pinhole surgery!

it's amazing how small, almost insignificant details can be utterly important. And how even a scene from a 1954 Ealing comedy can, to this day, have such a massive impact on my working life.

Sir Lancelot Spratt completely owns "Doctor in the House", where he sends a gaggle of medical students into quivvers in a string of superb "teaching" scenes. this one, image it..

Patient lies in bed surrounded by students and mentor (Sir Lancelot), he asks one of the anatomical n00bs where one would make the incision when operating on the spleen (I think it was the speen, I was just a kid, and I haven't seen it again since). He hands the wannabe doctor a felt-tip pen.

The student sheepishly approaches the patient (who is quite awake!) and draws a tiny circle in the exact area of the spleen. Sir Lancelot pushes foward, shouting..

 "Pinhole Surgery!"

..grabs the pen and draws a massive circle encompassing all the major internal organs of the patient, who then faints. At least, that's how I remember it. And it's served me well enough in that form.

Right now I'm working on my comment script, "That Comment Thing", which rocks, yes, and I'm thinking about adding a live editing function, because I want it to be rigtheous, before I sell it to you. I spot the point at which my new code must insert..

And I make a comment (they are important, in six months time I'll come back to the program and go "PHP? WhaT?"). I mean "a programmers comment", some non-executable text within the script to let the reader know what the following, executable, stuff means. Like this..

// this protects your code..
if (@!$in_blogz) die("to err is human!");

don't let the fact I'm referring to my comment script introduce extra confusion. These are the comments behind the comments!

Before the programmers comment, I add ten new lines of space. After it, the same. I'll need space to work. I don't do pinhole surgery, you see.

Sometimes I'll be in the thick of things before I do see, the image conjures in my mind, (ah! the discomfort was the cramped in feeling!), and I'll add some space around what I'm doing, the work becomes instantly easier, like just emptying a cupboard out instead of rummaging, rummaging blindly around. I apply this almost everywhere.

I keep my dektop clear, for similar reasons. This applies to people, too, some folk tend to clutter the environment, make work difficult. Old, unworkable code. That "Made in Holland" shoe you got hanging up? Bin it!

Meanwhile; an image of astronaut Neil Armstrong receiving an early form of laser treatment to his left eye..



ho hum..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org

that's not the story

I'd been out for the evening, trying to get a busy friend of mine to sit down mindfully for a couple of hours; a movie, 50 First Dates, and a bottle of the finest cream liqueur. But that's not the story.

On my way home, a mouse ran out in front of me, right into the middle of the road, closely followed by a cat. I stopped, to watch. The cat terrorised the mouse for a minute or so until I intervened, giving the mouse a chance at freedom, which it took, darting under a fence.

As I walked down the hill, two, three hundred yards, the cat was still at the fence, trying to figure out where the little bugger went. That was the first time I've seen this archetypal battle waged in the city. But that's not the story, either.

My bloody digicam packed in! OMFG! The super-cute lens-cap that flips in and out of place to allow the lens mechanism to extend, protruding out of the body, stuck. BEEP BEEP BEEP! No pictures of the mouse, then.

When I got it home, I dismantled the FujiCam (FinePix F401, anyone know where I can by a lens cap retraction unit?), taped up the "hatch is open" micro switch (Thanks God that still works!) removed the lens-cap altogether, and the cam works again. *phew*. it's not so cool, sure, but I can take digital pictures again. Of course, that's not the story, either.

The story isn't even the actual real story I got when I first woke up. It involves a group of cute pets, a bath full of water, and it's a bit tragic. Seeing as how it's not the story either, I won't go into details. Not a great start to a day.

Today was the first day I've ever needed sign-language. I don't know any, apart from a few intuitive, obvious things, so I'm thinking maybe I'd like to learn some. She understood when I told her I recognised her face. it's a start, I guess. But no, that's not the story.

...

I can't remember what the story was, I was a bit tipsy, and fell asleep. It was a long day, and that was two days ago...

Yesterday I was in Glasgow for a meeting with my new bank. I'm going official; corz.org, the business. More about that another day.

