I got glasses!

What has this got to do with programming?

What do you think got me into this sorry state!
12 hours a day staring at a computer screen two feet away, that's what!

My sister bought the glasses for me as an early birthday present. It was becoming obvious I needed glasses when I was having a hard time reading signs on the highway from more than 100 feet away.

When I had my eye exam though, I weas surprised to learn that my vision is 95% of 20/20. And that's much better than I thought it was.

Take a look for yourself... Here is a close approximation of what I see out my window behind my computer desk. Does the first image look like it's 95% of the quality of the second?




Also, keep in mind that the second image is maybe half as sharp as what I'm actually seeing. So the difference is even greater than it appears here.

LCD screens help a lot in this area. I've been going though this for the last 3-4 years, and being more artist than coder, this has brought much sorrow and frustration.

People, if you spend mucho hours at the screen, then do yourself a huge favour and go LCD as soon as you can find a way. It might well be that you can postpone a moment such as this entering your life.

Good luck getting used to your new glazing Sswift! Keeping the damn things clean is the biggest pain with it all that I've found.

If you could see what I see without my glasses... well you couldn't see... take a camera and focus on somthing 6 feet away and then turn the focus ALL THE WAY in to MACRO...

Now with my glasses I have 18/20 vision...

And NO they are NOT coke bottle rims... (though without UHI lenses they would be!)

Keep them clean with the cleaning cloth and Don't use WINDEX to clean them!!! :)

yeah.... i suffer fromt eh same thing... 12 hours a day in front of 3 or 4 screens have deteriorated my sight from what used to be better than 20/20 to god knows what now...

i find that a few days away from the screens helps a lil... but i'm sure i've lost a lot of my vision this way...

when i got my glasses i was so amazed at the things i was missing... texture details in the trees... materials details in the walls, the counter tops...

man, i was really blind and didn't know it :)

--Mike

TFT doesn't have a pricetag purely for the elite anymore. I'd say you *always* get a TFT screen, no matter how many hours you'll spend behind it.
My 17" TFT, from end 2002, was 800 euro .. you can get the same thing now for under 300 .. and ok, a 17" CRT costs about 130 orso, but still, for a monitor 300 is very doable. I remember my 19" Liyama vision master pro costed well over 500euro in summer '99.

oh ps, some 3 years ago I spent 650 euro on a chair .. I still don't regret it :P

I'm not convinced that there is something about an LCD which would save your eyes. Though using an LCD means a flat screen which you can move back another foot, and that might help a bit, but still, focusing at a distance of three feet for 8-12 hours a day every day doesn't seem a whole lot more healthy for your eyes than focusing at a distance of two feet for that same period of time.

I did read on I think lenscrafter's website that looking at a screen all day can cause eye strain because your eyes can't focus on it like they do on a book, so they are constantly refocusing, but while that might make your eyes sore, it might actually be better for you to refocus constantly than to remain at one focus nearby.

But even if not, I'm not sure LCD avoids that refocusing problem, and LCD is on the way out anyway. SED is where it's at, and that's more like CRT so you're not gonna save your eyes with LCD for much longer.

Anyway, unless you guys can point to actual studies that show LCD will prevent this problem, I will remain a skeptic. :-)

My eyes are really bad, but the vast majority of the badness (er, you know what I mean) happened when I was much younger. Thus it was due to all the book reading in bad lighting. My prescription hasn't changed a whole lot since high school, and that's when I started using computers all the time. The main thing all the computer use is doing to me is RSI.

Also, I recently got new glasses. I had been using an ancient pair that was all bent and falling apart; I'm still getting used to not being afraid the lenses will pop out while I'm cleaning them.

I have been wearing glasses since '85. My eyesight has gotten worse over the years. I now have 20/200 vision. I keep a pair of glasses by my two main computers and my writing desk.

And you need to clean you window!

Ha ha speccy four eyes! ; )

sswift- I'm sure staring at a monitor is doing my eyes in, too. Have you heard of pinhole readers? These are opaque sheets on a glasses frame with hundreds of drilled pinholes that allow your eyes to relax their focus whilst looking at the screen. They don't make a great fashion statement, but if there's a possibility of improving your vision whilst sitting at the computer rather than getting full-time glasses, it's got to be worth a try.

