11.20-11/27 Laser treatment, Life of Pi, XP usage

On the last two Tuesdays I have had laser reattachment on my left eye. There is still one laser treatment on 
the left eye this coming Thursday. Hopefully that will complete the treatment for the left eye.

The right eye detachment is still too large for laser treatment but is getting smaller. There are 2 options:

1. Wait for the attachment to improve and then use laser.
2. Do an operation that injects gas into the right eye that with push the flap of detachment against the back of the eyeball. Then at a latter date, use the laser to reattach can repair small tears.

The result of today's checkup was to wait another week before deciding among the 2 options. I's good that I am retired and have the time to wait.

Both eyes are still being squeezed by the belts placed around them in the first surgery. These belts will deform the eyeballs and I will probably be more myoptic than before. So when all the treatments are completed I will definitely get a new glasses prescription. We estimate that the process will last another 2 months. Patience, try to possess it.


New topic - XP Usage

Taiwan has lots of small businesses copy shops, drugstores, stationary stores, restaurants.  They use a computer for billing, inventory, email ... and they all seem to be running Windows XP. While Microsoft(MS) is pushing Windows 8, most of these uses have skipped Windows Vista and Windows 7 and will probably skip Windows 8 too.

I think most of this is due to the existing hardware and Windows XP being adequate and additional features from MS or extra speed and memory of new hardware are not needed. Also as long as the hardware is adequate, upgrading the OS will just slow down operations. MS has never been good about preserving the user's investment whether hardware or software. On the software side "backwards compatibility" is not in the MS vocabulary.

Question: What features of Windows Vista, Windows7 or Windows 8 can't you live without?

Question: What is the most useless key on the keyboard?

New Topic - "Life of PI"

This past Sunday a group of 10 of us went to see the movie "Life of Pi" which was directed by the Taiwanese director Lee Ang. I couldn't see much of the details, but the story was good. I think the second story of the survival is the real one, the one of the movie is the one to make life beautiful. I don't see how the story can make one believe in God. I do believe that we invent our Gods to make life more beautiful that it is. I recommend the movie, I plan to see it again when my eyes are better maybe I missed something.

The cost of "The Life of Pi" in 3D was about the equivalent of $11 US. The per capita income of US is about $48K versus $20K for Taiwan. So going to the movies is more dear in Taiwan than in the US. For the time we were there, it seemed that going to the movies was more like a date, with many couples dressed up.

Cheap Haircuts

100NT haircuts are pretty common now in Taipei. Here i am with my barber. The machine next to us is a dispenser. You put in a 100NT bill and you're given the next number in the queue.

11/13-11/20 surgery, magnifiers, apartment

Florence and I went to the emergency ward on Sunday(11/11) morning for the eye surgery. The operation lasted about 4 hours(so they tell me). Both eyes were wrapped in belts under the eye muscles, The belts are tightened to increase the pressure within the eyeball. Hopefully that pressure would push the flap of detached retina against the back of the eyeball. The left eyeball had the worst detachment and so a bubble of gas was injected into the left eyeball. When lying prone(face down) the bubble would rise to the back of the eyeball and hopefully push the flap of detachment agaisnt the eyeball. This was all done under general anesthesia
so I wasn't really there.

The bandages came off Tuesday morning. Although the doctor had warned me, my vision was less than what it was before the surgery. I could see blobs of light but no details, this was depressing. But after 2 days the vision in both eyes improved and I was discharged from the hospital. I still could see the gas bubble in the left eye and the bubble had correctly pushed the retinal flap against the back of the eyeball.

I left the hospital with a boatload of pills, drops and sauve. Puffy eyelida and red eyes. They say that at the Battles of Lexington and Concord the colonials were told to hold their fire until "You see the whites of their eyes." If I had been a soldier for King George, I could have walked right through their lines as the whites of my eyes were gone.

I could not read or use the computer without a lot of magnification. I blewup the icons on my desktop to be the size of a cellphone display. I used the high contrast Desktop settings, I used the onscreen magnifyer, I bought a black lettering on white keys keyboard(that helped a lot). I could stumble my way through email.

I now have an impressive collection of magnifyers:

The best is the handsfree unit:

In the meantime, our apartment is in good shape. We have the same apartment and landlord as last time. We have a good relationship so the landlord has really made some improvements. We are still in the Redlight district but close to Florence's relatives and now the MacKay Hospital. We have new windows, new curtains, a microwave, a new flat screen TV, a new couch and maybe even the same pigeons.