It was perhaps the least unpleasant train journey I've had all year. Did I mention I hate trains, and I mean Hate. The seats are uncomfortable, don't recline, and almost every carriage has some idiot playing their iPod/walkman/whatever device with inadequate headphones for added annoyance. Fuckerz!

Maybe if, when we buy rail tickets, we were to ask for "a carriage without annoying walkman and MP3 player users", they might do something about this public nuisance, at least a separate carriage for them. hmmm, that's a thought.

But at least my camera is fixed, so on the way back, I was able to nab a few tasty shots, including a couple of scenes I spotted on the way down. Like my new desktop wallpaper..


Nabbed at 100+mph from my speeding train. Lucky shot? Yeah, Rrright! If you look closely, you can see faint reflections. If I'd had a polarising filter handy, I might have done something about those, but I'm glad I didn't. it's tempting to mess with the colours, increase saturation, contrast and stuff, but I haven't done that either; I kinda like the mellowness of the shot. I've resized it down to 1024x768, which most desktops are. Enjoy!

That image will eventually find its way into my FREE WALLPAPERS section (the word "FREE" would flash, too, I reckon, to catch your attention) which doesn't yet exist, but seems like a smart idea; I've a lot of images taken specifically with the desktop in mind.

Sadly, this Summer is mostly going to pass me by; There's just so much to do, and that's before I start work on getting my 3000+ songs online. erm, FREE MP3's anyone?

But before that, I need some shopping.

for now..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org

aye eye!

I thought I might share a wee secret. Because it shouldn't be a secret. I'm using the word "should" properly today, you'll notice.

This is arcane esoteric data. More copy for my "corz instruction manual series: the human machine", or whatever I eventually get around to calling it. This is how to fix your eyes.

You see, I've been having trouble with my eyes, again. It was some years ago, working as a photographer with a local magazine, that I first experienced not-perfect sight. I have 20/10 vision, always have. But with one eye almost perpetually squinted in a rangefinder, the other focused as normal on the world around me, they started to drift apart, my eyes, mainly in focus. I got headaches when I wasn't using my Olympus. "OM2n, that'll do nicely, Sir!"

I had to DO something, and "chanced" across an interesting book, an old book of Yoga, and as I flipped the thing open, there it was, the answer! I practiced the excercises daily, and within a fortnight my eyes had returned to normal, taking pictures all the time!

The eyes are complex, but like most of the other moving parts of the human anatomy, they are controlled by muscular action. Humans tend to move their eyes about less and less as they get older. Reading, for instance, has us inching them left to right, left to right, and rarely do they move beyond the central regions of their range. When someone calls our name, we turn our heads, not our eyes.

The centre is the best bit, of course, so this all makes perfect sense, I guess. Perhaps it's our gradual loss of awe and wonder at the world around us, they way a child will dart their wee pupils around a room, attention continually entranced , I noticed this, and I can see the pattern of our decline. it's like most humans travelling through the "education system", knowing more and more about less and less until they eventually know everything about nothing^*. BANG!

Humans adapt, we are truly creatures of habit. it's a great strength of ours, but also a weakness; if we adapt into unhealthy states, bad habits. Fact: If you wear a pair of glasses, one lens a prism that turns the world upside-down, you will, in a short time, adapt, and see everything as it was before. After that, if you remove the glasses, the world will again be half upside-down! So throw away the glasses! (oops! did I say that out loud?)

Okay, it's not healthy to sit in front of a computer screen for thirty six hours on the trot, for weeks on end, for years, something's gotta give, and it was my eyes again, giving me trouble. I won't go into details, it's scary. I had work to do, you know.

So I'm back to my Yoga, and a daily dose of Beta-Carotene in its natural matrix form, aka, a carrot. I haven't had any "Woah! Trippy!!!" experiences for a few weeks now, and I'm making real progress. Also I'm saving for flat-screen monitors. If you want to help out with that, you know where to click! If you heal yourself with these excercises, click twice!

Now to the juicy stuff, the excercises themselves..

Of course, like everyone else, you create your own reality every day, so if you "don't believe" you have the power to heal yourself^*, or rather "create the correct conditions in order to allow the natural human healing process to occur", then go away! Read some past blog or something, get some confidence, will ya!

