I can see!

I recently went to the optometrist for my one-month checkup to see where my eyes were at.  He told me that I read all but one of the 20/20 line correctly, so I guess my vision is close enough to corrected.

Practically, I’m no longer frustrated, and I feel like I can see as well as I did with my contacts before my surgery.  The only side effect that I’m noticeing now is that my eyes are more sensitive to irritants, like when I wash my face, I have to be more careful than I was before not to get any soap in my eyes.

For all intents, I can see.

Oh, and whatever people are saying about starbursts or whatever, I have no idea what people are whining about.  I notice nothing but pure vision.  Happiness.

I forgot my sunglasses today, and for the first time, I felt aware of what I was looking at.  For the past few weeks when I’d been wearing my sunglasses almost everywhere, I would look at things or people out of the corner of my eye, and realize “oh, they can’t see that I’m staring at them” and stare.

Today, I was staring at things and people as usual, and realized that people can see what I’m staring at!

I’m paranoid about hiding my thoughts and goals for whatever reasons.

I think I’ll paint my nails right before the next time my family hosts an onslaught of guests.  That way, I won’t have to help out with anything in the kitchen either.

I have been a faithful LG user for 7 years.

LG TM-520

In high school, I bought the LG TM520 and it was great.  It was hardy, the external display was always on, so I could check the time while I was on the phone, it was cute (considering it was 2002), it had a loud piercing ring, it had dynamic search (searches your phone book as you start typing the number), it was everything a high school kid could ask for in a cell phone.

Alas, I have a fickle heart, and I got tired of this great phone.  I was careless with it and dropped it all the time, only to wonder “why won’t it break?”

LG VX-4600

So I got the LG VX4600 because of its flashing lights.  It was cuter, and it did everything that TM520 did, except for the dynamic search, and the external display turned itself off during phone calls.  Those were things I could live with, though I still do miss that dynamic search.  Then, I started a downward spiral of crappier phones…or perhaps LG started making crappier phones.

I heard about this hot new phone that was coming out in 2006, the LG Chocolate.  It was the first slide phone that I had seen, and I loved the heat-sensitive keys.  I waited for months for it to come out, and when it finally did, I purchased it on the day that it came out.

LG VX-8500

I loved it!  I loved the high-resolution screen, the camera that was crappy, but the first I had had.  I loved the speakers that pierced its ring through a shopping mall, and the customizable ring tones that a girl just couldn’t do without.  I started hearing bad rumors about it, about how many people who had the phone had run into problems with it.  I hadn’t experienced the problems myself, so I thought maybe I got a good batch, and shrugged off the things I heard.

Then about 2 months after my 1-year warranty had passed, my phone started to act up.  I would open the phone, and it would start acting like I was scrolling through the menu.  It would start making phone calls to people in my phone book when I just wanted to look at their information.  I knew that my phone had started having the problems everyone else was having.  I checked out the web.  There were scores of people demonstrating the same problems as myself.

LG VX-8550

So last year, I bought another LG phone.  The LG VX8550, the Chocolate Spin.  The salesperson told me that it was the LG Chocolate, with all of the problems corrected.  It featured haptic feedback and redesigned ’send’ and ‘end’ buttons, so I was satisfied and I bought it.  It wasn’t that I was tired of the Chocolate.  I was happy with it, so it made sense to buy the new and improved version of it.

I’ve seen new and exciting phones being developed in the one year and 3 months that I’ve had my Chocolate Spin.  It hasn’t been easy holding myself back from being an idiot and buying a new phone, but sensibility has prevailed.

Since last week, I’ve found my phone turned off when I go to use it.  How odd.  It has been randomly shutting down without my noticing it.  Sometimes, I use it, put it down, and two minutes later, I pick it up to use it again, and it has turned itself off.  The battery is never low, so I have no idea what’s going on.  The only thing that strikes me is that it has been 3 months after my warranty ended.  Somehow, LG has mastered the art of making cell phones that last approximately one year.

With LG, I’ve definitely had a series of attractive phones.  Yet somehow, all my loyalty has been for naught.  I guess they just don’t make them the way they used to.  I see that most cell phones without plans cost around $300.  I just can’t believe that the device costs $300, and they last a year.  Worst investment EVER.

It’s been almost 2 weeks since I got my laser eye surgery, and I’m back to my daily lifestyle.

I did some casual research online, and I’ve found that many people went through the same anxiety when their eyes didn’t go back to normal after a week.  Turns out that it can take up to a year for my eyes to go back to 20/20.

In the mean time, my eyes are at 20/30, and I’m okay to drive.  I can’t believe I can legally drive with this level of vision!  I can’t read any of the street signs.  I find myself missing turns at intersections.  I think I should stick to routes I’m familiar with.

