Eyes: Better, but
Sense of Digital Self gets the Death Rattle
in Southern California

Cornea specialists at UCSD's Shiley Eye Clinic confirmed that after 2.5 weeks in Shanghai, my eye condition, if initially totally misdiagnosed, occasionally improperly treated, never fully tested, and potentially threatened by steroid injections, was "not as bad as I imagined it could have been." If you're looking at that photo on the above left and you don't see anything, that's the same way my eye looks. So don't you be worrying about your narrator.

Apparently my keratitis (cornea infection) has retreated, while the stromal keratitis (on the inner layer of my cornea) can be described as "atypical" "weird" "club-like" "ghostly" and "should go away with steroid drops." (which I've started dropping). This "ghostly club," unfortunately, is right in front of my pupil, which explains why the vision in my right eye has been blurry. Already the blurs are starting to improve, which is good because the doctor says anything not cleared up after the steroids reduce the swelling will be permanent. Puke.

Hard Drive Crash: Record of Digital Self Destroyed

Though my old digital archive (ie laptop) survived a five-month trip through the Americas in a converted backgammon case, the flight from Shanghai to LA was simply too much for my new IBM Thinkpad X60. After two days of not booting, I took the young thing in for her diagnosis. We took out the hard drive. There was something clanking around in there.

Yeah, my hard drive is under warranty, but data recovery (costly, not 100% effective) is not. Perhaps this is so long to my scattered personal narratives, starts of stories, photos (only those not uploaded to flickr), videos, edited and unedited podcasts, and the rest of the distractions a grad student doesn't need. Still, I wish I'd uploaded just a few more things to the net, or gotten my DVD burner running, or had time to buy an external hard drive.

On the bright side, my laptop will come back running just as fast as it was when I bought it. It's a shame that after a month of use, it was already starting to slow.