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The genesis of my vision loss

(and why I've been so cranky)

I've spent the last decade dealing with deteriorating retinas from proliferative diabetic retinopathy, despite having glycosated hemoglobin levels that are below those of someone with Type 1 diabetes, which just goes to show, genes play a big part in the disease progression, and some things are inevitable for some people with the disease, even with excellent control.

I've always tried to keep my blood sugar on the low end - so much so that my doctor recommended I bring it back up to normal levels. Can't say he was wrong - I passed out in 2011 after taking my shot but before eating because the dogs needed to be walked, and woke up with a broken back from a fall. It never healed properly - osteopenia means I've been breaking bones in weird and wonderful ways sice my late 20s (including the first event, when I broke two ribs hugging someone too hard - try explaining that to the doctor with a straight face).

Then broke my neck in 2014 from another episode. Didn't heal properly.

Started treatments in early 2011, doctor said if I had waited a year I would have been "stone cold blind."

Initial treatment was several years of both spot laser photocoagulation to stop bleeders and pan-retinal laser photocoagulation to decrease the permeability of the eye to oxygen from the body, to decrease the growth of blood vessels on the surface of the retina.

That destroyed my peripheral vision (when it was checked 3 years ago, I had 60 degrees of horizontal view, half the minimum legal requirement to drive, and way below normal).

It's gotten to the point where I've gone back to not bothering to look left when crossing the street - my left eye is pretty useless anyway and I can't turn my neck far enough left to use my right eye, so I use my hearing to decide there's no car coming from my left.

The long road to recovery

I tried using screen readers. On-screen magnifiers make me sea-sick (boats don't make me sea-sick, go figure, even when I'm piloting ... okay, was piloting. Something else I'm not allowed doing, like driving.)

Quit my job in 2011 (the boss had bounced 4 weeks of pay cheques in January, and I couldn't see what the heck I was doing anyway - everything was blobs and blurs of blood).

A few periods where I lost all vision, but I was prepared. I had been warned I might lose it permanently, so I had trained my two dogs (at the time a newfie and a big mutt) to serve as guide dogs. Of course, by this time I couldn't use a computer to look up how to train them to cross the street, so I improvised. I taught myself to use my ears to decide when it's safe to cross, and guided the dog.

Turns out that's how it's done ...

Currently, I've had cataracts for almost 5 years, I have macular edema in both eyes, as well as holes in both retinas that will have to be repaired by two more vitrectomies (the link to wikipedia isn't bad, but if you find any videos, they are kind of gross, same as the photos I had a student take of me getting injections of anti-VEGF in my right eyeball to combat blood vessels that were trying to grow onto my iris).

First attempts to read again.

Screen readers? Windows was a bust. NVDA was frustration after frustration. Deleted every time I lost hope, re-installed every time I thought "maybe this time ..." Finally, in frustration, wiped and returned to my work environment - which was linux and freebsd. But linux screen readers were also a bust. Even tried Adriane from Knoppix /Knopper.net - and I really LIKED knoppix as an all-in-one ready-to-go live cd work environment.

So what changed?

I decided to take a different track. Learn how to read with what little vision I have, and let the optic system filter out the garbage. After all, if AI can do it, why can't humans?

Started with Aisleriot full-screen on my 26" external computer screen, from back in the days when I was employed by a search engine and got pissed off at their screens, so bought 2 26" 1920x1200 LCDs. No shortscreens for me!

With this setup, the cards are about 2-1/2" x 3-1/2". It was almost impossible to read, and I made lots of mistakes, but eventually I was seeing the cards without even having to worry about what they were - the visual system had "learned" what the cards were and presented my mind with a corrected version. So, while I couldn't recognize people I know from 10' (still can't), I could read cards.

Next was the web. Links in a full-screen terminal, big big big fonts. I mean really big.

Eventually I was able to reduce the font size to something just abnormally big. Happy days.

Then the big challenge - graphic browser (firefox). Graphic text is a lot harder on the eyes because the letters aren't like a terminal font - they're thinner, and you have to reduce complexity by getting rid of stuff like serifs. Make it easy for the retina, optic nerve, and brain to come up with something acceptable.

And it worked!

My vision is still totally crap, I keep bumping into things,I can walk right by people I know without recognizing them if I don't have context (their voice, or we're at the place I volunteer at and they're not more than 10-20 feet away, or I know we're the only ones there).

I still trip on things right in front of me, I still bump into things not quite in my reduced field of view, my eyes totally go dysfunctional after physical activity, but I CAN READ AND WRITE.

Other things that made a difference

One of the consequences of losing normal sight was losing the ability to work. The improperly healed back fractures meant I couldn't even do menial jobs for more than an hour or two, and nobody is going to hire someone who's half-blind and has a bad back.

