These eyes

I had an eye exam yesterday. It was at the same place as last year's exam. I guess this will be my new place now.

Of course, I was nervous that I would need glasses or something because my eyes are sitting in front of a computer whenever possible (I was nervous). I think the doctor said that my eyes were getting worse (particularly my close-up vision), but they were not bad enough to need glasses yet. My visual acuity (now you know what to call it) is still 20/15 (6/4.5), so when it gets worse it will at least be average for a while.

Oh, and Samson the collie was there too. I still think he's a health hazard, wandering around an optometrist's office like that.

The doctor reminded me (again) that for every ten minutes of looking at the computer screen, to take your eyes off it for 30 seconds. I had very rarely done this because it was annoying and I never ever could remember to do it. I figured there ought to be a program to remind you, and I thought that once I learned some programming, I could put one together.

Guess what? I have learned some programming. So my next programming project (once I get done with the present one) is to work on that. (The present project is stalled because I can't for the life of me figure out how to give the program its own icon without distributing it as a separate file. Nothing code anyone has given to me has worked. CheezySlots users take note that if you move slots.ico and CheezySlots.exe into different directories, the program will crash. That's the situation I'm trying to avoid.)

All this program will do is appear minimized (or preferably in the system tray) when you load it (which should be whenever the computer starts up), and it will maximize every 10 minutes for 30 seconds with a reminder to look away and a little counter to count the seconds. I'll try it out myself first, and it doesn't have to be fancy then. The main workings will be easy; I suspect the hardest part will be getting it to load in the system tray and having a little context menu when you right-click its... ugh... icon.

A few years ago I had an ad-blocking program for Internet Explorer (ah, those were the bad old days). It blocked pop-ups! (Or pop-up ads, as we [I] used to say.) It also blocked banner ads (or any images with the same dimensions). But I got rid of it for some reason, and even after switching to Firefox, I didn't use ad-blocking software, even though Firefox blocks pop-ups natively. But yesterday I downloaded Adblock, a Firefox extension that allows you to block just about any images, scripts, inputs, Flashes, videos, frames, and iframes you want. One word: wow. It uses regular expressions to match them. A regular expression is a method of matching text; it's so powerful, in fact, that entire books have been written about them. Here's a relatively simple example:

The forwardslash indicates the start of the regular expression. http://ads\. indicates that this filter will block any element that contains "http://ads.". The backslash before the period indicates that the next period is to be taken literally as a period. Since the second period doesn't have a blackslash to "escape" it, it is treated as a pattern matcher (the period character indicates a match of any single character). The ending fowardslash signals the end of the regular expression. This expression will match elements such as "http://ads.example.com/images/buythis.gif". Pretty handy, huh?

Once you have a basic knowledge of that stuff (you don't even really need to use regular expressions, by the way -- it's just for more advanced filtering -- in fact, I probably didn't need to have that as a regular expression), then you can enjoy the web as it was meant to be seen: without annoying ads everywhere. Once you have a good set of filters, it's truly amazing to see the Internet in a whole new light -- and it's much more fun than simply avoiding sites that have annoying ads. Get Adblock.

This is just weird: Roy Orbison in Cling-film, which I would assume is what I'd call plastic wrap. Sensual (?) short stories about the late, great Roy Orbison being wrapped in plastic. If you don't care for that sort of thing (it's not dirty, though, really), at least enjoy the weird writing.