Monday, May 30, 2005
Are you as sick of the Crazy Frog ringtone rubbish as I am?Take a look at THIS
Steve 1:51 PM [+] (0) comments
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
More progess with my eye.Went back to the clinic and the doc says there are now no visible signs of inflamation inside my eye, despite some irritation on the outside So I'm off the ointment, and cutting down the steroid drops to almost nothing over the next 3 weeks.
What else can I tell you?
I've found an amusing use for a glitch I discovered some time back with my cam and tv card.
It seems that if I unplug my cam, my webcam software defaults to taking a video stream from my tv card. Now, while this doesnt actually work with the webcam software I usually use (coz the resolution is too high), I can then fire up msn and it'll also use the tv card as the video source, allowing whoever I'm chatting to to watch the same programs as me. If I fire up the tv software, I can change channels too.... and then use skype to provide audio to go with the video.
Long winded... but fun when you let non-brits watch brit tv with you.
Labels: iritis, medical, webcams
Steve 6:19 AM [+] (0) comments
Monday, May 23, 2005
How cool.I found a program that maps keys on the keyboard to buttons on my joypad, so now I can play Radiant Silvergun in all it's glory, and not keep losing lives through difficulty in controlling the ship.
Now I just die through being crap, and the game being shockingly tough.
Having said that, I can see exactly why this game has such a legendary status on the Saturn, and commands such high priced for the Japanese only copies being sold on ebay.
When you consider that the Saturn is pretty much 10 year old technology, and was widely regarded as inferior to the Play Station, the graphics on this game are quite staggering, and the gameplay very innovative.
Best 2D shootemup ever?
Almost certainly.
Steve 7:26 PM [+] (0) comments
Hah!!!
Emulators are wonderful things.
For ages there were no usable Sega Saturn emulators, and for ages I had no way of playing Radiant Silvergun on my real Saturn without paying around £130 on ebay.
So this morning I found a fully functional Saturn emulator and then managed to make a downloaded copy of Radiant Silvergun work on it.
This isn't a perfect solution, as I'm restricted to using the keyboard to play the thing... far from ideal, but I dare say sooner or later they'll update the emulator to accept keyboard input.
Still... game collecting being what it is, one of these days I'll actually stump up the money to buy the game anyway.
Labels: consoles, emulators, games
Steve 5:57 AM [+] (0) comments
Monday, May 16, 2005
Had a great weekend.No one specific thing made it great... just a series of chilled and enjoyable moments with Andrea.
Sunday spent wandering round Newport Pagnell was fun. Burger and chips in the park/gardens by the river, enjoying the sunshine. Then getting lost around the south side of the city, passing through Simpson Village, and taking a look at Bletchly town centre. Bletchly's a pretty awful place... but it rather shows how nice the rest of Milton Keynes is.
Getting shot to bits in 2 player Time Crisis in the evening was fun too.
On the eye front... things are much better. Probably not quite cured yet, but very near to it.
Steve 5:32 PM [+] (0) comments
Thursday, May 12, 2005
Hmm. Okay.I rang the clinic and the doc was there... seems he's not away till next week.
Anyays, he said not to worry about the redness, as the drops themselves can cause that, especially over an extended period.
That makes sense to me, though I do feel I'm getting mixed messages from him. He says I should be able to tell myself whether there's an internal improvement, but he also says I worry too much about what's happening with the eye when I see changes.
So what am I supposed to do... diagnose my own condition, or interrupt him and seek advice? Obviously he'd love it if I'd just do what he says and then forget about it... but that landed me with an injection in the eye last time I did that.
Ho-hum.
Steve 11:53 AM [+] (0) comments
I'm at a complete loss.
The doc said my eye was much improved, and to reduce the drops and stop taking the dilator.
Today the redness around the eye is increased, and the steroid drops which have never stinged before sting.
Now one of the effects of taking these drops for a while is that they can cause conjunctivitis, or general irritation.
The other eye isn't looking too clever either, though not as bad as it was initially.
So... is this the iritis flaring up again coz of a recuced dosage, in which case I should increase the dose... or is it an irritation, meaning I should reduce the dosage, or be taking/doing something different?
The obvious course of action would be to ask the doctor... but guess what? He's gone on holiday.
Bollox!!!
I'm SO wishing I had sonething other than the state of my eyes to be blogging about. This is getting really old.
