Introduction, and Creating This Blog

What you should know about me is that I'm a 30-something man living in upstate New York. For those of you not from New York, that means I'm from that fairly vast area of land which is part of New York State, but not the city of New York.

I'm not starting up this blog to bore you about my opinions of things. I'm not an important person, so my opinions are irrelevant. Maybe I'm doing this blog for me. I want to record and share my unique experiences of the world.

I have the condition Retinitis Pigmentosa. Wiki it for more details, but the TLDS version is that my vision is bad, but I'm not completely blind. The problem cannot be fixed with glasses or laser surgery. As of this date, there is no truly viable treatment that I'm aware of to combat genetic RP. If I'm lucky, something will be devised within my lifetime.

I think people are baffled by the concept of 'partial vision'. They can't wrap their heads around it. They think of vision as an 'all or nothing' thing. I, and many like me, don't fit into that conception of vision. We have been painfully aware of the fact that there is a spectrum of vision, and it can be an amazingly wide spectrum, from normal, to beyodn normal, to blurry, to shadowy, to non-existant. My vision is a bit closer to the 'non-existant' side of the spectrum than the normal side, so I'm going to try to give my readers a window into my world, to try to put into words what it is like living the way I do. Like I wrote above, maybe this is mostly for me.

/introduction

My first example will be the very act of creating this blog. My computer is my gateway to the outside world. Technology has done wonders for expanding the capabilities of people like me. Even still, it's not perfect. I don't take advantage of every program or option that I could. For instance, I avoid screen-reading programs. I find them annoying. I use a text-to-speech program, but I generally use it only to read long blocks of text. Thank you, people who made ReadPlease, for your product.

What I mainly use is a part of Windows that has been a part of every Windows OS since 95, at least, which very few people know about. It's a Magnifier, which these days can take several forms, but I use it as a small window in the upper right hand corner of my screen which magnifies everything near my cursor, and everything I type by 5x. The magnification can be adjusted, of course.

While this solution generally works for me, it has some drawbacks. I can only example a small portion of my screen at any given time in any significant detail, so when I went to create my blog, I found the 'create your blog' option in the middle of the Blogspot cover-page easily enough, but failed to realize that because I already had a Google account, I really should have just logged in, and it just made the process yet more complicated. Obviously, I eventually figured it out.

Choosing my template was also a shot in the dark. I could tell the examle boxes were there, but could not see well enough what the templates really looked like. I decided to go with the Simple formet, though I was tempted to go with Awesome Inc. What do you think, did I make the right choice?

That's it for this entry, but I have another one coming right up soon.