emerging.org

Just got my eyes fixed at Scott Hyver’s Daly City location south of San Francisco. Figured I’d provide a little bit of detail on the process, since most of the summaries I found while researching were either positive (and very short) or negative (and very long). In the case of the negative reviews, many of the entries provide a lot of whiny details but not a lot of medical background, sometimes even without a date.

Maybe this story will help out a little bit. Here’s my background - I’m 31, and had myopia with about a -7.5 diopter prescription. (Roughly 20/1100) My prescription hadn’t changed in nearly 4 years, although my glasses had started to feel a little bit underpowered. A stable prescription overall.

I’ll give a little background then some terminology. This has been of interest for about 10 years, but I was too cheap to pay for it. In the summer of 2006, I decided to seriously investigate LASIK (with wavefront in particular) at Coleman Vision in Albuquerque. I was approved, but didn’t quite go for it. Then Wind River came in and I ended up in the bay area.

After settling in, I went to Pacific Vision in San Francisco, and got turned down. The rumor is that if you’re not a really ideal candidate, you can be turned down by offices to keep their success rates up. I don’t know if this was the case, but I did get an elitist feel (from a technology perspective) at Pacific Vision.

As an aside, I was told at Pacific Vision that my corneas were thick enough, but too flat, and could result in halos. Instead, they wanted me to go with ICL as a replacement for LASIK.

Next, I went to Scott Hyver’s location in Daly City, on December 27, 2007. They approved me, particularly for PRK. And they could fit me in for surgery December 28. (I had reviewed a lot about Scott before going in, it really wasn’t an uninformed jump.)

Before I go into the details of the surgery, here are some terms:

LASIK (easy one) - the process of using an excimer laser to reshape the cornea to correct vision. A key part of normal LASIK is that a ‘knife’ is used to slice the cornea so it can be hinged back for the laser to do the work.

LASIK/PRK - (photorefractive keratectomy) this is the same as above, but instead of cutting a flap, the epithelium (special layer on the surface of the cornea) is scraped off, and the laser works from there.

ICL - This is a relatively new procedure (and currently twice as expensive) that is similar to cataract surgery. A slice is cut in the eye and pressure is maintained while a new (rolled up) lens is inserted. It unrolls in place and acts as a new lens, correcting vision internally.

Wavefront - A variation on the normal correction procedure. Rather than just taking off X microns of the cornea to get back to 20/20, Wavefront analysis takes a high resolution map of the cornea and accounts for the specific shape of the cornea. This lets the surgery correct for any local aberrations, correcting for minor irregularities in the cornea.

I have a slight abnormality in my cornea shape that made me a little better fit for PRK, according to Scott. All 3 locations indicated my cornea was thick enough to account for my prescription. (The higher the prescription, the more that has to come off to bring vision back to 20/20.)

I was comfortable with PRK - it has some significant differences from normal LASIK:

• A longer recovery time. Normal LASIK gives almost 20/20 vision immediately, once the flap is back. PRK leaves you with an open wound that has to heal, and for my prescription, takes months to heal.
• A longer track history. PRK is actually one of the older procedures (oldest?) still in use. It’s got almost 30 years of history, and the technology is well known with a low failure rate.
• PRK does not leave a flap that has to heal - instead, the epithelium grows back naturally (but slowly). Flaps always have a risk of being ripped open, and while rare, still a possibility.
• PRK actually _can_ provide better results, in theory. Since the wavefront corrections are at the surface, the epithelium grows in properly around them, whereas with a flap, the flap may not fit back as naturally as it would have without the corrections.

That’s the overview - next I’ll cover the actual procedure.

Gas prices are constantly in the news - there are always short segments when the price of gasoline goes up by 10 cents, or down. Sometimes it’s news when it’s an even smaller jump. There seem to be fewer stories about specific gas stations running specials and having huge lines, and that may simply be because gas stations usually don’t make money on gas (they make it on sales in the store) and pushing a lot of cars through the pumps isn’t the best thing to do anymore.

I’ve always been a little suspicious of these stories as being real news. Certainly, people drive around looking to save 2 or 3 cents per gallon, which seems like a waste of time (and gas) to me. It’s like driving around the city to be able to use a 50 cent coupon. If you’re buying 100 gallons of gas, sure, it can save you 2 or 3 bucks. But with an SUV-sized tank, it might save you a buck, tops, in exchange for lost time, wear on the vehicle, and of course used fuel.

