Fell Voices on the Wind
I am in the shittiest of shit moods today, so this post is going to have lots of complaining about first world problems. The main reason is that I hardly slept last night, thanks to the insane wind that seems to rise up every night to make me feel like my whole house is going to be blown off the cliff and into the ocean. I know that’s extremely unlikely, but try telling that to my amygdala which jolted me awake each time the wind redoubled its efforts.
I considered taking something to help me sleep, but then decided I didn’t like that idea because if the roof happened to blow off it would probably be a good idea to be awake for that. So I went out and sat in my car which at least felt more secure and quiet (less rattling and creaking for a start) but was not exactly comfortable. So then I went for a drive and swerved around all the detritus that was being blown all over the road. Then I went for a walk at the beach where the wind was causing the waves to break upwards, and it was horrendously freezingly cold. Then I came back and sat in my car for a while and listened to the audiobook version of Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test, which is not exactly the cheeriest subject matter. All this at around 4AM. Of course the car was rocking around with the wind as well so I realized I probably wasn’t going to get to sleep. So I came back inside and got back into bed, listening to the rest of the audiobook as I finally drifted into a fitful sleep. Being hideously tired I didn’t bother undressing, so when I awoke around midday today I was sweaty and bothered after an endless succession of horrible nasty dreams about psychopaths (I always have bad dreams when I am overheated). A gentle breeze blew softly through the branches outside my window, as though to mock me.
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My vision is still getting better but I’m starting to get really tired of waiting for it to finish getting better. A few weeks yet, yadda yadda. It’s weird that I can sort of see really well now, but at the same time it feels like I still can’t. I am basically mildly myopic, and can see close up very well, and distance slightly better than pre-op without glasses, so I should be happy, but something still doesn’t feel quite right and I can’t put my finger on it.
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I’ve been playing a bit with Google+ and so far it just feels like Facebook from a few years ago, ie it isn’t yet covered with deeply insulting advertising and there aren’t yet any shitty apps spamming for attention. What is depressing about it is that even though I use gmail, which means that I also have the “sandbar” as I’ve heard it called, for some deeply stupid reason the Google+ defaults are to email you with every trivial notification. If anyone has an incentive to keep email free of notification crud it’s surely Google, and they have just built the infrastructure to do it, and yet still I had to go uncheck a bunch of boxes in the privacy/notification section to stop it clogging my inbox. Defaults are important, since 90% of users will probably just never change them, and this is Google’s chance to learn from Facebook’s mistakes, but I see little evidence of them doing this. Also there is still Buzz in there for some reason (I tried to remove it but failed), and I’m pretty sure the Huddles feature is just the poorer cousin of Wave. Part of the problem is that Google+ is a unified service in which every component is still an independent named product, eg Picasa, and this makes it feel like a big half-assed shamozzle. Picasa is a stupid name anyway… it should have been renamed Google Albums ages ago. Why is it that everything Google has done in the last 5 years or so seems so half-baked? Sometimes it seems like Google is like a giant super-rich corporate version of me, tinkering for long enough to keep it interesting but then their attention wanders when it’s time to deliver a finished, polished product. I think Maps is the only truly impressive thing they’ve done in years.
That’s pretty cool, that your vision’s significantly better than it was, and it’s going to keep getting better. Hardly surprising that it feels wrong, though. To have one of your basic sources of sensory input so radically altered, even for the better, can’t feel normal.
it would not surprise me if google + gets abandoned by google themselves in 2 years. half baked and unplugged.
we lost power many times so I had no choice but to lie in bed with the howling wind.
when do u do the other eye?
I had minor power outage here which meant it was actually my microwave making this horrible bleating sound that woke me up, and sure didn’t add to my mood.
Other eye when I win the lottery!
Mmmm — on things Google has done well in the last couple of years, I might tack Android to that list — although to be fair, they did acquire that.