Epidiascope

Very little sleep last night, finishing one of my own papers, and then helping a friend finish a 7 page paper starting from scratch at around midnight. Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to playing L4D tomorrow night.

In case I haven’t mentioned it, go buy Left4Dead, it’s really a hell of a lot of fun. 4-player team-play zombie killing, built to be like a classic zombie action flick. The lighting really adds a lot to the texture of the game and the level design – you want to hop between pools of light. You stay together, your team probably only dies some – one player wanders off, they die quite quickly. Some really fun set pieces, and the replayability is quite good, given the “Director” technology which gauges player stress level, and throws zombies in as appropriate to create a fun balanced experience. It’s different every time you play through a map. Not a game one can play on push-to-talk, it’s open-mic all the way – there’s no time to press the button when you’re suddenly being overrun by a zombie horde. I was hoarse after my first several hour play session. It’s really fantastic when you get a full 4 player game.

Also, tonight I’m starting my first night of the Overnight Orthokeratology research program I’m participating in through the UC Berkeley Clinical Research Center. Essentially, it’s a custom hard contact designed to be worn at night, which reshapes your eye such that after a few days of wear, your vision is corrected during the day even without the contact. Normally a $1.2k+ treatment, it’s free for me as a research participant (of course, I have to go in regularly and let them measure my progress, keep a wear diary, etc.).

Yesterday (my third visit, the first two consisting of a million detailed measurements of my eyes) I was shown how to put in the preliminary set of contacts, and I am supposed to wear them tonight for the first time. They were (as expected) pretty uncomfortable at first, but after a few minutes my eyes had stopped watering enough to notice that the optical quality of hard contacts FAR surpasses that of the soft lenses I have worn in the past. If this treatment doesn’t end up working out for me, I may look into getting hard lenses. They were relatively comfortable when I had my eyes closed, so hopefully sleeping won’t be too bad. I go in tomorrow morning right after waking (and wear the lenses to the appointment) to get an evaluation, see how much improvement there is, and to decide whether I should continue to wear this pair over the holiday weekend. The doctor will order the custom lenses after tomorrow if everything looks good, and I’ll have them in a week or two. I’m excited!

You might also want to look at my other posts on Overnight Orthokeratalogy.

I must quickly plug Doodle, a really wonderful scheduling/polling tool with an extremely low barrier to entry for everyone involved.