The real question here is whether these little jumps in fuel are really news. The way it’s portrayed, these little spikes have huge impacts on people’s lives - impacting whether families drive places for holidays or not. I don’t know if that’s true, so I figured I’d take a few moments to do some multiplication and division.

A few minutes of searching and a few seconds of math shows that gas prices shouldn’t have a huge impact on driving habits. They can, but only when people have made some pretty poor decisions.

So I stumbled on AAA’s report of what it actually costs to drive a car - gas, wear, etc. (here)
It doesn’t appear to cover everything - items like interest on loans is not covered. But overall, the average cost of driving is 52.2 cents per mile, at 15000 miles per year (national average). (Higher for SUVs)

It also puts the average fuel efficiency at 25mpg. This is pitiful, but Congress is getting right on that to put the standard at 35mpg by 2020. Right on that. China will be at 35 by 2009. Japan’s current average is 45. Anyway..

Gasoline prices right now are averaging (nationally) $3.10. at 25mpg, that’s 12 cents a mile for fuel, or roughly 23% of the cost of driving. What if gas goes up 10 cents/gallon? Yup, it brings the cost to 24.5% of your cost per mile. What if it goes up a whole dollar, to $4.10? That’s 16 cents a mile, or 30% of the driving cost.

To be fair, I’m using data outside of the model that makes the numbers seem worse. The model was done last year(!) at $2.25/gallon. At 25mpg, that’s 9 cents a mile, or 17%. But it seems relatively fair to use current gas prices. Don’t worry, I’ll be consistent with the other side of the argument too.

That was a lot of numbers, and probably too many in one paragraph. So to simplify, remember this - for a vehicle that gets 25mpg, today, gas prices make up about 23% of your driving cost.

What if you drive a car that gets 50mpg? They’re not hard to find. Actually, that whole oil issue in the 70’s generated a number of efficient cars, before our collective attention span reset. You don’t even have to get fancy - a 1990’s Geo Metro will get close to that, and they can be picked up for under 1000 bucks. A diesel Beetle made in the last 10 years can get this. There’s no real need for a hybrid, at least from an mpg standpoint.

At $3.10, a 50mpg car costs 6 cents a mile to run, compared to the above 12 cents. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Double the efficiency, cut the energy required in half. That means that per mile, only 11.5% of your cost is going to gas.

What if gas goes up to $4.10? That still gets you around at 8 cents a gallon, or 15% of the overall cost of running the car.

(And to be fair, at $2.25/gallon, that 50mpg car costs 5 cents/mile, and gas makes up 9% of the over all cost.)

So right now, the choice is, spend 23% of your money just on fuel, or spend 11.5%. Those of you who were paying attention will also have realized that this is really just a matter of ratios, and the numbers themselves don’t matter much at all. It doesn’t matter what gas costs - if you get an efficient vehicle, you can pay 50% of what the buyer of that gas guzzler is paying.

So what’s with the 25mpg average? Please tell me - it seems completely idiotic. I can’t believe the inefficient cars are that much more comfortable. Cushy seats are cushy seats, regardless of fuel efficiency. It can’t be safety, because there have been a number of huge safety issues with SUVs.

I might be convinced that people are swayed by horsepower, but for a loss that big? A Toyota at half the power but roughly half the weight of a Navigator still gets up to speed pretty well on the highway. If you’re really into power, get a roadster and admit it already.

I wish I had a witty way to wrap this up, but I’m mainly just dumbfounded. Are we all just plain stupid?

With the Loonie past the US dollar for the first time since the ’70s, ($1.06!) Canadians can now look to the US for cheap products. Well, actually, it was common before, but now all of the shipping markups don’t seem quite as steep with the dollar so weak.

Canada’s got it good, though - they’re still capable of making things, or if not, at least they have raw materials. Canada’s pretty much made of raw materials, with a few people scattered here and there. However, having a strong currency isn’t always a good thing.

Sure, you can buy a lot of stuff. And you can outsource labor cheaply to those Americans south of the border. (This is a huge stretch right now with the current dollar parity, but if the trend continues, it may apply.)

