Moved

Posted by HELiX

After a year in a Malaysian KL server, I’ve decided to move back my web host to Singapore. The higher speed was the main factor. This move was made despite the strong and highly unsound opinion of the audience.

Also, I registered a new domain to point to my website. It isn’t anywhere as cheap as a normal domain, but I thought that I’d better take it up first before someone else does.

http://www.helix.sg!

I wanted to launch a new site design together with the change of web host, but I’ve been behind schedule from the busy days I’ve been having. I’ll try to get it up within the next few days though.

Just a little sneak peek for now. The new design is named Helixated.com Version 4: Web 2.0 Edition, so you can infer some ideas from there. It’s codenamed Blue, which was the main factor guiding its theme.

Other than looking much more cooler and pleasant than the current one, a couple of pages will also be added. For once, you can expect an About Me page.

Comments(0) 11:28 PM 11 November 2008

Best Hand Cream Ever

Posted by HELiX

I was just looking through my photo archives from my previous vacations, and I found this. Maybe I’ve ever posted it here, but I can’t remember.

It was in Guangzhou, China.

Talk about Brand Name fail.

And $10 that it contains melamine.

Comments(0) 12:42 AM 11 November 2008

Okay ;)

Posted by HELiX

Comments(0) 4:49 PM 11 November 2008

Post Lasik Follow-Up

Posted by HELiX

A day after the first surgery of my life, I had to go for a check-up to review the results of my surgery. The results vary from person to person. Generally, 95% of lasik patients will obtain a eyesight better than or equal to 6/12.

Turned out to be pretty good actually.

A staff tested my eyes and found both to be 6/4.2.

Now, generally, a 6/6 eyesight is accepted to be perfect vision. As your vision gets worse, the second number increases. A 6/12 eyesight is the bare minimum needed to drive legally.

And somehow, I managed a 6/4.2 in both eyes. This means that I managed to read the line of letters which was smaller than what a person with a 6/6 perfect vision can.

Which in the doctor’s words, “You have an eyesight better than perfect.”

LOL. Win.

Comments(0) 11:08 PM 11 November 2008

Lasik Surgery

Posted by HELiX

Today, a day before my 18th birthday, I went for Lasik surgery. Quite possibly one of the youngest to do so, at 17 years and 364 days.

Being under 21, there’s a 3% chance that my vision will return to its original state of myopia. After 21, the probability drops to 1%.

And for all Lasik patients alike, there’s a 95% of success of achieving a 6/12 vision at least. A 6/12 vision isn’t perfect vision, but it’s pretty good already. It’s the minimum for driving in Singapore.

So, this is to say, things could go wrong.

Lasik surgery is one of the coolest surgeries for a few reasons.

1. No pain! But like many other forms of surgery, this is due to the amount of painkillers and anaesthetic eyedrops loaded into your eye.

2. You are fully conscious.

3. And being conscious, you SEE everything. Yes, you SEE the surgery as it is being performed on your eyes.

Of course, you’d be interested of how everything feels and looks like from my eyes. So let me take you through.

LASIK SURGERY FROM MY EYES

First, I was ushered to the preparation area. Then came the anaesthetic eyedrops. It’s pretty much the same as any other eyedrops. And then they cleaned my eyelids with alcohol and finally I was made to wear a gown and that cap. Like in hospitals. Uh.

Facial expression at this point in time:  o_O

Uh, without the facial mask and glasses.

And then I was brought to this very comfortable chair, and was given two pills.

“Painkiller and sleeping pills.”

Facial expression at this point in time:  O_O

Around the chair, the staff closed the curtains as the drugs set in. This went on for 5~10 minutes.

Facial expression at this point in time:  o_o

Another staff, fully dressed in the surgical gown and all, opened the curtain and pointed the way into the operating zone. Oh crap, this was it. By the way, the sleeping pill had almost no effect.

Facial expression at this point in time:  >_<

…There was more waiting around to be done, as the staff added more eyedrops and cleaned my eyelids another time. Probably as an assurance before the operation. A final check done by the doctor.

And finally, after a lot of waiting around, I was brought into the first operating theatre. Here, the Intralase laser will create a flap in my cornea. I think it would help if I explain how Lasik works.