11/6-11/12, lost wallet, first lesson, single payer

This week something happened that I can't see happening in the US. Florence lost her wallet out of her fanny pack. The zipper was open and it just fell out. In the wallet there was a bankcard and maybe $150 worth of Taiwanese money. The bankcard has a 8 digit pin so the account was safe but then there would be all that hassle of reporting a lost card, waiting for a new card, new pin number ...

Then Florence got a call from the bank saying someone had turned in the card and that we should come to the bank and pick it up. It seems someone had found the wallet and turned it into their local bank. Then when we picked up the found card, the bank called the finder and the finder came to the bank with the rest of the wallet. We tried to reward the finder but she wouldn't take any money. She actually thanked us for showing up because otherwise she would have to go to the police and go through the hassle of reporting the found wallet.

Wow, in the US the wallet would be in the trash can and the money long gone!

This week I had my first class as an English teacher. My student is a manager at HSBC and a friend of one of Florence's nieces. We meet for one hour a week and concentrate on English conversation. But on my way to our first class I couldn't find her office! The street numbering in Taiwan is different than that in the US. I have written about this before:

http://mikeintaipei.blogspot.tw/2012/05/convenience.html

In Taiwan, the streets are on a NS/EW grid like in the US but the road that marks the boundardy between N and S and E and W is not always the same. Also the numbering is divided into even on one side and odd on the other. But in Taiwan, the numbering includes a "section" and so the house number rarely goes above 500 before a new section is begun.

So on my first day of class, I had the correct house number but I forgot that there had to be a section number. When I realized that I didn't have the complete address, I called the student and eventually got the complete address(it was Dunhua South Road, #199, Section 2). So when I called the student, she asked me where I was, I was so far in the wrong direction that she didn't recognize the local landmarks. One of the landmarks I thought she might remember was this one.

This "sculpture" encloses the Walk/Don't Walk LED display. This whole episode made me feel like a "horses's ass." That phrase is one of my mother's favorite, I had to look it up on the web, and yep it's exactly what I thought it meant.

Last year when Florence and I were in Taiwan, I applied for the Alien Resident Certificate(ARC). being the spouse of a Taiwanese citizen, I got it. It was a lot like applying for a Green Card in the US. The hardest part was collecting all the police reports, marriage certificate, ... and having them officially translated into Chinese. Then after 3 months of continuous living in Taiwan with the ARC, I applyed for the National Healthcare Insurance card. With the help of Florence and her relatives, it all went smoothly.

(The Taiwanese Healthcare Insurance Plan is a "single payer" system. That's one Obama almost immediately gave up on in his negotiations with the Republicans. Basically every citizen(or legal resident) pays a flat monthly fee,  currently the equivalent of $24. The government pays all medical bills and has a vested interest in keeping its citizens healthy. And the government can use the strength of a monopoly to weed out "bad apples" and providers that overcharge.)


So this time when coming to Taiwan I came as a legal resident not as a tourist or on a Student Visa. 10 days into our trip to Taiwan my eyes really started to fail, they had been gradually deteriorating over the Summer, but now I was becoming blind. I went in on Friday to the MacKay Hospital and they said it was bad, there was a followup exam on Saturday and on Sunday I was in Surgery.

10/29-11/5

I am back in Taiwan. This is the 4th year in a row that I am living 5 or 6 months in Taiwan.I put a lot of effort into the previous blogs but don't plan to spend so much time organizing and planning this time.
I reread my previous blogs at:

tainanchineseclass.blogspot.tw
mikeess-trip.blogspot.tw
mikeintaipei.blogspot.tw

now I am at:

mikeintaipei2.blogspot.tw

It's simpler to just do sequential weeks with random thought.

This week went fast, we got our apartment from last year and got setup quick.

Halloween was this week and although ghosts are popular in Taiwan, Halloween is not a big holiday. But there were a few in costume. Could be Riley's competitor.

As I've noted before English pronunciation has almost no rules, so in Taiwan you get some phonetically correct names that are propably spelling contest incorrect.

We went to a wedding last weekend, so many people taking pictures, I didn't get a good one. This was my best.

The wedding was setup for 270 people, you know with so many people the food can't be too good. But the

purpose of such a wedding is for socializing anyway. There was one new "wedding event", the bride chosse 10 of her friends and the groom chose 10 of his friends as teams in a drinking contest. Both had to drink beer from pitchers using a straw, the girls one pitcher, the boys two pitchers. I couldn't see who won.