Damn, it’s been awhile.
I’ve been unable to post because my eyes were so messed up it was simply too painful to do much on the computer except play my games. I was blinded every time I opened my own damned blog because of the white background. When I went out in the early morning I wore dark sunglasses because my eyes were extremely sensitive to bright light. It hasn’t been fun. At night I felt like I was living in a dark cave. I couldn’t get enough light even with all of the lamps on. It felt like I had sand in my eyes they were so dry.
It’s slowly getting better now. We changed light bulbs. We had put in CF light bulbs. At first they were great then I slowly noticed a change in my vision. When I sit here at the computer I have a lamp on the right side of the desk and on the left is the ceiling light fixture in the dining room. I’ve always had an extremely wide field of peripheral vision so I was getting blasted from both sides with the CF bulbs and from using the computer monitor. I’ve had problems with computer vision fatigue and had to take breaks but this was horrible. It was driving me slowly batty and was making me feel depressed. It was screwing with my vision to the point that I had trouble reading text period.
We changed back to the old light bulbs in the living room and dining room and damn you wouldn’t believe how much better my eyes felt. My eyes no longer feel like they’ve been pulled out and peeled and I no longer feel like I’m living in a cave at night. They’re slowly improving every day. I still have my computer set to a high contrast computer theme because I have come to grips with the fact that I’m an idiot. I felt that by using a high contrast theme that I was “giving in” to my vision problems. Like I said I was an idiot. Using the Stylish firefox plugin and by visiting userstyles.org I was able to download darker page styles to use for some of my favorite sites. I also adapted a style to use and added it for other pages that I view often.
By simply changing the light bulbs and changing the computer theme the difference is like night and day. I still need to adapt a theme for the blog and I intend to do that but I’m giving my eyes time to get back to what they used to be. I’m still going to be on a break from the blog but now I feel that I can eventually come back to it.
As for the money that you supposedly save with the CF bulbs? Screw it. My vision is a hell of a lot more valuable than the few measly bucks we would save.
March 21st, 2007 at 11:03 pm
Thanks, good topic. I have one CF lamp overhead at my desk, I use it intermittently, it has an annoying flicker that creeps up on you. I have a lot of them throughout the house for general lighting but they aren’t very good for reading.
I started using a CF bulb at work because the heat from incandescent bulbs were drying my eyes too much, I had no problems with them then because I wasn’t reading, only doing detailed assembly work, and used them for 3 years there. I do have two different types, the normal ones and a pair of special “daylight bulbs” that I really like but they are expensive and they don’t have that yellow cast to them.
I wore photogrey glasses for many years but they werent available in bifocal when my eyes quit due to age so I went to clear lenses, it took nearly a year for my eyes to adjust to….light.
I’m like you, vision is much more precious that a few cents worth of electricity.
Hope you get back to normal soon.