Russell's Blog

The eye doctor in Davis confirmed that my magical eye bubble is central serous retinopathy. Here's a much better picture (now also on Wikimedia Commons).

That volcano-shaped thing is supposed to be a little pit (that's what "fovea" means).

I'm a bit pissed off that the Zeiss optical coherence tomography machine that the doctor used to take this image evidently keeps the data locked up in a proprietary format, and can only exchange data with other Zeiss products. The doctor says he can't even save a screenshot. The only way I could get this picture was by snapping a photo of the display with my phone.

I'm impressed with the technology, and I'm happy to pay for it. It's much better than the machine used to take the image in my first post about this, and allowed for a quick and unambiguous diagnosis. I just don't want to pay more for it than it actually costs. Ziess is taking a page out of Microsoft's playbook here by leveraging proprietary data formats and locked-down data sharing to coerce doctors into buying their equipment instead of someone else's. Except, the stakes are higher for medical products.

Back in May 2007, I decided I'd try writing a Wikipedia article. I can't remember why I was seized by the impulse. I think I was supposed to be studying for something, and I'd already cleaned the bathroom and organized my closet. I pondered for a some time on the problem of selecting a topic obscure enough not to have a page already, and yet not so obscure as to become a target for the dreaded Deletionist clan of Wikipedians.

And lo, the Tasty Bite page was born. Looking at the page traffic, I fear that it will eventually become my most widely read piece of writing.

Well, they are pretty tasty. Oh, and those very mediocre pictures? I took those myself, and then consumed the contents of the pouch. Also, my friend Srijak says there is no such thing as "Bombay Potatoes," but he eats them too.