Pioneer on the Internet – Sean Gursky

Sometime in December I noticed that my vision was not as sharp as it used to be. I thought it was because of different lighting conditions at work or the darker days, but I found text was not as clear as it had been. Maybe it had always been a little fuzzy following my PRK surgery, or maybe something else changed. When I compare my vision from the left eye to the right eye there is definitely a difference and the right eye is noticeably blurry.

At the last appointment in 2009 with my ophthalmologist noted the pressure in my eye was a little high and to stop using the Flarex eye drops. Was it because of the pressure that my right eye started to lose focus? Or was it all unrelated? I was on track to have an appointment in spring of 2010 but I was concerned with my vision so I scheduled for an appointment for early February.

The pressure in my eye had decreased and was no longer a concern but the vision in my right eye was a 20/25 and the left eye was 20/20. The chances of the right eye improving were doubtful, but there may be no benefit in having surgery again on the eye. I can function day to day without an issue. Driving, playing hockey and other activities are fine; but when I am required to read text on a screen, especially at an angle, I have to get in closer to read it. Some days I feel I can see a little better in the right eye but after I do a quick left eye versus right eye comparison I’m reminded of how far from perfect 20/25 is.

I cannot do much about this for the time being, my anniversary is in two months and I wonder how my eye sight will be then. Will I need to get a pair of reading glasses soon? Should I consider surgery again? If so, would I go for PRK or Lasik? For now CanSeanSeeYet.com will be partially updated and may stay that way for the remaining two months on the domain registration.

For all other PRK surgery recovery posts see here.

Day two of the playoffs mean day one of the playoff beard. Vancouver starts their series against sixth seed Los Angeles tonight and I am hoping this will be the start of a beautiful thing and by June I will have a disgusting and shameful beard.

Again, the word ‘beard’ is used loosely, I don’t know if I will be able to better the growth I did last May. Perhaps I can last more than 27 days? Time, and my face, will tell.

I have a few other posts in draft status but this one is worthy of being pushed out the door promptly.

For the last four months, nearly to the day, Jenna and I have been thinking about houses. We look at For Sale signs when we are driving, we watch any property hunting or home renovation show we can on TV and we constantly check MLS.ca for homes and new listings. In the last sixteen weeks we have considered building a house, moving to Beaumont and living anywhere from Terwillegar to Tamarack.

In the last four weeks we have listed our condo, sold it and have an offer accepted on a house both of us love. The 24 hours leading up to the offer acceptance was amazing and is nothing short of a real estate miracle.

Wednesday April 7 we met with our Realtor in Sherwood Park to look at a few houses. The first house we saw caught our attention and became our favorite of any we had seen in the month prior (between Open Houses and tours with our Realtor). There were things that needed work but it was a strong candidate. The second house we went to immediately caught my eye and before walking into the house I was in love. You could argue the proximity to Little Caesars Pizza and being on the same road Gord lived on were factors, but they just sweetened the deal of a house that was amazing.

I raved about the house for the next few days and built it up so much in my mind. Both houses that appealed to us would require a second showing, but we used Saturday April 10 as an opportunity to see additional properties and see if those houses still stood up in our mind. They did, and on Monday April 12 we returned to Sherwood Park to see the two houses we liked. Our Realtor broke the news outside of our first stop that the house I loved most was not available, because an offer had been made on April 10th and that we should move on to find that right place for us.

It may have been the crushing news outside of the house, or that the house didn’t appeal to us on a second viewing, but the place didn’t speak to us the same way and we continued looking at properties on Monday night. At 9PM on Monday we got home and felt deflated about everything. The houses we liked were unavailable or weren’t as good and after 20+ viewings we were back at square one.

Tuesday morning I received a text from our Realtor saying the offer on the house had fallen through and we had a second chance to view the house and see if it was worth making an offer. This house had been on the market just over a week and had a lot of foot traffic so we knew time was important and arranged for a viewing four hours later at 2PM. I left work early, picked up Jenna and critically evaluated the house I loved a week prior. It still looked good and as we went room to room we started building our future, imagining coffee on the deck, working on the kitchen island and living on a quiet road.