The secret to any self healing is how mindfully one practices it. Visualising doing press-ups tones you up more quickly than doing actual press-ups, so imagine doing both! THAT is mindful excercise. And that's what we're going to be doing here.

I keep a chart on the back of my toilet door. I figure the eyes and bowels are linked, because if you're constipated (and who isn't!) and strain some, it feels like your eyes might pop out, so I keep the chart where I can see it when doing a dump (the secret to THAT, by the way, is correct posture (get a stool! hahah!), and relaxation. Roughage is important, too, of course).

The excercises are simple, and you'll remember them easily, the chart was just put there to remind me during that tricky "I'm practicing, but it's not a habit yet" time, which generally seems to last around a fortnight, whatever habit you're trying to program in.

Every time I take a dump, I do my exercises. So that's two or three times a day, if your bowels are working properly. Like this..

eye repair exercises..

• Look Up, Look Down. repeat five times.
• Look Left, Look Right. Repeat five times.
• Look Top-Left, Look Bottom-Right. Repeat five times.
• Look Top-Right, Look Bottom-Left. Repeat five times.
• Look round the clock, two times slow, three times quick.
• Look anticlockwise around the clock, two times slow, three times quick.
• Focus on your thumb, Focus on the wall. Repeat five times.
• Palm your eyes.

Palming your eyes is achieved by a) rubbing your hands together briskly (or slowly, if you are a master!) and getting them HOT, b) placing warm hands on closed eyes, c) keeping them there for a minute.

If you time it just right, the palming can be syncronised with the last of the bowel-emptying, for complete relaxation and enjoyment! Really push your eyes to the edge, feel how unfit those eye muscles are! work it baby! At all points focus on the most distant object there, like the wall, except when you focus on your thumb, which is best held about six or seven inches from your face.

If you want to turn up the juice, get everything synchronised with your breathing, slow and calm. For more juice, put your heartbeat in the mix and synchronise everything, you'll really feel your eyes swooshing through the universe!

I also do something I call "tracking", which is simply fixing my vision on some random edge point, say Two O'clock, and then moving my head to match that point, so that I am again looking dead-centre. Repeat this a few times (five) with different random points. Note: this is a powerful excercise, and you might want avoid the very edges of your vision until your eyes are in better shape. When you do it right, you get the feeling your eyes are "dragging you around".

The main excercises have been tried-and-tested by Yogi masters for probably thousands of years, you can feel confident using those, but the tracking stuff is still new, and feels like a righteous optical work-out, so careful with that, the long-term consequences are unknown, syat.

I googled around recently to find out if all this was common-knowledge yet, seems not. I do see many dubious schemes for sale, mainly based on the work of William Horatio Bates, which itself is a bit dubious. They want $100-$300 for the "program". Feck it! Program yourself for free!

that's all, consider yourself informed, and if your eyes are ever in trouble, get to it right away! Make it a habit! Maybe we could have a wee song for the kids.. (to the melody of a popular breakfast cereal commercial).. whenever you take a shite, do a work-out for your sight, or something.

for now..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org

yeah, rrr8!

Of course it was a joke!

See, I've never done an April Fool's joke onsite before.
Hopefully I've got that outta my system now.

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org

ps.. you should of known by the time of the blog entry!

sold, sorree

Microsoft have offered me the princely sum of $230,000 dollars to use the corzoogle search technology in their new web-based "thin-client" version of Windows®. w00h00!

As well as making me wildly rich, at last, part of the deal is I have to hand over the corzoogle and corz.org domains. This has ramifications.

But with all the money they're giving me, I can finally afford to put all my biggest and bestest plans into action! I'll pick up some other domain, corzsummin.org or summin, and host it right here, on my new fibre-optic link.

As from next Thursday, I will no longer be able to accept mail at the corzoogle address, please alter your address books to use @how.to for the meantime, until I have a new home. sorry for the inconvenience, but clearly this is too good an opportunity to miss. google will be a bit pissed.

So, as well as my birthday, it's a bit of a sad day, really. No more corz.org. No more corzoogle. But look on the bright side, I get to have lots and lots of money, and money is, after all, the reason I'm here, we're all here, r8?

l8rz..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org