That was depressing.

Now throw in social isolation. It the end of the last century I decided I couldn't put up with pretending to be a male any more, so I laid the groundwork for transition, including getting rid of all my friends who wouldn't accept it, as well as those who would be a serious hindrance to a new life.

However, all my old friends except one live in different cities - many are between 45 minutes and an hour and a half drive, so all of a sudden, no driving meant we couldn't really get together any more. This is a problem with many people who have vision loss - they become a "burden" to accommodate. Who's going to pick them up, who's going to drive them back home, what activities should we now avoid (like going to the movies or sight-seeing).

So I lost contact with all my friends, including the ones I kept and the new ones I made. And the only one who lives in the same city (actually within walking distance) was so hostile to the idea of my transitioning that he said a lot of really cruel stuff. I was worried it would degenerate into violence - I had never in 2 decades seen him anything like that.

And it was around the time all this started that my sisters and brother-in-laws let me know in no uncertain terms that they were totally against my transition. Totally.

Kind of a bit late, guys ... srsly.

Mind-altering drugs

So, no job, no career, no car, no friends, no family ... I ended up with both major depressive disorder and anxiety disorder (PTSD was already on the chart from nasty stuff in my teens and the whole flesh-eating disease thing).

Who wouldn't be depressed with all those problems? Only a sociopath or someone who was delusional.

The trigger for a first bout of suicidal depression was blood pressure medication. Turns out that a Japanese study had found a correlation between suicide and the blood pressure medication I was on. Also, the FDA database had 125 incidents of suicidal depression linked to the same drug, and 25 successful suicides. Well, depends on your definition of "success", but having been there, I would agree.

I discontinued the blood pressure meds and things slowly returned to normal. I was able to cope with my crappy life, more or less, and I still had hope that we'd fix my eyesight in short order. Maybe a couple of years. I'm patient ...

I eventually went back on a different blood pressure medication and that was a serious mistake.

I was in such bad shape mentally that I went to emergency, saw a psychiatrist, and ended up with some serious antidepressants - which I took before bedtime and woke up to classical music playing from my dvd. Which was really strange, because it was just before Christmas and I had watched Scrooged the night before.

So, fast forward the dvd with my mind - worked. Reverse - worked. Okay, I've never done drugs, never hallucinated, but that MUST be what I'm doing now.

So I stopped the drug immediately.

Next visit, got another one, was hoping it would work, it didn't. Obviously, it can't - it doesn't fix the underlying problems.

5 more years of different drugs in different strengths and combinations. Finally, one that made me sound like a bad TV commercial from the previous century - "I've fallen and I can't get up." No muscle control for 5 minutes or so. When that happened 3 times in one day (I had to crawl off the street through a snowbank and along an icy sidewalk at night with my dogs to avoid being hit by a bus) I said "to hell with this. They don't work, all the evidence I can find indicates they don't work any better than a placebo, and if I'm going to be depressed over my situation, I at least want to be in control as much as possible."

Antidepressants and retinas

Retinal scans from a year ago showed two really ugly retinas. Lots of exudate from seriously irritated nerves - it looked like the startup screen from Win9x, there were so many clouds of white gunk.

The one from May wasn't any better.

I stopped taking antidepressants because, among other things, I suspected they were also damaging the retinas. After all, the retinas are huge collections of nerves, and antidepressants cause depletion of grey matter in critical areas of the brain - how could they not affect the retina and optic nerve?

The retinal scan December 7th showed holes and edema in both retinas, but it also showed retinas that were not irritated. They looked healthy for someone with PDR.

So that's yet another reason not to take antidepressants; it aggravates retinal disease, as confirmed by Optical Coherence Tomography before-and-after scans.

The retinal holes appear to have happened last year, according to my re-examination of OCT scan data. They may never have happened if I had stopped antidepressants earlier.

The reckoning

The events I detailed in I'm a perv magnet affected me a lot more than I let on.

I ended up so down in the dumps yet again that I re-examined everything ... since then I've consistently scored between 15 and 27 on the PHQ-9 depression scale (you can take it yourself here). But I guess I'm getting used to it.

I came to the conclusion that there's nothing I can do to change my situation. I can read for longer and longer periods, but it's not like there's a job out there for an almost totally colour-blind person with low vision and a bad back and neck (and a torn rotator cuff, and a few other problems) and depression so bad that there are weeks I can't do much more than walk the dogs and go back to bed) .

Negative family input again

It didn't help that my sisters still think I should just detransition (how the heck would I do that even if I wanted to).

They ignore the fact that until my sight went, I was happy, functioning both at work and socially. De-transitioning, even if it were possible and I wanted to, wouldn't fix the job situation. Wouldn't fix the lack of being able to drive. Wouldn't fix my eyes. Wouldn't even fix my back.