A random link, first I found:

http://www.pinhole-glasses.com/

I'm just curious... how much persuasion did it take for you to realize that you can't see?
I completely forgot that the world had any detail in it until I finally tried on a pair of glasses :)

@ sswift:
LCD does not go out of focus like CRTs do. What do you suppose your eyes are trying to do with an image that can not really be resolved?

Then there's glare and reflection, but then that's just an issue for CRTs.

I'm not digging up case studies for you; If you want to know what they say in case studies, go find some and read them. How can anyone know for certain they are 100% right anyway? More or less pointless.

Bottom line; they're your eyes, it's your choice to either make a small effort to help them or just not bother and maybe screw them up further. So you could end up with even less eyesight still, and for what? Choosing apathy?

Oh please!

I've been wearing glasses since kindergarten. (well,... contacts for the last 10 years) The funny thing is, when I got the contacts, the first thing I wanted to be able to do is wear sunglasses! (I had never been able to wear them before)

Without correction, I can see 2-3 inches in focus, everything else is as if you looked through a camera lens and de-focused as much as possible.

I figure working at a screen all day doesn't help much, but my vision has been pretty stable over the last 10 years, with very slight changes to the prescription.

I wore them as a kid so computers weren't the cause, but might now help.

sswift: I don't get your picture comparison. How have you ensured that the top one is 95% as good as the bottom one, in what ways?

Hmm, I sometimes wonder if my eyes are starting to go that way too.
When I get in a car the first few corners I go around I can barely see where I'm going but after a while my eyes adjust and I can see again.
I hate the thought of having to carry glasses around (like some sort of handbag)

> texture details in the trees...

Heheh, you mean leaves! That description would only come from a programmer's vocabulary. :)

I do hate driving at night.

> I do hate driving at night.

Despite the obvious lack of vision at night I find driving easier cos all you have to do is watch the car and traffic lights and you don't need great vision to see those.
Infact I don't think I even consciously look at the road or street at night, just follow the lights home. :)

Heh heh. Nerds. =]

Wow, that's not dangerous at all. Do you unconsciously notice pedestrians?

I'm just curious... how much persuasion did it take for you to realize that you can't see?

polygoon:
"Bottom line; they're your eyes, it's your choice to either make a small effort to help them or just not bother and maybe screw them up further. So you could end up with even less eyesight still, and for what? Choosing apathy?"


I could tell you that drinking colloidal silver will solve all your ills, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to try it even though it might do nothing, because it might also do more harm. So unless I find a paper that tells me LCD won't do more harm to my eyes than a CRT, it's a possibility. Of course you can say how can you trust that paper you don't know it's right. But it's better than guessing! :-)

Also, I can't afford to get a decent LCD screen. The good ones that are big (and thus you can move farther away from your eyes) and don't go all blurry when you play FPS games cost a thousand or so. I can't afford that at this point in time. So it's not an option for me anyway.

Anyway, I'm not that concerned about it. I can always look into corrective eye surgery if things get really bad, and it's been 30 years and my eyes have only gone 5% bad, so by the time I'm 60 I think they'll be able to clone me new eyes to correct for my then 10% defect. :-)


Grey:
"I don't get your picture comparison. How have you ensured that the top one is 95% as good as the bottom one, in what ways?"

I haven't. You read wrong.

The doctor says my vision is 95% of normal.
That sounds crazy to me.
Image 1 shows you what I see without my glasses.
Image 2 shows you what I see with them.
Assuming image 2 is 20/20, and 20/20 is normal, does image 1 look to you to be 95% of normal? Hell no. So either my eye doctor is crazy, or they're grading on some weird exponential scale. :-)


Pongo:
"I've been wearing glasses since kindergarten. (well,... contacts for the last 10 years) The funny thing is, when I got the contacts, the first thing I wanted to be able to do is wear sunglasses! (I had never been able to wear them before)"

You know they sell perscription sunglasses, and perscription eyeglasses which have a magnetic thing to attach optional sungalss lenses on top of, right? :-)


Picklesworth:
" I'm just curious... how much persuasion did it take for you to realize that you can't see?
I completely forgot that the world had any detail in it until I finally tried on a pair of glasses :)"


I persuaded myself. When out looking at trees for example, I noticed the branches at the top would look odd. I couldn't really focus on them to resolve their shape, and I decided my eyes couldn't possibly be that low res. :-) Also a neighbor had a flag, and when I looked at the stars on it I couldn't really resolve those, and again, I figured something must not be right.