In normal Lasik surgery, the doctor uses a metal blade to create the flap in the cornea. After my mom and brother went through that, my mom decided that I should try the more expensive bladeless surgery. Where, instead of a blade cutting my cornea, another laser is used instead.

I thought that this was probably the most uncomfortable part of the whole operation. The doctor held my eyelids open with a device I couldn’t quite make out. I was made to lie flat and this machine approached my right-eye.It was slightly larger than my eye, and had a circular pattern of white lights around it.

The middle was hollow, as if a small mirror was inside, and I was told to look at it.

Of course this device was covering my right eye and I still could see other stuffs using my left.

The device was lowered… and device… and suddenly, my vision changed. Suddenly. I couldn’t see that hole I was supposed to look at anymore.

In a second or two, I came back back to my senses. I was somewhat half-blind at the point in time. The machine was cutting my cornea in my right eye, and I couldn’t even use it to see. It wasn’t darkness, like when you close your eyes. It wasn’t bright and full of light either. At that point in time, my only vision was in the left eye. I couldn’t say what I was seeing with my right eye because I couldn’t see with it at all.

While my right-eye couldn’t see, it could FEEL the machine. I don’t know how, but there was pressure.

After 10 seconds, the machine was done and backed away from my eye. The pressure was released and tears automatically flowed from my eyes. Relief.

In this time, the machine had used its laser to cut and create a flap in my cornea.

Everything was a total blur in my right. In fact, worse than a blur. I couldn’t make out anything except for visible light.

Facial expression at this point in time:  o_X

The machine moved on and repeated the process with my left-eye. The thing about Lasik that I really disliked was that it is used to correct both eyes. So after going through the discomfort with the first, you know you’re in for another round with the other eye.

Facial expression at this point in time:  X_X

After a few blinks, the flaps settle in properly and I could see my surroundings. Very blur though. Like in a mist. Although the flap has been create, it is not opened yet and I could still blink my eyes.

And I went back to the preparation area for rest, for 15-20 minutes to allow the bubbles under the flap to clear. I just closed my eyes during this time.

Finally, after all that waiting, I was guided to the operating room for the laser treatment to correct the power of the eye.

It wasn’t much, even though it’s the main part of the treatment.

The doctor held me down and covered my entire face, leaving only a small opening for the eye he is operating on. Some tape-like thing was used to hold up my eyelashes. And another springy device was used to hold open my eyelids.

And, similar to the Interlase laser, the machine had a few lights. It was only green and red this time, though. Could make them out despite everything being blur. These were lasers. I was made to look and focus on the green light in the middle.

And the doctor says, “Now just hold your eye as still as possible. I am going to move it.”

WTF?

And he did. Not quite, but somewhat.

He basically uses some device to open my flap. My eye doesn’t move, but the flap does. And since that flap is my cornea, my vision actually moves. The red and green lights rotated wildly around. I think this is the correct photo.

As the doctor lifts the cornea flap, my vision gets a bit weird. If anything, I thought it looked like frosted glass.

And finally, the red lasers comes in and does it job. I lost sight of the green light and the entire vision was red and black. This is the whole process:

The red laser shaped the interior of my cornea such that it corrects for my astigmatism and myopia.

How it looked like while it was does? I couldn’t find a perfect photo, but it was something like this:

Except, the red laser was more diffused and there was no ‘concentrated’ centre as shown.

It was totally painless, and no pressure on my eye. Much better than the Interlase flap creation. However, it was longer and took about 30 seconds. Imagine keeping your eye and body still for that long, and you can’t even swallow. Easy? Try that when you’re in an operating room.

Then, the doctor closed back the cornea flap and smoothen it out. And it was on to the next eye.

…

After a while… done!

The doctor flushed my eye with a liquid and I could blink and all. Everything was a blur, but I could make my way around.

The whole procedure ended about 1pm or so. My parents took me home from there, and I’ve been dropping 3 different chemicals into my eyes every hour since. I also took a short 4-hour nap in the afternoon when it should have been the whole day. I was prescribed sleeping pills and painkillers.

So how my vision looks like now? Since it was done, it hasn’t changed much. I can see text from afar, so I know my myopia has been corrected for sure. But everything’s still a little blur and whitish. It’s like a haze covering everything. Colours appear whiter too. A true red colour looks pinkish to me.