It has been one week and one day since I had my laser eye surgery, and I still can’t see.

The first few days were awful as expected.  There was a little pain, but nothing I couldn’t bear.  I slept a lot because my eyes kept closing.  But each morning, as I opened my eyes, my vision got a little better, so I had hope.

But for the past 3 days, every morning has been the same.  I can see well enough that I can function, but not so well that this is a sustainable level of vision.  I can see about 15 to 20 centimetres clearly from the tip of my nose.  That’s not too bad considering I could only see about 5 cms before the surgery.

I’m starting to get annoyed and stressed out by my situation.  I can’t drive, and the work that isn’t getting done is piling up.  Although I’m not working, it’s definitely no holiday.  I feel uncomfortable when I think of all the things that I need to do.

I had no idea my vision was going to be this bad for this long.  So I did some googling, to find out that some people haven’t reached 20/20 after one year.  I’ll be happy if I reach 20/25 in the next few days, but somehow I doubt it.

They should make a video game of people driving alongside cyclists, where the goal of the game is to knock as many cyclists off the road as possible.  That would make me feel so good.

I don’t understand why cyclists in Toronto think that the road rules don’t apply to them.  The weirdest thing is, it’s not even a case of the few ruining it for everyone, it’s everyone.

As a driver and pedestrian in Toronto, I’ve never once seen a cyclist stop for a stop sign.  EVER.

Cyclists abide by about 50% of traffic lights…the green ones.  They abide by most traffic lights at major intersections, but if there’s a traffic light where one street is much larger than the small street, they ignore them.

Once, I was crossing a major intersection as a pedestrian, and a bicycle was running a red light.  My friend who was standing to the left of me (thus first to be run over) almost got hit by the cyclist.  I backed him up, and as the cyclist passed us, he yelled “watch out!” like we were doing something wrong.  WHAT THE FUCK?

Yesterday, I was trying to turn left on an amber light, and because an oncoming cyclist decided to run the amber, I was the only car that made the left turn on the amber.  All the cars had either cleared the intersection or had slowed down, but the cyclist decided the traffic light was not for him, so he could ignore it.  The thing is, when a cyclist runs an amber, they’re SLOW.  They take forever to clear the intersection, so it totally hampers the left-turning traffic.

Another thing I hate is when cyclists ride too close to traffic.  When you’re on a two-lane road and there are cars parked along the right lane, I understand that cyclists will have to squeeze to the left.  Usually, this means that I’m reduced to the cyclist’s speed if there’s oncoming traffic.  That’s okay.  I wait until there’s a break in the row of parked cars.  I would LOVE it if cyclists squeezed back to the right so that I could pass them.  But they don’t.

I’m sure that traffic laws apply to cyclists too, and there are times that they demand that we treat them as motor vehicles.  They insist that we give them a full lane when passing them, and proper right of way rules.  But why do they ignore the traffic rules when the rules are inconvenient to them?

I don’t actually hate cyclists.  I think they’re very admirable and good for the environment.  But why do they think they can pick and choose the rules they follow?

Make me a cyclist-knocking video game and it’ll help me relieve my road rage.  Of course the media will blame every bicycle collision on violent games like this one.  Well if I don’t have a video game to play, I may just knock over a real cyclist.

What is with the people who don’t know how to use T9?  It seems like the vast majority of people who use a non-qwerty phone to text use ‘abc’ mode over ‘T9′ mode.

I had been thinking of getting a qwerty phone to increase my texting efficiency, and I asked around to people with qwerty phones.  Did they notice a significant increase in their texting speed when they switched to qwerty?  The answer was an overwhelming yes.  However, when I got to shopping around for qwerty phones and playing with them in stores, I felt a uneasy, and felt like I could actually text faster on T9.  Of course there was a learning curve to consider, but I knew that I could text without looking at the number pad because the pad was small enough that I wouldn’t lose my place on it, whereas on the qwerty phone, the keyboard was too large and the buttons too small to text without looking.

After my realization, I started to ask an additional question, “did you use T9 before you switched?”  The answer I got was most often “T what?” or “Oh, I have that, but I have no idea how to use it.”  The one person who I knew used T9 said that she texts equally fast on T9 and qwerty.

People!  Use T9!

I can’t believe how ignorant such a large body of people can be.  Just think of all the people who switched to qwerty and touchscreen phones to text faster, how much money they could have saved if only they had used their puny little brains a little bit.  Think of how all the phone manufacturers have duped us with planned obsolescence.