But even though I thought I might need glasses and started talking about it with my dad and sister, I still didn't want to get them, because I knew as soon as I did I might become very aware of how bad my vision was, and it would be really annoying. Just walking around, stuff looked fine. But I kept thinking about it, and I then noticed recently that I couldn't even read the signs at the other end of the aisles in the supermarkets telling me what was in the aisle, and when traveling on the highway I had to get really close to the signs before I could read them. So that kinda convinced me I needed them. But I didn't know how much they cost, and I oculdn't really afford the expenditure I figured, so I put it off, and eventually my sister decideed to buy them for me for my birthday.

sswift: "Image 1 shows you what I see without my glasses.
Image 2 shows you what I see with them." Yeah I understood that, but how the hell have you made images which show waht you see unless you "approximated" it somehow. But hell, yeah I agree, you should wear glasses if that's the difference.

Grey:
That's what I did. Approximated it.

If I had to do that without having my glasses available, it would probably be pretty difficult to do. Especially if I didn't have the scene right in front of me out the window behind my monitor.

But because I had my glasses, I could put them on and take them off and see the differences, like the partial double vision on the power lines and even stuff in the distance, and how blurry things were in general.

So what you see there is really a very good approximation of what I'm seeing. There are some slight differences, but for all practical purpouses, it's a good representation.

bad eyesight is a bummer. I'm used to my glasses but when surgery is nearly 100% proven to be effective esp for stuff like astigmatism, I'll spend the money. If you buy new specs once per year it's around £200 a year, plus contact lenses can push this up a lot even if you only wear them for sport. The bill over 10 years is probably worth the surgery bill. Mind you as you get >40/50 I think eyesight goes crap anyway in many cases, so it might not make much difference :-( I'd better get on with it.

I never thought I needed glasses.....but in the Marines, they made me get them cause my vision wasn't quite perfect.....oddly enough, I shot better in the range without them so I never wore them since.

"If you buy new specs once per year it's around £200 a year"


The costs for my stuff were:
Eye Exam - $80
Frames - $119 (Most were $149)
Lenses - $209

50% off frames+lenses coupon brought total to $244. Without that coupon I probably wouldn't have gone for the top of the line lenses with anti-glare and water/oil resistance. The standard polycarbonates were I think $149 or so.

I'm still kicking myself over not getting laser eye surgery when I had a vision plan that covered it. My current plan covers glasses and contacts, but not lasik.

£200 is with the thinest anti-reflect lens as I don't want coke bottle ends strapped to my eyes.

Heh. Without glasses I'm around 20/400 -- can't even read the top line on the vision chart, and things start to get blurry about 4 inches away from my eyes. "I need glasses" is a bit of an understatement.
With glasses I'm at 20/20 and 20/25. While that's OK, the minification is a bit annoying. When I look over the top of my glasses, my screen appears about a third wider than how I see it through my glasses.

Contacts aren't really an option due to astigmatism, and I'm right at the outer limits of LASIK, making it ill-advised for me...
The only remaining option to get rid of the glasses would be implantable contacts (IOL's), but those are around $3000/eye, which is way out of budget.

So meanwhile it's the extra thin lenses and small frames (larger frames = thicker lenses)

(The flipside is that without glasses, I can see very clear at 2-3 inches away from my eye, and can read most of the microprint on the old Dutch banknotes without a magnifying glass)

I will babble what is on my mind

I have my brightness and contrast low. I cant see pictures as well but its worth it. When I put my monitor to default setting it hurts my eyes so bad.

I totally failed the eye test at the DMV when I got my licence, but a few years later I renewed my licence and (barely) passed the same eye test! So legally I dont have to wear glasses when driving.

My moms eyes got a lot better recently, she told the optomotrist, but apparently they always give you a bit stronger glasses than last time no matter what, thats messed up.

>>You know they sell perscription sunglasses, and perscription eyeglasses which have a magnetic thing to attach optional sungalss lenses on top of, right? :-)

Yea,... those look so,.... cool,... yea,... that's it.

/also had lenses that changed tint when I was in the sun,...
//Now happily get to wear sunglasses that actually look good.

edit: it's not that I'm so shallow worrying about what's "cool" or not, but having to walk around with a contraption clipped on top of already bulky glasses was not exactly what I wanted to wear. Now I can happily wear whatever style sunglasses I want to, without being tied to the bulk (and price) of prescription sunglasses. (of course, I still spend the money anyways, because the optics of $200 sunglasses is so much better than the optics of $5 ones!)