The model only works well, though, if you make something, or sell what you have. The US became what is called a ’service economy’ once we realized we didn’t have a lot in the way of exportable resources, and had lost most of our ability to manufacture things. The same problem may recur up north now. From a recent Globe and Mail article:

Can a society survive by serving each other lattes? People rise in the morning, go to their posts and start feeding the customers. But everyone does it, so they’re all running in and out, serving and being served. I have to finish this croissant so I can rush back and make you a falafel. I extend the metaphor to those who serve information or entertainment. That’s the shell of an economy left when you produce almost nothing for basic need.

(source here)

It’s a good summary of where a lot of the US is right now - “in the latte pits”. Right now we’re holding things together with a delicate fabric of technology, and some returning manufacturing. Canada probably won’t go as far down that road as we did, simply because of their wealth of resources, but hey, if they do, at least we know we’ll all get their outsourced jobs!

If someone offers me something for free, I tend to take it. If it’s junk, I’ll avoid it, but cash works. So when I get credit card offers in the mail, I act on them if:

a. They’re easy to get out of
b. There’s no annual fee
c. They offer cash or something easily actionable

The other week, one came in offering $100 bucks for opening an account. All I had to do was make a purchase on the card within 3 months. No fee, no real catches (aside from a 30-some percent rate, but there’s no way I’d carry a balance on the thing). So I filled out the offer, and got the card.

Now it was just a matter of using the card. Coincidentally, there was some kind of benefits fair at work (discounts on cell phones, gym memberships, vision care, that kind of thing) this week. I went over, figuring it was something potentially productive I could do while waiting for a build to finish. (Needed to get Lasik info anyway.) Turns out there was a Costco membership table there.

This could be useful, but how much were they scamming memberships for? The usual cost is $50 bucks, but here they gave you a bag, $10 bucks off, and a credit card offer for $25 bucks. Really, it boiled down to $15 bucks for a membership, which really is worth it if you go to Costco a couple times a year.

Why not use the credit card I have in hand to make a purchase, so I can get my free $100, and have the purchase get me another card with a new check?

No such luck. Wrong kind of card. I still have a long way to go at this.

I might have a yellow belt at being cheap, but if I was really together, I would have had an in-flight offer on the right kind of card, and could have had that ready to use right at that moment.

Maybe next time I can prove myself worthy, but for now I’m still just a young grasshopper.

Some days it’s hard to tell if the tech industry is depressing or the current state should be a cause for optimism. (I’m talking about tech in general, not embedded systems, web apps, phones, etc. This applies to the whole thing.)

I mean, on one hand, in the valley, the supposed technology development center of world, the leading edge of the industry is brought into focus by sites like valleywag, who at this moment are talking about Scoble’s lament that he locked himself into Facebook as his modern day Rolodex. Three months ago he was praising it with: “Facebook is the modern day rolodex.” We may not invent much, but I think we were first to market with ADHD. (If you’re reading this a week from now (10/14/07) and this has no relevance, you’re proving my point.)

What passes for technology development around here is less technology and development and more of a VC-backed popularity contest. There’s a complicated analogy here to musical chairs that I won’t go into. C’mon. Twitter? I can’t go into what I feel about that kind of waste. (Update: Zlango? 12 million bucks? Uncov.com covers this perfectly, as usual.)

It’s just depressing if you look at it from that angle. There’s another, though - consider how far we can go from where we are today. Think about it.

Here’s where we are right now. Silicon vendors are investing huge amounts of time and energy reinventing their lineup so we can have a new weird variant of a chip that does almost what the previous one did, but in some new way that’s, well, really, not usually any better. Then there’s the effort of getting a whole toolchain going that can target the thing. Then there’s the usual bootloader efforts. Once that’s in place OS development is done to support the new variant. Bonus points if it actually uses any of the chip’s new features. Depending on the target area, vendors now take the thing and get their stacks going on it. Once this whole (simplified) chain is complete, it can be wrapped up, productized, boxed, marketed, and sold.

Now people have this new chip that should be able to do all of this fancy stuff, and what do they do with it? They send twitter messages. For a few months. Then it gets pitched in favor of the next generation device, which is really just a way to recoup all of the losses around the errata on all of the technology bits used in the first run.

