Skin of Stars

Icon

Kevin Carmody on machines, media and miscellanea.

Oh my eyes

I write this through blurry vision having just had an injection into my eyeball. It seems I’ve been unlucky enough to be one of the few young people to have developed Macular Degeneration in my left eye. Seeing as I’m still reasonably young at 28 I decided to go for one of the fancy new unlicenced injections, my drug of choice in this instance is called Lutein. I’m happy to say that the eye hospital in Oxford is excellent and the doctor treating me is one of the best in the country. This still doesn’t take away the sting of the possible impact on a career in web-app design (I can’t see the screen so well these days), or the sting of the cost at £1500 an injection (no NHS for this treatment). Still, I hope to recover a bit of vision and perhaps in time I won’t even notice it. I just hope the already visible signs of it developing in the other eye don’t progress any further.

The Future

Just thought I’d mention the small feeling of sorrow that I have for the loss of Arthur C Clarke, a childhood hero of mine. I’ll append an image from xkcd which I think shows this feeling a little.

future

New toys

I’m very excited today after winning an auction last night on eBay. I’d decided that I needed a computer as doing graphic work and generally pouring through code is hard work on this little laptop. What I needed was a mighty box, which is what I’ve now just bought.

The specs on this beast are as follows; intel core2 quad with a combined speed of 9.6ghz, 2gb of ram (I will certainly upgrade that to 4gb), 500gb esata (quick access thingy) hard drive and an nvidia 8500gt graphics card which can do HiDef… which means I need a HiDef monitor, which I get that tomorrow, 22″ widescreen.

Yes, these are very geeky boys toys but I am now very excited. My next question is what operating system I’m going to put on it.

Live and evil

Lying in bed with my thoughts I have stumbled across a problem. It looks like this:

revel – lever
team – meat
nib – bin
tip – pit
real – lear
made – edam
desserts – stressed

What are they?

Now, I know that they are palindromes when placed together, what I want to know is the name of a word that changes its meaning when reversed. If you know the answer then for the sake of my sanity please post it in a comment. Also, I’d be interested to see any others that you can come up with.

Underground

I’d always wanted to see what an underground map would look like and the other day I remembered whilst infront of the computer. Now, the one I have below is not totally accurate insofar as exactly where the tubes are laid, but it is more so as far as the stations sit.

This map was generated as part of the
London Underground geographic maps project by software written by ed g2s and James D. Forrester utilising GPS data.

You may want to see the large version.

remember

My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming Planets.

Large Image

The wrong trousers

An American judge losses his 54 million dollar court case over suing a dry cleaners for lost trousers…. wtf?!

Should Blog More

I’ve been told off for not blogging much of late.

Phone IDeas

I’m terrible at saving numbers in my phone, mainly because my phone is so awkward to use, but normally because I think ‘I’ll do it later’. Surely it would be better if each phone had its own ID that the user sets which when you call someone it comes up as you ID/name. This avoids all those confused times of asking who it is when you don’t recognise the number, or in some peoples cases, not answering at all.
That is all.

National Trust – Blog A Little

Today is the day to blog. In an attempt to take a snapshot in time, the National Trust is asking that everone blog a littel about their day. I’ll come back later to do mine, for now here is the beeb link.

My Twitterings....

Powered by Twitter Tools

About

My name is Kevin Carmody and I live in Oxford, United Kingdom. I am a web developer with a penchant for community sites and a pedantry for open standards.

This here is a collection of my thoughts and musings, a spot for pooling a little of what's rattling around. Thanks for taking the time to visit and I hope you enjoy your stay.