We were still in the house at 2:30PM when another Realtor showed up with clients, we finished up our viewing and decided to make an offer. Over a cup of coffee we prepared the papers and our Realtor drove the offer to the sellers agent. When he arrived their agent was on the phone with the Realtor we had seen at 2:30PM and was interested in putting in an offer. When she found out an offer was in place she backed out for not wanting to get into a bidding war, something we were hoping to avoid too.

A few restless hours went by and at 8:34PM we received a call from our Realtor, talked numbers on our counter offer and ten minutes later the house was ours. 24 hours prior we were going through the break up process of a house we loved to owning it.

Our Realtor said the right house comes along when you are ready, and had told us that offers do fall through and there could be a chance for us to get this house. We were doubtful about any of that working out, but it did. It was the perfect ending for a house we loved and a story that him, and us, will share for years to come.

I had a pretty good week with hot dogs. It has been over two months since my last tube steak and in the span of a week I had three meals of dogs adding to my count by 8.

My dream of getting to 52 (again) is still alive.

I feel like I missed a great opportunity to recap 2009, or even the decade that was. The final weeks of December flew by at an accelerated rate I didn’t think about a blog entry to commemorate the occasion. Therefore I am going to take a recent page from Jeff’s blog and do a statistical year in review.

Top 10 Google Queries
1. google analytics
2. wct
3. weather Edmonton
4. wcf
5. canada post tracking
6. ack attack
7. sean gursky
8. whois seagurs.com
9. virgin festival 2009 calgary
10. petro points

I have two Gmail accounts, one for work and one for personal but my work account does not have Web History enabled so everything that did go through my query appeared above. My busiest month for searching was in January with 489 queries recorded, and my least active month was in July with 117.

Top 10 sites
1. en.wikipedia.org
2. www.imdb.com
3. www.seagurs.com
4. www.worldcurlingtour.com
5. www.php.net
6. www.amazon.com
7. www.google.com
8. answers.yahoo.com
9. www.youtube.com
10. www.tv.com

I guess these results tell me I was obsessed with the status of seagurs.com (when it was in Redemption Period with 1&1 and waiting to take ownership back) and could never be bothered with bookmarking the Analytics site, or even learning how to spell it correctly. No idea how Virgin Festival made it into my top ten, especially since I did not even consider attending, but it stands as a testament to the year that was.

Top 10 Artists
1. Bear McCreary (2,587 plays)
2. The White Stripes (1,434 plays)
3. U2 (1,387 plays)
4. Matthew Good (877 plays)
5. Philip Glass (777 plays)
6. Bad Religion (726 plays)
7. The Beatles (684 plays)
8. Coldplay (680 plays)
9. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard (668 plays)
10. Michael Giacchino (520 plays)

No surprise by this, but maybe the sheer volume that Bear McCreary beat everyone else in the last twelve months is worth mentioning. Not counting the occasional song on Battlestar Galactica that contains lyrics, four of my top ten artists were instrumental and three of those were purely from soundtracks.

Top 10 Tracks
1. Philip Glass – Metamorphosis One (124 plays)
2. Philip Glass – Metamorphosis Five (123 plays)
3. Philip Glass – Metamorphosis Two (111 plays)
4. Philip Glass – Metamorphosis Three (104 plays)
5. Regina Spektor – Man of a Thousand Faces (97 plays)
5. Philip Glass – Metamorphosis Four (97 plays)
7. Bear McCreary – All Along The Watchtower (77 plays)
8. Bear McCreary – Heeding the Call (74 plays)
9. Bear McCreary – Sonatica (72 plays)
10. Bear McCreary – Passacaglia (65 plays)

Pianos and Bear charge the way. I really enjoy Man of a Thousand Faces, it’s a beautiful song but I didn’t realize that I had listened to it over 3.5 times a week (“Far” was released in June, halfway through the year).