It’s post-lasik review tomorrow, where the doctor will check on my recovery. I think I’m done here.

Comments(0) 1:22 AM 11 November 2008

Night Cycling

Posted by HELiX

Yesterday, I met up with some friends to go prawn fishing.

But no, fortunately, this will not be about prawn fishing. Because… well, first, a very scientific diagram of prawn fishing.

I caught 2 prawns in 3 hours, and I think I did pretty okay. Get the idea?

So, moving on. It was about 3pm when we were done with lunch and had nothing to do. So we decided, on the spot, to go home and meet up again for night cycling.

You see, normally, that would have been a totally sound and cool idea.

But here, we’re talking about three guys who last went cycling together at Desaru 5 years ago and ended up like this:

So, at about slightly past 7pm, me, Dong Wei and Xin Jie accidentally met up at some junction along Choa Chu Kang Way. Otherwise, we would be having a fun time playing hide-and-seek.

From there, this was the planned route:

We had three aims in mind:

1. Lim Chu Kang Cemetery
2. Kranji Dam
3. Kranji War Memorial

Heading down from CCK, we would pass through Bukit Batok for a little sight seeing at Little Guilin. Stole the picture below from somewhere. It was dark when we arived.

And then we would pass through the Hillview area and take a short detour for dinner at the Railway Mall.

From there, it was a long and tiring journey straight down Upper Bukit Timah Road, Woodlands Roads before we finally arrive at Kranji.

We were slightly ahead of time and decided to take a turn for Kranji War Memorial.

I don’t have the photos because Dong Wei was doing the photography and HE LEFT FOR MACAU TODAY. So for now, I shall just steal DAYTIME photos from elsewhere.

Turning into the memorial from the main road at night was perhaps the scariest part of our journey. We arrived at the turn, a road leading into the memorial. We looked in - pitch dark. We looked up - lamp posts, which were switched off!

It didn’t make sense for them to build lamp posts if they weren’t going to use it. Ignoring that, we took out our torches - only to discover that I was the only one with a decently working one.

So we crawled our way to the cemetery gates. Admittedly, I was half-hoping that it would be closed. And fortunately and unfortunately, it was open - that’s where it didn’t make any sense again. They had gates there. Built right there, attached to the walls. But it wasn’t closed at night!

Perhaps it’ll be good to note that the Kranji War Memorial was constructed with no night visitors in mind. So, at night, the place is totally dark and we were relying on light pollution from the sky to find our way around.

It felt a little weird when you arrive at the main area where over 4000 graves are. It isn’t one bit scary. If anything, I found the sight beautiful and impressive.

Uh. They were very… uniform. And evenly spaced. And… I don’t know. It was nice.

So after spending about 45 minutes there, we left and continued up Kranji Road.

And we finally arrived at what we thought was Kranji Dam…

View Larger Map

And Dong Wei started complaining of how disappointed it was. Having seen many similarly unimpressive dams in my life, I told him to get over it.

We cycled on and arrived at another dam. On the map below, it’s the one on the left. We arrived from the one on the right.

View Larger Map

“DAMN. SO THIS IS KRANJI DAM.”

It was big alright. Big. And Dong Wei was satisfied to the point that he could have married the dam if we left him right there.

We carried on and made our way to Neo Tiew Road, the road no one cares about because it’s the transition to Lim Chu Kang Road.

Lim Chu Kang Road is long. Really long. It was pretty much the climax of our journey. The cemeteries were somewhere ahead, and we were really exhausted by then. It wasn’t helped by the fact that both mine and XJ’s bikes had steel-fibre concrete seats which were really hurting our butts. It was so painful, that midway through I swapped bikes with Dong Wei to enjoy his cushion bike.

After almost 5 hours of cycling, it started to rain heavily. OF ALL PLACES, WE WERE IN THE MIDDLE OF LIM CHU KANG.

We quickly took cover at bus stop and considered our choices.

(1) Sit and wait for the rain to stop. Being a midnight rain, it may last into dawn and we’ll be sleeping there at the bus stop with nothing but our bikes.