But to someone who is hostile to the idea of changing sex, any problem must be because of it.

I finally admitted I'm permanently handicapped on new years day

After years of hoping that I could reverse the situation, I finally had to face facts. This is not a temporary situation. I'm permanently handicapped. I'm always going to have battles others won't understand. This is something that has dragged on a full decade, and the doctors won't be able to fix it.

However, I did fix the problem with using a computer. Today is the first time I've been able to spend all day reading and writing. Even last week, I couldn't do more than an hour or so without lying down to let the excess clouds go away.

And I now have the need to code.

I wish I hadn't wiped all my code tools last month after conceding that the doctors weren't going to be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat ... but that's okay.

I'm going to give it a few days, take some time to review the code from my last hobby project, then I'll download my toolchain one more time and start playing.

If all goes well, I'll probably start freelancing in the spring - something I haven't done in almost 30 years (but I don't want a regular 9-to-5 job any more anyway - I'm officially early retired, so I might as well start enjoying it instead of being depressed that I can't work or drive).

And that's how I used linux to fix my vision problems, and a few others as well.

Happy new year!

(I'll be on the net less over the next few weeks so I can spend time with my old code, etc., but I will still check in regularly).

Senior Iranian, Iraqi commanders killed in Baghdad airstrike - Iraqi state TV

An air strike has killed Iranian Qods Force commander Qassem Soleimani and another senior Iranian-linked figure in Baghdad, Iraqi state television reported on Thursday.
No one claimed immediately responsibility for the strike, which Iraqi television also said killed Abu Mehdi al-Muhandas, an Iraqi militia commander, near the Iraqi capital’s airport, but the death of Iran’s most revered military leader appeared likely to send tensions soaring between the United States and Iran.

Soleimani, who has long been Iran’s most prominent military figure and is closely linked to the country’s foreign proxy groups, has taken on an enhanced role in Iraq as the country’s Shiite militia groups have gained new clout in recent years.

Pentagon officials declined comment on the strike.

Hearing rumors it was a US strike, nothing confirmed yet though. If true, seems like bombing one of their most prominent generals means war.

EDIT - The Rumor: Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian general who led the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds force, has been killed in a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad, according to two people familiar with the development.

Picture of Julie Berman, a 51-year-old trans activist who was beaten to death with a blunt object to the head, allegedly by Colin Harnack, 29.

I dare anyone to look at her and say she had it coming for being trans.

Julie Berman is the third trans woman to be murdered in Toronto in 2 years.

Julie Berman, a woman long active in Toronto trans community, was found murdered on Sunday, The Globe and Mail reports.

Berman, suffering from head injuries, was discovered by Toronto police and brought to a hospital where she was pronounced dead. A 29-year-old man named Colin Harnack has been charged with second-degree murder.

Employed as a hairdresser, Berman has been active in the trans rights group The 519 for over three decades, according to the newspaper. Berman memorably delivered a speech at an event held for 2017's Trans Day of Remembrance, where she spoke of the injustice of transphobia and the murder of one of her friends, who was trans.

“It’s really heartbreaking ... the same thing that she was trying to be vocal about happened to her,” Davina Hader, a friend of the victim and a member of The 519, told The Globe and Mail.

Three trans people in Toronto have died from violence in the past couple years, according to the paper. There is an epidemic of anti-trans violence in the U.S., with at least 20 Black trans women murdered just this year.

Nobody should be beaten to death with a blunt object to the head just for being who they are.

Unfortunately, trans women are easy targets of sexual assault, violence, and harassment. The world is simply not safe for us.

But we knew that already.

Finally got around to watching A Scanner Darkly last night.

Definitely going to watch it again. I probably missed a few nuances in passing.

Some critics didn't like it, but that's their problem.

Considering the book was written almost 50 years ago, set in the 90s, and shot in 2006, it holds up far better than expected.

Philip K Dick's final words in the book, seen at the end of the movie, really make you think.

The Worst CPU & GPU Purchases of 2019

Intel Core i9-9900KF / i9-9900KS

Essentially what Intel has done here is create hype around a new product that’s not new at all. They’re charging users more money to cherry pick the best silicon, while reducing the overall quality of the 9900K range by limiting it to parts that can’t easily run at 5 GHz or beyond.

As a result, a few months out from the 9900KS release people started to notice how poorly new 9900K processors were overclocking and binning specialist ‘Silicon Lottery,’ had to drop the 9900K altogether. Typically as a CPU ages the manufacturing process that it’s based on will mature and this leads to a higher chance of ending up with better quality silicon, so typically you’d see parts like the 9900K that usually overclocked to 5 GHz, start to do it more frequently as times goes by.