I boarded eight different flights in 2009, flying to London, Marseille, Calgary and Las Vegas. Those eights flights spanned the same number of weeks. Roughly thirty hours of flight time equated to covering a distance of 22,242 kilometres. I drove my VW Jetta TDI 11,000 kilometers and filled up the vehicles 16 times and filed a single police report.

In 2009 I wrote 81 blog posts and I sent roughly 350 emails from my @gmail.com and @seangursky.com email accounts and 110 from my @hotmail.com address. I made fifteen orders with amazon.ca, two with amazon.com, one from amazon.co.uk and three with monoprice.com.

My rough estimates lead me to believe that I took nearly 7,500 photos with six different cameras. 17% of my photos taken this year were done in the two weeks in England/France. The majority of my total photo count came from my Canon EOS T1i/500D which had over 5,300 actuations.

We shall see what 2010 holds, and if my past numbers will continue into the New Year or not. 364 days remain…

Life goes on and sometimes the blog gets left behind.

The Christmas break for TV shows has started to kick in. Some shows (FlashForward, V) may not return until after the Olympics, others will begin again in January, but this quiet is the calm before the storm. It will give me a chance to re-watch season five of Lost and prepare for the final season in February.

Details about the sixth season are very accessible. Casting spoilers can appear in an interview for TV Guide or in a not-Lost related article. With just over fifty days to go it is easy to cave and read the smallest detail, but I want to go into February with as much unknown as possible.

To pass the time a little easier and get excited for the upcoming season I have spent a lot of time watching fan made Lost trailers. In Preparation for Season 6 is some of the best fan work I have seen on any trailer. Keeping in ABC fashion (where no new footage is shown in previews) these videos do a great job of building up certain elements of the show.

Blue Skies Over Bad Lands
Sadly the giant black hole that appeared over Norway turned out to be nothing more than the Russians testing a missile out at water. The photos from this entertained the alien geek in all of us and fueled the what if conversation a little bit more.

Tube Steak Challenge
A long overdue update wouldn’t be without an increase to the Tube Steak Challenge. Thanks to my nieces second birthday I was able to add three more to the drive to fifty-two.

On the Edmonton Journal website today I saw an article about the new arena increasing property values. The text didn’t grab my attention as much as the concept of the arena.

I immediately thought of one thing; the new Apple Magic Mouse!

Way to go team, way to go.

When my torrents started to act up a few days ago I thought nothing of it. I chalked it up to the tracker being problematic, Shaw being stubborn, a weird seed to peer ratio or something else I would investigate later. I never thought it meant that my RAID 5 system had failed. When I went into Disk Management and saw my RAID drive not recognized my face turned a ghastly expression and Jenna said she “never wanted to see that look on me again”.

Wingman was crying for me and for over a day I neglected the signs. In fact it had been crying for so long that two drives were marked as failed. In a RAID 5 system it can survive if a single drive fails, but two or more is when things get serious and I had a critical issue on hand.

My 1and1 data loss in March is still an open wound and the thought of losing everything was too much to handle. When I say everything I mean it. I could survive if my Videos folder disappeared. I could slowly rebuild it over time, cut back on what I wanted to watch. However losing the photos would be an injury I could never recover from. I may not look at our Jasper photos from 2004, or reminesce about the giant pizza Dad and I made one day, but I always could, and to have that taken away would have been huge.

The thought of losing everything started to takes its toll as the RAID was being examined at work. How would I recover? What would I do differently? It was like being faced with a life changing conversation at the doctors office after being told what the dark spot on your x-ray meant.

This was a road I did not want to go down but I prepared for the worst and contemplated what would be my poison as I intended on drowning my sorrows in the evening if the results weren’t good.