Sad.

But think where we can go from here. If you feed me an apple, I can metabolize it into energy (and optionally store it) then use that energy to do an amazing number of things. I could build a house. I could write a sonnet (not a very good one, though). I could write long papers on the social importance of Mork and Mindy. I could write useless blog posts.

Feed an apple to technology, any technology, today, and what do you get? Nothing. It’ll rot on top of any MIPS processor you place it on. About the only thing it’ll do is mush and short circuit the board, causing complete and usually irrevocable failure.

Want to get fancy? Feed the apple to an energy conversion technology like a biomass converter. Then you can convert the apple into a suboptimal amount of current that can be fed to a computer. And what will the computer do with it that’s so magical? Not much - really, all they do is ever-more-modern-and-fancy methods of loading memory addresses and performing simple operations on the contents. They can’t comprehend the depth of Robin Williams on cocaine.

There’s something really fundamentally wrong here, but the lesson in the end is that what we have today is complete crap when it comes to technology. There’s a long way to go, and if RTLinux was worth 10M, just think what a fruit-powered sonnet generator is worth!

And now, your moment of zen.

Rumored here.

Neat. Combine unstable and expensive energy supplies with a weak dollar and we can:

a. Make a serious push for other energy sources.

b. Learn to do things for ourselves again. You know, make stuff here using our now-cheaper US labor. (We did make things, once upon a time. It wasn’t always like this.)

Ideally, it’d be good to do both, if possible. Looking around sometimes, though, it’s hard to imagine many of the people around you as productive economic contributors. Consumers? Sure. But consumption without production only works as long as the credit line holds out. I didn’t live through the depression, but sometimes I think it would be a good thing for this place to go through something like that again. Reset mentalities a bit.

There’s a lot more that could happen in the next few years aside from the above 2 options, but those would be good things to do to solve some of the core problems facing the country. Dedicate a few areas of high desert to Stirling Energy and we can get at least a large jump on breaking the oil addiction. (I’m partial for being connected to them via FSMLabs/New Mexico.)

With oil rising and the dollar dropping, unless the labor markets really can capitalize on the labor costs (are markets really that efficent?) it seems like we are heading for a recession. I’ll guess the measurable indicators will be coming in July or so, after the rest of the mortgage ARM peaks settle out and the rest of the housing crunch hits the consumer. It has to come sooner or later - constant growth with finite resources doesn’t hold up forever, politically or physically.

We have the potential to become a leader again rather than just the big fat elephant in the room. The US used to be able to innovate, and if we don’t dig ourselves out of this energy mess, I don’t think we’ll ever get there again.

There’s just way too to do! Wind River is hiring - if you’re interested in kernel development, userspace work, tools, real-time Linux (RTLinux/Real-Time Core or PREEMPT_RT), BSP development, all around one hell of a nice platform, email matt.sherer@gmail.com. Please!

There’s a lot of work available in the field of computer science. A lot. Even after the shakeouts from the big bust, outsourcing, broader interest in the field, etc., there’s just a huge amount of work. Not all of it’s really that interesting from a technical angle, although it all pays the bills pretty easily.

Perspectives vary of course, but finding an interesting subdomain in CS is straightforward. If you’re doing something new, that’s usually interesting. (Meaning something really new, not just new to you, although that’s a good substitute.) Old technology applied to a new field can be interesting too. Work which may be a bit behind the curve but with a more meaningful application (say, infrastructure for the Peace Corps) gets bonus points.

I’m not saying other fields here aren’t interesting and/or fun. With the right mindset, the most constrained maintenance job can be a hell of a mindbender, and really hard/interesting to keep things going.

There are some ‘classical’ areas of applied CS that are generally interesting, too, and that’s what I’m mainly thinking of. Think of your undergrad classes - Algorithms, Discrete Math, Operating Systems, Compilers, that kind of thing. There’s a lot of interesting work there, although not many people get to work on it anymore. Sure, you can go to school and focus on it, but not everyone can maintain that publication rate up forever. Instead, students leave academia and head out to do the applied work.