Ha, my eyesight is perfect ^_^

plenty of years ahead for it to go bad son ...

That's why I said it 'is' and not 'was' or 'will be'.

I highly doubt that, since glasses are very precise prescription products. Wearing glasses that are too strong can cause damage to one's eyes, and thus any self-respecting doctor would not prescribe them. If they really do disturb your mum's eyes, they should be taken back immeadiately to avoid vision loss.

Noel = pedant ;-)

Noel = above u all z0mg

I just take breaks from the monitor, by staring out to the country side out my window, and focus on distant objects. That's my plan for staying glasses free. Ironically, everyone else in my house wears glasses, except me. My mum, dad and two sisters, and none of them really use computers.

I don't think your eyes get worse from looking at the screen. You will get tired but the eyes getting bad is something that would have happened anyway.

http://www.intelihealth.com/IH/ihtIH/WSIHW000/28067/28122/193064.html?d=dmtContent
http://www.stlukeseye.com/Conditions/ComputerVisionSyndrome.asp

My eyes are -5 and -6 :(

Glasses are a pain although I dont notice them most of the time. I hope to get contacts sometime soon, but those will probably be a bigger pain.

Last time I had my eye's tested I asked the optician if starting at a computer monitor from the early age of 10 onwards caused my short sightedness and he said no.

I've had that confirmed by 2 opticians now that staring at screens does not make your eye sight poor. It's more of an old wives tale that watching TV too close ruins your eyes.

eye exercise. Focus on something far away and then somethng
close. deliberately blur your vision in both directions
flattening and destending them to keep them flexible. One
of the side effects of getting older is the hardening of
the eyeball. If you don't keep them exercised they end up
freezing in a narrow range of focus. If you can get the
deliberate blur thing under control, I've noticed with
controll over the muscles you can sort of use your eye like
a telescope making things appear closer than they actually
are. It helps when trying to see a sign far away.

I'm at -10.5, plus some astigmatism.

Here's an aproximation of what I can see when sitting at my desk:

-

Tempted to get me glasses here for TV/PC usage, my high-school still has some older PCs in the less-demanding PC-related classes, and the default 60hz they set the monitors to kills my eyes, cant stand looking at them without having to up the hz if the PC in question allows it too..., maybe if I complain a lot they'll actually reach into their budget and replace them all with "decent" monitors.

Not quite a fan of CRT anymore though ever since I got this LCD/TFT this X-Mas, so much easier on the eyes.........especially during the night with bright colors, no refresh-flickering in site either due to the way LCDs work.

Qube:

I'm still skeptical.

This wikipedia page discusses the subject. Seems the jury is still out on whether near work will cause myopia:

http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:Jy-cY2Wl3uwJ:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nearsighted+computer+screen+near-sighted+study&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=2

That page says one theory is that your eye lens muscles weaken, but that this is not borne out because your eye muscles actually need to release to focus on near objects.

But others say that the eye's lens gets stuck in the near position. The page does not say this has been disproven, and it seems perfectly logical that if you have a lens that needs to be stretchy to focus at a distance and you leave it in one position for a long period of time, that it might become less elastic and get stuck in one position.

I wonder if one could use an electrical stimulator to exercise the lens during sleep and bring back some of the stretchiness. You may not be able to exercise it on your own, because once you can't focus at a certain distance, you may not be able to make the muscles contract further.

Hmm... I wonder if rapid eye movement during sleep might be designed to help prevent the lens from getting stuck in this way?

Anyway, this page links to a recent study which says that students eyes get worse during months which they study, and stop getting worse during months when they are on vacation. This seems to me to be strong evidence that focusing on books and computer screens is in fact contributing to Myopia.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15926878&query_hl=11

Xlsior:
It must suck to have your eyes use box blur instead of the more accurate gaussian blur.


Ice9:
That probably won't work... and neither will my idea to stimulate the muscles either I guess... Because focusing at a distance means relaxing your eye muscles and allowing the lens to return to it's previous shape. But if focusing on near things for long periods of time pulls the lens out of shape, and it isn't elastic enough to return to the original shape, trying to focus on things in the distance is just going to relax the muscles and put no stress on it at all. And without counter stress that squeezes the lens (as opposed to stretching it when looking at near objects) I don't see how you could ever exercise your eyes in such a way as to get the lens back into shape.

Yup. I looked at both, but the box blur is a more accurate representation since there's some slight double-vision as well.

