This Space for Rent

Annoying misfeatures of getting old

Most people, as they get old, get more farsighted. Not me! Apparently I’m special and am getting more nearsighted as I get older; I went to the eye doctor + glasses place today to get an eye exam + new glasses, and discovered that I’m actually more nearsighted than I was eight years ago.

So I ordered two pairs of glasses; a set of single-vision glasses for wearing when I’m out on the line and don’t have to read any fine print except for cue sheets and brevet cards, and then a set of bifocals for reading things at home. The eyeglass place could provide the single-vision glasses right away, but the bifocals had to wait, so I picked up what I could and swapped out my now extremely battered old glasses for new ones.

My increasing nearsightedness and decreased ability to change my focal distance (I think my uncorrected focal range is 0->4 inches) means that reading gets a bit more fun; a laptop in my lap is close enough to me so that me+new glasses makes all of the small text a bit blurry, and is far enough so that me-glasses imakes everything a blurry unreadable mess.

*sigh*

I hope the bifocals arrive soon. They’re progressive bifocals, which means they’ve got a pretty pathetic near-vision zone, but it will be interesting to see just if they make any difference to my reading/coding style (right now I’m just interpreting letter shapes and trusting that my fingers remember where the keys on the keyboard are :-) And if they don’t work it will be time for regular old fashioned bifocals (the ones with the nice split lens) work out, or just a pair of dedicated reading glasses that are just a couple of diopters worth of correction (+ the regular absurd amount of astigmatism correction.)