Steve 10:50 AM [+] (0) comments
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Well that was a surprise.Turns out there indeed was something wrong with my other eye, but it wasn't iritis. I had a foreign body in there and it was causing irritation. Funny, coz apart from a general soreness, I couldn't feel a thing.
Something I've found over the past few weeks... I've become a lot more tollerant of having my eyes prodded at. The doctor put a drop in to numb my eye, and then poked at, and wiped directly across my pupil. A few weeks ago, that would've had me screwing my eye up and jumping out of my seat, but as it is, I didn't flinch in the slightest.
As for my 'bad' eye... it's vastly improved, and I can stop taking the dilator drops. This is a good thing, as those drops blur my vision terribly, and since the antibiotic ointment I've been given for my other eye blurs my vision too... the timing couldn't be better.
Steve 10:32 AM [+] (0) comments
Monday, May 09, 2005
I just phoned the eye clinic, coz it's still not looking right.They said it should be okay for me to wait untill my appointment tomorrow.
This is ok by me, as it doesn't look as bad as it did last night, and compared with how my other eye looked, even if this is iritis, I'd say it's pretty mild.
There's no clouding, no internal pain since yesterday, no sensetivity to light, and the pupil appears to be functioning normally. At the moment, it's just a bit bloodshot and slightly sore.
If I hadn't gone through all the crap with my other eye already, I wouldn't even have given it a second thought, but as it is, I'm ultra wary.
Steve 9:39 AM [+] (0) comments
The phrase "oh crap" comes to mind.
I pray that I'm mistaken, but I do believe the iritis has moved to my good eye. It was aching earlier today, whih I put down to eye strain, but when I looked at it before going to bed earlier, it was all bloodshot. Needless to say, I haven't managed to sleep.
So I'll phone the eye clinic first thing in the morning and see whether the doc can look at it, or if I need to wait till my appointment on tuesday, and if I should use the drops I already have for the other eye on it... or again, if I should wait till he's had a look.
If it turns out as I fear, then this may be my last post for a while coz the drops blur my vision to hell, and while it's hard enough to type with one blurred eye, there's no way I'll be able to see well enough if both are blurred.
This sucks.
Steve 3:19 AM [+] (0) comments
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
Update:I saw the doc, and he says my eye's made a marked improvement. I canr reduce the dosage of the steroid drops to one every 3 hours as of tomorrow.
So, I may not be cured by any means, but this is a real step in the right direction at last. I'm very releived.
Steve 4:35 PM [+] (0) comments
Back to the eye clinic this afternoon.
I SO hope that doctor says it's showing signs of improvement, coz after all the crap I've had to stick in my eye, I'm gonna be waaaaaaaaay pissed off if he doesn't.
It's not just the taking of the drops that gets old, but how they rule your life completely. You have to fit your entire life around them, sleep pattern, etc, and going out is very tricky, coz some of them have to be kept in the fridge, others kept below 25C, but not refridgerated.
Anyways.
Turns out there's a retro gaming shop in Andrea's home town, so she went for a look in there yesterday, and picked me up an Atari Lynx handheld console. This is another largely overlooked piece of impressive hardware that died a quick death due to the dominance of the gameboy.
The collection grows and grows.
I can't tell you what a buzz it gives me, being a total gaming geek, to have a girlfriend who's into gaming too.
But damn, she slaughters me on Mario Kart.
Labels: consoles, iritis, medical
Steve 9:32 AM [+] (0) comments
Monday, May 02, 2005
It's been a pretty good weekend.On the 'eye front', the doctor gave me pretty much a free hand in deciding my own dosage of drops (which seems pretty irregular to me), so I kept it at 1 per hour till last night, and I'm dropping it to one every two hours from this morning.
That's a high dosage for such an extended period of time, but all the info I read says severe or persistant iritis should be treated aggresively, and that's exactly how I've treated it. Seems to be working so far.
So... fun stuff.
Andrea and I have been doing the retro gaming thing quite a bit lately. Lots of head to head games like Mario Kart on snes, Mario Kart 64 on N64, and more recently, head to head Tetris on 2 Gameboys.
It's kinda funny. Andrea manages to effectively slaughter me on Nintendo games, but then when we play on PS2, the tables are turned.
Labels: games, iritis, medical
Steve 8:21 AM [+] (0) comments
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