Saccades

☯

It's becoming more and more apparent that my intensely-considered purchase of some very expensive (for me) Bose noise-canceling earphones was a life-giving investment for my sanity. What's really insane is that I'm legally deaf. Being legally deaf and having to wear noise-canceling head phones is just crazy. I've tried to make sense out of this predicament, but so far, I've not been very successful. '-)

Each morning and throughout the day I'm beginning to realize that I have to learn to see all over again. Having to do this with another of my senses has been (and is) burdensome, but like with teaching myself to hear through my skin using the Neurophone, it has yielded odd, but beneficial results. 

The artificial lenses the surgeons installed to replace my original biological lenses are made of clear plastic and not stained by over forty years of smoking tobacco. The reason I have to re-learn to see is because there is a lot more light coming into my eyes now, and my brain has to learn to cope with the availability of all that new-found light. I can cop an attitude about the adjustments I'm having to employ in order to accommodate my new condition, but that would be silly wouldn't it? 

For the last week or so I've been attempting to set up my own website as the container for this blog. For this purpose I bought a domain name to host the site. You can see what I've done to get it online by going to http:// felixperegrino.com. The only thing you'll see there so far is the text of my disclaimer header like it appears at the top just under the pic of the painting of Falstaff above. My youngest brother is hosting it for me on his own unlimited account with godaddy.com. Since the website is only intended to host a blog format similar to this one, it's purportedly not a huge task to conjure. Unless you're a neophyte like me. I'll probably use more images because it's easy to set up my own unlimited images folder to use as I please, but mostly I like words.

My brother makes a living from what he sells on his websites. He's got this HTML thang down. He's hosting my site for free, and helped me to get it online with the text paragraph you can see there as the front page. It's not like my brother won't continue to help me get it going, he will, but not only is he busy with his businesses and his family, it will be more interesting if I learn enough about websites to set it up as a blog and maintain it by myself.

I don't have a problem posting here on Blogger.com, but it was bought up by Google, and Google appears to be getting autocratic and totally abandoning their credo: Do no harm. I've been a big fan of Google since they initially showed up with a clean, easy to use design, yet sadly, they're already going the way of all good things and become a part of the military/industrial complex. 

To learn what I need to know about creating and maintaining a website, I've started watching how-to videos to generate or inspire constructive thinking about the tools I need to get a viable end result and how to use them. This video-watching method has been useful in the past. Apparently people, in general, take a lotta pride in displaying their expertise using the various methodologies for doing they love to do. They appear to enjoy making video tutorials on just about any facet of life that intrigues them. I love this about people. How truly humane.

One of the reasons I'm watching the videos to learn how to setup and manage a website on my own is that doing so gives me a lotta say so over what appears on the website and for why. I own the domain name felixperegrino.com. It's mine for the next two years or for as long as I pay per year to keep it. Having to turn to somebody else to maintain it defeats the whole purpose of ownership. 

In keeping with my basic nature, that of a miser filled to the brim with avarice, I gotta find the cheapest way to get this done. I'd like to buy the software program Dreamweaver to accomplish this end, because my brother uses Dreamweaver and he is perfectly willing to help me learn what I need to know, but Dreamweaver is expensive and actually much more than I need. 

Dreamweaver is owned by the same company as Photoshop called Adobe, and it's complicated like that too. Eventually, if I enjoy messing around with it I might set up a commercial site and try to make some money with a website, but that's a big if. Presently I'm checking out a free open source software program called KompoZer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KompoZer

Maybe it will do the job for me or maybe not, which is the whole point, that presently I'm fumbling around trying to get started with something. If I just wanted to set up a blog and let it go at that I could use WordPress, but that's hitching a ride in somebody else's wagon, and not much different than using a source like blogger.com to express my inimitable opinions. Sometimes these sources wanna censor what people say on their nickel. 

It's probably a good thing my eyes got fixed so that I can see what appears on my monitor without wearing eyeglasses. At first I thought I might need at least reading glasses, and I probably still will need them for low light and small print conditions. A lot of the problems I've had so far seems to be associated with relearning how to see. 

I couldn't see very well through the cataracts even with the best prescription the optometrists could come up with because I just wasn't getting enough light through the lenses of my eyes. It was because of this progressive darkening of the light that it got to where I stopped trying to see what I looked at. 

I saw in glances instead of focusing directly at what appeared in my in the center of my focus. Now that I can see what I focus my vision upon I have to learn to actually look at what's there and truly seeing it for the purpose of comprehension. If you're interested in how the eyes see things a useful expression to type into Google might be "visual glances". It's been a fascinating side journey for me. 

☯