The real world is the other side of the fence. Now there’s pressure to pay the bills, and rightfully so. Paying the bills means that the work that gets done has to be valuable enough to justify the checks. That’s the beginning of the end for most of those fundamentally interesting fields. Who’s going to pay your company your salary plus overhead to develop a compiler these days? How about new algorithms? Maybe if you’re at Google or a new startup (and thus satisfying the qualifications listed above), you’ll get to do some algorithm research, but probably not for the bulk of those ‘Enterprise Java’ type apps. How about OS development? Right. It’s hard to tell if Microsoft does that anymore. If it’s not Windows, it’s Linux or OS X, and really, with their size, it’s hard to contribute meaningfully.

The trouble is, OS technology is largely (not completely) a solved problem. Between the two major players today, there’s just so much momentum that it’s unlikely that anything meaningful will ever seriously overtake them and gain a majority. There’s just not enough value (read: cash) in the ecosystem to justify another investment of that magnitude. Don’t get me wrong - there will always be a number of other OSs - security focus, footprint, high availability, stability and certifiability will always require much more than what just the main players can provide. (Disclaimer - I work for Wind River, and really, VxWorks has some serious applications where there’s no real contender.)

Many of the current niche systems will over time bleed into Linux and CE as those OSs shrink and hardware grows. I don’t expect Symbian to be around in 10 years time except in support mode. I’ve gotten off on a tangent here - to get back to my point, if you want to do OS development, it’s going to have to be in academia, and even then, most of the work will probably have to be written off. It’s going to be really damned hard to bring a new OS to the field. The best that can be hoped for is that an idea can be grafted into an existing system, most likely Linux.

Now we’re back to the problem - if you want to do something new in, say, operating systems, it’s likely going to have to be in academia. Very few companies are going to let you play around all day trying to write a new OS from scratch. You’d be lucky if you could get enough paid time to write a few little hooks that could come up out of a bootloader and control a system, and in the end, that’s what it would be - a controls system, not an OS. Once your boss looks over your shoulder and sees that you’re trying to ‘genericize’ your current control app into a full operating system ‘for reuse on the next project’, he/she’s should be yanking that out of your hands and handing back an OS.

Rob Pike has a similar view, although more pessimistic, here. I doubt the last 7 years of development in the field has changed his mind much.

I will offer up a bit of hope, though - since 2001, I’ve been working on RTLinux (also known as Real-Time Linux, RTLinux/Free, RTLinuxPro, RTCore/BSD, and Real-Time Core), and really, this completely invalidates what I’ve written above. I wasn’t in academia (even though the idea started there), although I did do new and interesting operating system development that was applicable and above all commercially viable.

How? Well, a number of magic factors, notably, being in the right place at the right time. It helped that the idea could be done in an area with an absurdly low cost of living. (Those familiar with Socorro, NM, know what I mean.) We also didn’t develop a new OS from scratch - POSIX provided the framework. (I firmly believe that the POSIX spec ended OS interface development; aside from a few blemishes, it’s a very fluid and comprehensive system view.) We also made use of Linux and BSD (Net and Free, not Open) - we just did the real-time OS, just what we could bite off and chew. There was no way we could have written the real-time system plus a driver for every little SATA interface that came on the market. There just isn’t enough value there, especially when it’s free in Linux.

That’s what makes the RTCore idea work so well - it adds value and lets us concentrate on the applicable aspects of real-time programming and in doing so provide value, while leveraging the right balance of Linux expertise to round out the system. At FSMLabs the focus was on the real-time side and the Linux/BSD was a bonus, but now at Wind, there’s focus on both sides, and we have the benefit of a large group helping move Linux forward both inside and outside the company. There’s actual real OS work being done in a way that creates value without any of us having to figure out how to keep taking graduate seminar for another 30 years.

And why is OS development interesting in the first place? Lots of reasons - interesting call contexts and scenarios, exposure to hardware, etc. But it can all be summed up with one single call - schedule(). Where else can you write code in which code calls a function, does some work, and returns, but returns to some other context as someone else?

It’s such a simple concept, but it strikes me as really interesting. Other OS interfaces have neat implications too, like the chain of events that can be triggered off by a simple write() call. But schedule() sums it up better - not only do you trigger all kinds of interesting activity, you actually call a function and come back, but you’ve become someone else in the process.

Maybe I’m just strange.