(2) I could also call my Dad to pick us up, but I concluded that it would be absolutely insane for me to tell my Dad over the phone that I was stuck, OF ALL PLACES, IN THE MIDDLE OF LIM CHU KANG.

(3) We could hitch a ride, but those vans and lorries driving along Lim Chu Kang at past midnight… were not in our interest.

(4) Call a taxi, and abandon our bikes.

The rain did, however, eventually stopped. It took almost an hour to do so, and we were feeding the LCK mosquitoes big time.

That was when XJ had to say, “Y’know, LCK is a mosquito disease hotspot right?”

…I already had about 4 bites. There’s a chance that I’ll show symptons of some disease in a few days, so don’t be surprised. Dammit.

We continued our way down the wet LCK roads and after a crazy hour or two on the road, we finally arrived at the intersection to Old Choa Chu Kang Road - our journey to civilisation and home.

“Where were the cemeteries? I didn’t see them.”

-Checks Google Maps-

“Shit. It’s there. We past them sometime back. We PAST them. They were on our RIGHT and we were looking to our LEFT.”

“You mean we missed them? We rode past the cemeteries without seeing them?”

“YES, SHIT.”

“Are you disappointed or glad?”

“Quite disappointed actually.”

We made the turn for Old CCK Road anyway, and after a tiring last stretch of road, we smiled at the sight of HDB flats towering over us.

I reached home at 3.15am.

…

In total, we were travelling for 8 hours.

Google Maps plots our route at a total of 35 km, but due to the detours we made for food, water and exploring, I estimate that we clocked in about 40-45 km.

The seat of my bike really took its toll on me. I came home with a BRUISED butt. No kidding. I couldn’t sit without wincing.

Our thighs were burning throughout the journey. It was a real long time since we last exercised due to A-Levels, and to put ourselves through this immediately after was a crazy idea.

So now, my thighs are aching and screaming. And I can’t walk more than 100m without feeling tired.

Comments(0) 12:17 AM 11 November 2008

Lasik Assessment

Posted by HELiX

I went for the LASIK assessment today, which would be perhaps be the most thorough examination of my eyes unless I happen to have some severe visual problem in the future.

Many people would be unfamiliar with LASIK. You see, for one, it stands for ‘Laser-Assisted in SItu Keratomileusis’. Much like what I would yell when a dog is biting out my eye.

Lasik in real world. Uh.

It was over 2 hours long. You can see where’s this going.

First was the pretty typical eye check-up where they’ll measured my near-sightedness and astigmatism. My eyes had a stable 400-325 power of near-sightedness, but my astigmatism was a little less forgiving at 100. Which was weird because the machine measured it to be only 40.

I went into another room where they practically took away enough information to rebuild my eye if humans could.

The sharingan. Unfortunately, NOT a side-effect of Lasik surgery.

They measured my cornea size, thickness, contour and shape with four different machines. How they did it? I have absolutely no idea. One machine flashed bright rotating lights into my eye AND I’M NOT SUPPOSED TO BLINK. Another had these swirls like Penguin’s Umbrella (of the Batman series).

The red-white swirling thing. Not only found at amusement parks and cartoons. But also at your nearest Lasik treatment centre.

Then I entered the third phase where my eyes were abused.

“So now we’re gonna measure your EYE PRESSURE.”

In the medical world, anything associated with pressure usually ends with something squeezing something.

Now, we’re going to measure my EYE PRESSURE!

But really, it was something like this:

They first used some stick-like toy to blow air into my eyes. I suppose by controlling the air pressure from the thingy, they can measure how my eye responds to… blah, whatever.

Then they proceeded to add YELLOW DYE into my eyes, where my tears were yellow. And then a machine poked this lens into my eyes, as shown in the picture above.

Of course, this has been a very brief summary of the whole Lasik assessment process. I have no idea how some methods could perform and obtain the results of what they were intended for.

I was also made to watch a 10-minute video of Lasik surgery. And some eye-drops were added to make my eyes dilate through the examination. And while the optometrists like your pupil to be nice and large by artificially inducing it to grow larger, it really hurts when you walk out into the open after the assessment. Perhaps I was fortunate that today was a cloudy day, so the glare wasn’t that bad. My vision also blurred for about an hour after the process.

Tomorrow, SURGERY.

Comments(0) 9:45 PM 11 November 2008