The thing is, T9 isn’t even that hard to use!  You let the phone decide the word based on the numbers you’ve typed, and you type each button once to make its 3 letters an option, very much like the Blackberry Pearl.  If you type the characters and it’s the wrong word, type the ‘next’ button and it will give you the next word guess.  It even learns new words so that you don’t have to enter weird words letter by letter over and over again.

Of course it’s not as accurate as the Pearl, since there are 3 or 4 choices for each button, not two like the Pearl, but it’s plenty good enough for most people.

We’re all always tight for money.  Stop wasting it on ignorance and use T9.

I have come a long way since my Morning Glory stationery days. However, I passed by Morning Glory in Koreatown Bloor Street (Not Koreatown North) yesterday, and I just couldn’t resist checking it out for old time’s sake.

My tastes in pens and pencils have long since elevated beyond anything Morning Glory could offer, but it was nice to take a look at what had changed, what hadn’t, and even testing out how their products no longer excited me.

The lady in the store recognized me, or pretended to recognize me (more likely the latter because I went very rarely even back in the day), and said that she hadn’t seen me in a long, long time. I was the only person in the store, and I felt bad to leave without buying anything, so I earnestly looked for something worthy of my cash. After all, most of the things in the store cost less than $5, so I could buy something without breaking the bank.

I actually found some good buys: refills for my Filofax diary. Filofax-brand refills cost an arm and a leg. The week-on-one-page calendar is $11, and the month-on-two-pages is $6. Even Daytimer for Dayrunner brand is pretty expensive. I found some un-dated monthly and weekly refills for less than $2 each, so I bought one of each.

I went to the counter to pay for my items, and the lady began to type my order into a calculator. My memory of shopping there several years ago came rushing back to me.  But before I go on to tell you what happened, a little bit of context must preface.

It is very common practice for Korean vendors dealing with Korean clients to complete their transactions under the table, or without a cash register.  This results in lower business revenue, which results in lower business taxes.  Since gst and pst are passed through the vendor straight to the government, under-the-table transactions don’t include sales tax.  Some high-quality people resist this temptation and report all of their earnings.  Although I dislike this part of Korean-Canadian culture, I’m sure I could find a historical context of why this is more of a historical residual than anything.  For now, I look down on the people who do this.

When I went to Bloor Street Morning Glory 3 or 4 years ago, the lady did the same thing.  She typed my purchase into a calculator, and I understood that she was going to perform a cash transaction.  Then I saw her type in:

* 1.15 =

WHAT THE FUCK?

She charged me tax when clearly she was not going to state the revenue.  She was essentially ripping me off 15%.  I was dumbfounded, but too confused and poor with the language to say anything, and I vowed never to shop there again.  Somehow, over the past few years, I had forgotten what a witch she was.

As she typed my order into her calculator, I realized what she was doing, and hoped against hope that she would just charge me the sticker price on my items.  I was ready to ask for a receipt to force her to enter the sale into her register, and I saw her type in *1.13.  She was on the phone with her friend the whole time, not allowing me to get a word in.  Then she gave me a large discount, and said so, as if she was doing me a favour.

How could I have been so stupid?  As much as I would like to condemn the lady for not changing her behaviour in 4 years, I was equally to blame as I could not set her right the second time around.  Shame on me.

Conversely, the Morning Glory at Koreantown North is very good with the receipts and taxes.  I once was even accidentally charged twice on my credit card, and they fixed it.

As much as I seem like a hypocrite in this post, to be fair to myself, I must note that I have asked for receipts in the past and have experienced a price hike through the process.  It’s not because I believe in taxes so much.  It’s because I would like to see the reputation of Koreans improve a little over my life time.

Don’t shop at Morning Glory Bloor St.

I went to McDonald’s today with my trusty travel mug and asked for a coffee.

The young man working there said that they couldn’t fill my mug for me, because he didn’t know what size it was.  He offered to fill a paper cup and to allow me to pour it into my travel mug.

WHAAAAAT?  That’s strictly worse than only using a paper cup, and I’m trying to reduce my paper cup usage as much as I can.

I had to ask for the manager to determine my mug’s size, and charge me appropriately.  Now that I think about it, I don’t think I got a discount for saving them a paper cup.

McDonald’s coffee has gotten some good press lately, especially with their free small coffee promotion (which actually made a noticeable dent in Tim Horton’s sales).  But no green movement?!?!  How hard is it to have a simple little coffee policy?  I mean REALLY, how much of a cost difference does a small and large coffee have to the company itself?  They could make it such that everyone who brings a coffee mug can get a fill up for a fixed amount, that would keep it simple.  Of course there are douches who would bring Bubba-sized travel mugs, so make limitations.  Even if they let the front-line staff use their discretion on the size of the mug, it would still be better than this.

Come on MickyD’s, get with the times!