FitBit on. Every morning it tells me how well I slept. For those with other devices (or none!) the way this works is by monitoring my heart rate, motion and blood oxygen level. It then does some magical maths to arrive at a score out of 100.

    In FitBit land, a score of “80” means you had a “Good” night’s sleep. In the real world, 80 is not a good night’s sleep. Ever woken feeling like someone filled your head with sawdust and you put the kettle in the fridge? Yeah that’s 80.

    Supposedly I also sound like a warthog that’s being strangled. FitBit doesn’t tell me this, my other half does.

    So I did some Googling and amongst all the snake oil quack medicine websites out there, and websites for apps trying to sell you a subscription to their dubious systems I found the good old NHS website.

    Feed it your height and weight, it spits out “you are overweight, lose five kilos”. It also shows you a free app you can use to help with that. I probably should cut out the excessive sweet things, and I’m quite sure if I went to the doctors about this their first advice would be “get more exercise, lose some weight”.

    That doesn’t solve the bit where I feel like death in the morning though. It might do in six months, but not tomorrow night. One website I found did mention propping yourself up on pillows. It also recommended stupid things like sticking a tennis ball to your back – the snoring happens when I roll on my back. I’m not taping a tennis ball to myself every night. I’ll forget to take it off and go to work looking strange.

    I can use more pillows though. It was a bit weird the first night, but last night seemed more comfortable. And also reports of their being a warthog in the house have gone down.

    I feel less like I’ve been resurrected against my will too (this is why zombies are angry, they were woken up too early) and my mouth doesn’t feel like the cats have used it as a litter tray, so maybe it spent most of the night closed.

    Further testing will continue. I have apps that collect data and make graphs.

  • Zen and the art of Cross Stitch

    Zen and the art of Cross Stitch

    “What did you do in the cold dark winter of 2022/23?”
    “Oh I took up cross stitch”

    Yeah so my partner likes making crafty things, and she does cross stitch. Although it’s a certain style of it. This isn’t doilies and pretty houses with quotes and nonsense under it. This is slightly more NSFW.

    Look how happy that sloth is!

    I was idly watching her make one and curiosity got the better of me – there was very little to watch on TV – after 30 seconds of explaining I was off making an equally NSFW picture of my own…

    I thnk that crocodile needs to be a logo

    This is a bit like those arty YouTube channels where they try a new skill, fart around for a bit, then try some large project to show off. Sure, there’s a certain amusement from stitching a dainty little creature that’s shouting obscenities but once you’ve done one the fun wears off a bit.

    Then I had a thought. During Christmas I was helping out at a local Christmas activities club, and one of the distraction activities was Hama beads. Those little cylindrical pellets of plastic waste you arrange into a picture, iron and have a wonky looking thing that passes as a bad coaster.

    There’s something quite nice about having to concentrate really hard on such a simple task. Copying a design takes zero effort, but getting adult sausage fingers to manipulate tiny bits of plastic requires conscious efforts. Patiently re-starting because you sneeze and flick your design onto the floor, knowing that’s the only option is also quite relaxing.

    Makes a 100% total opposite difference to trying to think really hard about programming, or teaching kids how to program. There’s nothing to compile, nothing to debug. And unlike drawing, there’s no real skill involved so you can’t do it badly.

    It appears cross stitch is the same, just without the slightly worrying contribution to increased plastic waste. The needle goes in the hole, it doesn’t stab your finger. Maybe you stitch away for half an hour, and realise you started from the wrong hole and now have to patiently unpick it and start over without getting upset and giving up.

    I decided I’d do a loading screen from my favourite ZX Spectrum game Rick Dangerous. Here’s the screen

    If you listen hard, you can still hear the loading… or is that tinitus?

    It’s 256×192 pixels. That’s 49,152 pixels. A cross stitch cross is made from two stitches. It’s a lot of poking a needle through a hole. I’ve got this far after a month.

    Cat for scale, no bananas in the house

    I’ll finish it eventually, it’s a nice alternative to staring at social media. I dipped into Facebook the other day, nothing exciting is going on. I have a new phone, I set up the wrong account in Twitter and just uninstalled the app.

    Take up weird obscure hobbies, the complete opposite to your normal activities. It is quite refreshing.

  • New Year’s Resolutions

    The normal gag is to say “1080p” or “4k”, but I think I’ll go for a nice plain VGA. Nothing too ambitious, something I will actually manage to achieve.

    Let’s make the challenge for this year “being more healthy”. I do a lot of sitting down in front of computers, or in front of the telly. I also do a lot of eating of things that are possibly not the best for you. I should probably do less of both.

    In an attempt at making this so easy I can’t fail, I’ve gone and bought a treadmill. It’s in my house, it’s not piled with junk being a bad table. All I have to do is switch it on and be a human hamster.

    I just need something to distract me from the mind-numbing boredom of staring at the wall. I’m not quite invested enough in it yet to pay for one of those game based apps, but before Christmas I was using it while watching YouTube and that seems to work.

    I’ve found I get bored after half an hour though. I can force myself to do an hour, but it’s not fun in the slightest, it is a proper endurance thing – and not an endurance thing physically, it appears I can walk at a brisk 6k/hr with no effort. The endurance is all mental. Its. Just. So. Boring.

    I’m not running on my treadmill though, I like my knees and also it’s upstairs and I don’t want to annoy next door. Treadmills are a bit thuddy when you get going.

    As far as eating better things, I’m making an effort to eat veg at least once a day and to fill myself up on things like beans, potatoes and rice so that when I see the tasty looking chocolate bar in the cupboard I’m less likely to eat it on my way back to the living room.

    I’m not going to count how many calories go in my mouth though, that gets a bit obsessive and you end up filling your phone with apps that just want to sell you subscriptions to health plans. I’ve got a fitbit, I’ll put numbers that it tells me in here occasionally.