Our concern with the 9900KS is that Intel now has the option to release a new CPU series and send reviewers the best silicon available at the time while also selling it to early adopters initially. After which point they activate an aggressive binning process, saving top tier silicon for an upcoming special edition series and sell it at a premium.

The chance of purchasing a lower quality silicon chip is always a possibility, but with this change your chance of winning the silicon lottery goes from say ~30%, to zero.

While we’re not wrapped with the idea of the 9900KS, there is also the 9900KF model. What we have here is a 9900K that overclocks no better, the integrated graphics are disabled, and it costs no less. Asking to pay full price for a defective 9900K is no joke.

Intel is so tight on 14nm supply right now that they’re selling everything, parts once destined for the bin are now binned as special versions without iGPUs. In our opinion, they’d be better off selling them to overclockers without the [integrated heat spreader], Intel could save a few bucks there, and overclockers would appreciate having to avoid the delidding step.

When you look at benchmarks for CPUs on sites like cpubenchmark.net, you're hopefully seeing an average score based on hundreds of tested samples, with the score fairly representing expected performance. But cooling and thermal differences, RAM speed, the number of RAM channels in use, and other factors could create large performance variations between the same chips. For example, the Intel Celeron N4000 in some 13-inch laptop should perform significantly better than in a thermally constrained device such as Walmart's landfill quality 10-inch EVOO tablet.

Now, not only do you have to be wary of benchmark conditions and reviewers getting sent excellently binned chips, but you should also keep in mind that early benchmarks could be artificially higher if a company's binning shenanigans includes selling lower quality chips with the same name later.

Related: That's Ryzen AF: Some Old AMD Chips Might Be Getting a 12nm Makeover

AMD Zen 3 CPUs Allegedly Features 17% IPC Gain Over Zen 2 Architecture, Ryzen 4000 ‘Vermeer’ CPUs To Feature Huge Performance Upgrade Over Ryzen 3000

It is pointed out that in mixed operations that leverage both integer and floating-point units of the Zen architecture, Zen 3 could deliver a 17% IPC gain on average. It is also stated that the integer ops are getting a 10-12% increase on average while the floating-point operations could feature up to a 50% increase in performance. Integer operations are what most general consumer apps use but in floating-point heavy applications, Zen 3 has the potential to be a big game-changer for the industry and especially the server market (HPC/Datacenters).

Big if true. Looks like a worthwhile upgrade to Zen/Zen+ systems if your motherboard is compatible. Otherwise, it might be better to wait it out until Zen 4 on a new AM5 socket, likely allowing upgrades to future Zen 5 and Zen 6 CPUs.

While family Christmas dinner was good, this was the first time that we actually had a discussion about the environment.

It was triggered when my sister put a straw into my drink, and I said "Straws? Think of the environment."

"Who cares. The environment's screwed anyway."

From ignoring it to total capitulation to the inevitable in one year.

While I agree we're all screwed royally (and the idea that we have 10 years to reverse course is laughable - we should have done that in 1980), we can at least try to do a few things to make it a bit less of a total disaster.

But that's just not going to happen. The people causing the majority of fossil fuel use still aren't uncomfortable enough to act. Maybe separate the garbage from the recycling (because you no longer have to pre-sort), but that's about it.

The only way people are going to change is if they're forced to. And governments won't do it. Elected governments are too afraid to take sufficient action to really make a difference, and totalitarian regimes don't have to worry about it because they're at the top of the food chain and won't suffer.

We can do all the local action we want - take the BMW (bus, metro, walk), recycle, reuse, repurpose, avoid environmentally dirty products, it's not going to make much of a difference in the end, except that we'll be able to say "I told you so!"

Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good net.

(Happy Christmas sounds better to me than Merry Christmas)

Paul wasn't the Walrus!

The dream is over

Baba Ram Dass, Proponent of LSD and New Age Enlightenment, Dies at 88

Baba Ram Dass, who epitomized the 1960s of legend by popularizing psychedelic drugs with Timothy Leary, a fellow Harvard academic, before finding spiritual inspiration in India, died on Sunday at his home on Maui, Hawaii. He was 88.

His death was announced on his official Instagram account.

Having returned from India as a bushy-bearded, barefoot, white-robed guru, Ram Dass, who was born Richard Alpert, became a peripatetic lecturer on New Age possibilities and a popular author of more than a dozen inspirational books.

The first of his books, “Be Here Now” (1971), sold more than two million copies and established him as an exuberant exponent of finding salvation through helping others.

He started a foundation to combat blindness in India and Nepal, supported reforestation in Latin America, and developed health education programs for American Indians in South Dakota.

Also at Wikipedia, BBC, and NPR.