Man, they’re fun. This recent SPY call (summarized best here) is a pretty interesting thing. Does it mean someone’s got inside info on a terrorist strike? (Could be, there’s rumors of the same option call happening in 9/2001, but no real details, in true conspiracy theory style.) Is it a hedge fund trying to cash out what it can now to appease investors?

I’ve got an even weirder idea - what if it’s actually someone with a much broader interest and ability looking to artificially depress the market, or at least supress it until the 21st of Sept? If enough fear is spread, and the market holds steady, then there could be a huge influx of demand right afterward. What if someone bought in heavy on the 20th and sold heavily on a large upswing on the 25th? Get a load of that conspiracy theory - maybe it’s someone who considers the idea of losing a billion nothing at all. And all this noise is just to cause a market swing in their favor, after the crazy option call expires!

Anyway, it’s an interesting thing to think about - we’ll see what happens in any case!

This is a broad one. I’m not sure how to zero in on the root of what I want to discuss. I think the issue is lost efficiency, and the root cause is sloth, and the subject: engineers. I’d like to make a case that there’s a large underlying flaw in the industry thought processes, and through that, the people in it. This could be a book, but I don’t want to write a book, I want to write a short post. It makes sense in my head, but let’s see if I can get there through some process of reason rather than just a easy-as-pie prejudice.

Where do we start? There’s a lot of waste in the computer science field, a discipline that claims to have a focus on efficiency. This is ingrained in us almost from day one, to greater or lesser degrees. Raise your hand if you were shown bubble sort in CS101, followed by a lecture on how much better quicksort is. How about those exercises in assembly (do they teach that anymore?) to avoid a memory reference when a register would do?

This is all well and good, even if everyone promptly graduates, forgets all of this, and decides to go off and help develop the next javascript-based OS, like YouOS, GoogleOS, etc. It’s not about absolute gains made in efficiency, it’s about relative gains. Yeah, your sorting algorithm used to manage data in your Web 2.0-based OS isn’t going to be as fast as one hand-coded and running on bare metal. There’s a trade-off there. The important thing is that reasonable steps are made to be efficient given the tools at hand.

In this regard, software engineers do a decent job at making things fast enough, even if not everyone is uniformly capable of doing so. My issue is with the fact that this is as far as most engineers take their focus on efficiency.

Let me define the scope here, so the question of ‘how far should the focus go’ can have meaning. Really, it’s simple - more than just SQL code should be analyzed and optimized for efficiency. Efficiency is the ratio of output energy to input energy, so if you can do more with less, do so, regardless of the task. Energy applies to much more than that function displayed on the screen - the whole world runs on energy. If there’s going to be a focus on efficiency, let’s focus on efficiency, not just where it requires minimal effort to apply. (Let’s be specific: don’t just think about efficiency when you’re sitting in an office chair.)

Here’s an example - if it’s OK to spend hours reworking a set of functions and data to make better use of the system’s L2 cache, in order to make a possible small gain in speed (don’t get me started on benchmarking methodology), it should make just as much sense to ride a bike to the store instead of hopping in the F250. If page reload and resize speed get focus in the name of efficiency, then by all means, stop wasting all the energy invested in building, shipping, charging, and throwing out the latest stupid USB gizmo idea, cell phone, etc.

I could go on, but the specifics don’t matter - the idea is, if you care about efficiency, be efficient. Drive less. Don’t order lots of crap. Get a smaller house, insulate it. Install CFLs. Whoops. Specifics again. If you really only do care about bragging rights for speeding up that inner loop, that’s fine, but call it what it is (code masturbation?), it’s not a focus on efficiency. It’s an interest in code optimization. It’s a microscopic view of the much larger field of resource optimization.

I think the reason software appeals to so many is that it’s so accessible. It really doesn’t take much in the way of scientific rigor compared to the ‘hard’ sciences. Repercussions for poor choices and poor science are light compared, to, say, a bridge design that is found to be insufficient halfway through construction.

I’m not saying software should be hard; nearly infinite flexibility is what makes software so potentially powerful. My concern is that it’s too common for software engineers to fail to extrapolate what science they practice on the screen out to the larger world. If they did, their sense of the world would be better for it. Their sense of science would be better for it. In applying a better sense of science to a better view of the world, science itself would be better off. I think that would be a good thing.