Ahh, my eyes!

The thing in my previous post about the light hurting my eyes... It wasn't the light that was the problem -- it was my eyes! The next day, I could hardly open them. It felt like there was sand in my left eye, and it was so sensitive to the light, I wore my shades all day, even though it was a gloomy day. I got an ampoule of artificial tears from the first aid cabinet at work and washed my eyes out, which seemed to help a little. On the bottle, it said if the pain persisted for more than 72 hours, I should see a doctor.

By Monday, it was a little better, but not completely, so I called my doctor, who told me to see a specialist. I saw the eye doctor yesterday; it was the first time I've had my eyes examined in... Well, maybe it's the first time I've had my eyes examined. And so I was blissfully unaware of what would happen next. They put all sorts of drops in my eyes. Some to make them numb, some to dilate the pupils, some to constrict them. Everything went blurry, and I had bright lights shone in my eyes. After all this, the doctor finally told me what was wrong with my eyes -- nothing. They're just irritated. I was given a sample of anti-inflammatory eyedrops and sent on my way.

A new post -- just because

Last night I got home from my painting class at 10:30 and was dead tired. I've been oversleeping a lot lately, so I decided to go to bed with the lights on, thinking it would keep me from sleeping too soundly. Instead, it just made it more painful to open my eyes in the morning. By the time I willed my eyes to stay open... I was late.

Metapost: Describing the blog

This blog (Maslov's Rag) is located at the following URL: maslovsrag.blogspot.com.

At the very top of the browser window is the header frame. The frame contains the following items:

* the blogger.com button
* the search control
* the "BlogThis!" link
* the "GET YOUR OWN BLOG" button
* the "NEXT BLOG" button

The blogger.com button takes you to the main blogger.com page. From there, you can log on and go to your Dashboard.

The search control does a google search. I'm not sure what "BlogThis!" does. The "GET YOUR OWN BLOG" button takes you to the Dashboard. And the "NEXT BLOG" button takes you to a random blog.

The rest of the blog varies in format from blog to blog depending on the configuration. In my blog, there is a column on the left hand side of the page. This column contains the following items:

* blog name
* blog description (quote by Marx)
* my profile
* list of previous postings
* archives
* another blogger.com button

If I make descriptive titles for my postings, you can use the list of previous postings as a "blog at a glance". This frees you from having to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to see if there might be something interesting down there. Click on a link to navigate to a particular posting.

The right hand side of the page contains the postings (like this one). Each posting contains the following elements:

* date
* title
* body
* author
* time stamp
* comments link

The body often consists of unformatted text, but HTML elements can be used. For instance, this posting contains hypertext links.

Open thread

Talk amongst yourselves...

Lunch time at the office

So I've decided to play with the blogger.com editing interface. Please excuse my overuse of fonts and colors...

I spent yesterday evening painting my basement ceiling. The building was built in 1903, and whatever was up there looked almost as old. It was this black crud that was cracked and flaky and seemed to be mostly held together by cobwebs. When I tried cleaning the ceiling, a lot of it disintegrated and fell on me as a sooty dust. Yuck. Fortunately, I was wearing goggles, a mask, and a cap. Lord knows what's in that stuff. Probably lead. Whatever didn't easily brush off, I left and covered over with white primer. The primer made everything a nice, uniform color. It also made all the defects in the ceiling stand out. There are holes, crude patches, and places where the ceiling material has buckled or sagged. And there are:

• pipes
• electrical conduit
• telephone cables
• and cable TV cables

...going every which way. The TV and phone lines are not in any sort of neat cable harness. It's just a nest of 4-conductor (red-green-black-yellow) phone cord up there. Some day, if I'm feeling brave, I might try to clean it up.

My first blog entry

This blog is not intended to be read. If you happen to have stumbled across it anyhow, I welcome you. Please submit your comment.

The whole purpose for this blog is so that I, with my own blogger.com blog, can become familiar with the site's feature set. Then I can provide technical assistance to a certain blogging friend who actually has something to say.