Our company IT man, Nigel, had been investigating the RAID and seeing what (if anything) he could recover. After a few hours had passed I heard an exclamation of victory and I was told Wingman would be okay. One hard drive was lost in the process and I would be wise to add a fifth drive to the array to allow for proper redundancy. Fortunately the next task of locating an old model hard drive was easy and for $140 (plus the lunch I owe Nigel) Wingman will be okay and with no data loss.

The Sunday before all of this started Jenna and I were relaxing at home and she was watching an episode of “Sex and the City”. It happened to be My Motherboard, My Self in which Carrie Bradshaw has her Macintosh laptop die and loses all of her files. Everyone she spoke with asks her what she uses to backup and equates backing up to something everyone does that no one talks about.

Even with a backup solution you can still come face to face with losing everything and having nothing.

From Me To U2
It’s old news now, but U2 is coming to Edmonton in June 2010!

The Monday after we returned from Las Vegas I saw rumors about an upcoming announcement and was thrilled to see a planned stop at Commonwealth Stadium. The U2.com pre-sale started less than 36 hours after the concert was announced and I was back in the same uncomfortable and stressed situation of vying for tickets. Would I play the odds and expect a second show to be added? Or should I play it safe and get seats?

The second tour date never happened, but from my understanding Live Nation stopped the roll out of a second show due to slow ticket sales. Hours after the public sale tickets were still available, and even the following day seats were available in the upper balconies. AC/DC sold out Commonwealth in the summer within minutes, and since this show did not get that same treatment Edmonton will only be enjoying one show. It’s easy to get hung up on the show that got away, but the important item here is that U2 is coming and I can stay within my area code to see them perform.

I ended up buying two seated tickets (closer to the center of the stadium to fully appreciate the stage from the front) and two general admission tickets. I often say that the April 10, 2001 performance I saw of U2 in Calgary was a life changing experience, and I think being on the floor for that was a strong reason why the night was so memorable. To get an optimum spot on the floor you have to wait in line. In 2001 I was in line for eight hours, and that is the norm for most lineups, especially if you would like a chance at the ‘inner circle’. I am still not sure which way I am leaning, we have already seen the show from the seats and a floor performance would give us more appreciation for the frenzy; but at the cost of sitting and waiting all day.

I came across this time lapse video of the “Claw” as it was constructed, performed on and torn down the other day and it immediately brought my excitement level back up for the show. Now to just get through the next eight months.

Nose Bleed Count
The count is now up to nine. There have been a few close calls but were just drips compared to the river of blood that is needed to count for this. The humidifier has been brought out of hibernation as I try and battle the dry climate.

It has been over four months since my surgery, and yesterday I had my final appointment of 2009. I have not noticed any improvements or discomfort over the last few months, it has felt natural; almost like I never had glasses at all. I was seeing 20/20 in July, but I had to guess on some letters. Yesterday I was still rated at 20/20 and some of the letters did not seem as fuzzy before, or maybe I exaggerated how fuzzy they were originally; either way my score remained the same. I do wish my eye sight was a little stronger, but 20/20 is the optimum eye sight so I shouldn’t be too upset over being normal.

The doctor has recommended I stop taking Flarex as part of my daily regime as there was no scaring or haze on the eye. He did note that my pressure was high and told me that about 10% of patients who use Flarex have increased pressure in the eye because of it. When I go for my next appointment in six months my pressure will be re-evaluated then and we can see if not using Flarex helped, or if it was related to something else all together.

With a clean bill of sight I feel good about my decision. The weeks following the surgery were difficult, but not having to travel with glasses, contacts and appropriate solution is amazing and worth the frustration I had in June. If I play hockey I can just get my gear and go. I don’t have to plan my day around when I put contacts in or if they need to go through another round of solution to make sure they are sufficiently lubricated.

I am not sure what to do with my glasses. I have some frames I like a lot, but I will never wear them again. When I need to wear glasses again it would cost more to get the new prescription put into the frames than to order a new pair online, but throwing them out is like Kerry Weaver walking for the first time without her cane. I will think on this further and hold onto the frames…for now.

In the mean time, can Sean see yet? Yes!