I think I'm onto something here...

http://www.coopereyecare.com/myopia.htm



What appeared in 1975?
http://inventors.about.com/library/blcoindex.htm

The first comsumer computers!

And from that wikipedia article again:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nearsighted



And what do intelliegent people do? Read a lot, study a lot, and use computers a lot.

Of course, the causality can be reversed as well -- worse vision can lead to less proficiency in things like sports and other fast paced stuff, meaning you're more likely to start reading in the first place.

hmm
after some test's i must say lcd screen's not much better as
my X-ray cannon's for my " eye feeling", but lcd has no x-ray , one point for lcd.

i use glasses since 25 years ,not happy with it (-5,-5.5 now)
and it will be not better all over the years.

one theorys says :
the eye tried of alone a better suppl.-smooth-eat to obtain
use glases with not so much dioptrin as u normally needed.
but i dunno it need years imho ;)

one good for all young - dioptrin user, if you older (60+) the
eyeball pressure will go down
eyeball will no longer so strongly deformed . u got now smaller glasses


i know some idiots uses glasses too
i like to drive @ night

7-8 IQ points isn't much... I would suspect these studies didn't include more than 1000 people. But even if they included 100,000 people it wouldn't be enough to draw a conclusion that there is anything other than a coincidence in that light increase.

Most studies don't draw from enough people to make ANY claims to their own validity.

Remember. If you poll 364 people, there will be at least 2 days that your statistics will show to have NO chance of being born on. Likely to be more like 20, and there will be a few days statisticly HIGHER to be born on. That data will tell you nothing.

Also, never trust a projection past a data set... like when a company projects how big they will be in the future based on the past. It isn't accurate and you are as likely to fail entirely or wind up with exponentially great growth than expected as you are to meet your projection.

It is very bad science to see past the data. It is very bad science to draw conclusions from small data sets.

These, ironicly, have become the norm. Which is why you wind up with the whole Eggs are bad for you, no good, no bad, no good. Not enough people in the data sets.

It is rare for a study to consist of more than 100 people.

You can't even get an accurate average of people with blue eyes with that cross section. How will you find a pattern for things as complex as IQ v Myopia.

It is also rare for a study to accurately reflect the earth... if study is done in New York, the average IQ will be different than in West Virginia... let alone Beijing or some remote village in the congo.

Can I call you foureyes?

"Yup. I looked at both, but the box blur is a more accurate representation since there's some slight double-vision as well."

Heh... I had some double vision as well. What I did was do a gaussian blur, and then I copied that and offset it on another layer and set it to 50% to simulate it. Take a look at the wires on the right side of the image in my first pic, and you'll see the vertical doubling. I think I went a little overboard though and moved the double image too far down.

That's what I tried too, but at the level of gaussian blur necesary, offsetting a semi-transparent second copy to the side was completely unnoticable, it all just blended together again -- hence the box blur.

I think using glasses will make it even worse. At least for my eyes. On a good day I can see a single hair on 15 Meters distance sharp and clear. But sometimes when I had a 3 days coding session and never when out, my eyes are no more capable of focussing distant things accurately. In such a situation I have to make some execises for several hours. After that I got the full sharpness back. It's also important to eat a lot of Vitamin A. That may be carrots and berries or Vitamin pills.

I have some reference points to check my eyes: some high voltage wires on the other side of the lake. when I can see them, it's ok.

A good exercise is to quickly focus things that are standing various distances far away. Near-far-near-far etc.

My sight is definately not what it used to be, but I don't particularly blame the computer for that. I just take frequent breaks. :P

It's certainly not the computer too blame. It's using your eyes for close range vision for long periods of time.

Hence the sterotype of nerds with glasses (cos they're always reading books and studying close range) and the overweight truck driver who never wears glasses. Infact Truckdriving is probably the best activity in the world that is good for your eyes because you're constantly having to focus from all sorts of ranges from as close as your speedometer to as far as the the eye can see on a busy motorway, hence the eye focusing muscles are being exercised constantly.

Strange, but true.

sswift:
The exercise is to alternate between focusing up close and
focusing on something in the distance back and forth. The
speed at which the focus occurs, I would assume diminshes
as you get older. The muscles don't respond as fast and the
eyeball hardens to the most used position.

Post a picture of you and your specs then "sswifty" - I only got pictures of you without - plus all those pictures of Blitzers that you doctored and left on your computer.