Having to wear glasses has always been something that’s given me the shits. When contacts became available I started wearing them occasionally, but their shortcomings were evident: having to be very careful not to lose them while going for a swim, and getting dry eyes regularly, especially when spending long hours in front of a computer like I do. The goal had always been to get laser eye surgery and fix the problem once and for all, but when I first looked into it it was still a relatively new procedure, still improving all the time, but not something I was entirely comfortable entrusting my sight to.

I forgot all about it for a long time, but, as I’ve got more active over the last few years, the shortcomings of contacts have become more evident and I resolved to look into laser surgery again. I have a couple of friends who have had the procedure done and been delighted with the results, even after a decade and a bit of research showed that the technology involved has matured significantly and there’s enough of a body of previous patients out there that any long term issues resulting from the procedure would have started to show up.

Since it’s elective surgery, I’d have to wait a few years to have it covered under my health insurance, so I resolved to pay for it myself. As it happened, Perfect Vision, the guys who brought the procedure to Australia, had a two-years interest free offer on, so I decided to take advantage of that and rang them up to start the process. The first stage is a complimentary assessment, where they examine your eyes, testing the thickness of your corneas and other details, in order to determine both your suitability for laser correction and which of the three types of correction is most suitable for you. Thankfully my eyes were in good shape and were suitable for the quickest and easiest procedure.

Stage Two was a meeting with Dr. Con Moshegov, the surgeon who’d be doing my procedure at which he double-checked my earlier assessment, fine-tuned the exact amount of correction I would require and answered all the questions I had surrounding risk factors, side effects and the likelihood of something going wrong. He assured me that the risks were minimal as long as I followed their post-op instructions and the fact that Perfect Vision include a life-time guarantee on their procedures seemed to confirm this. If I end up under or over-corrected, they’ll fix it for free, if I became short-sighted again at a later date, they’ll fix it for free, and if my distance vision goes at a later date, they’ll fix that for free too. The only time they won’t fix my vision in the future was if I needed reading glasses due to the natural ageing process, or if my vision deteriorated due to an eye disease (cataract, glaucoma, etc.) unrelated to my surgery.

So, that done, I was all set for the surgery, which was scheduled for Friday morning. I was told to ensure that someone would be there to bring me home and that I brought sunglasses with me as my eyes would be quite sensitive to light afterwards. I arrived at the surgery and spent some time filling in some paperwork and signing consent forms, then had to wait around for about an hour as other patients got their eyes done before it was my turn. I’d previously been given some Valium and Panadol, both to calm nerves and relax facial musculature, so the final prep saw me outfitted with a hair net, some anaesthetic drops in my eyes and the surrounds swabbed with betadine. It was also at this stage that I took off my glasses for the final time, never to be required again!

After a couple of minutes wait, I was ushered in to the surgery, made to lay down on the table and was shuffled around until my eyes were correctly aligned with the machines. My eyelashes were taped back and a device was inserted to ensure I couldn’t blink, though as my eyes has been anaesthetised, this wasn’t uncomfortable. Stage one was to cut a flap in each eye, which was done by a machine first placing a suction cup on my eyeball to hold it in place, then making the incision. This took about 10 seconds per eye. The surgeon then lifted the flap out of the way, at which point by already blurry vision got even worse. The laser was swung into place and I was instructed to look into the flashing orange light and to remain still. At this stage all I could see was the orange light, surrounded by a ring of white LEDs.

Then the operation started, accompanied by a series of clicks as the laser fired, and the smell of burning hair. I had assumed this was my eyeball being burnt into shape, but technically it’s not. The laser causes a chemical reaction to take place which is not burning, though it sure smells like it. A unique experience nonetheless! At the same time I could see the ring of white light being refined and alternately being sharpened and blurred as the laser did its thing, and then it was all over. Twenty to twenty five seconds - just like that. The surgeon then replaced the flap and as he did so everything came into sharp focus and I realised I could see again. Amazing! The process was repeated with the other eye, then I got up and walked out of the surgery unaided!

After a quick check to make sure I was feeling OK, wasn’t feeling unsteady from the Valium and understood my post-op instructions, I was free to go. Jacqui collected me and we jumped in a cab home. I had to keep my eyes closed the whole time as they were super-sensitive to light, but once indoors again I could open them and see properly. Post-op was fairly straightforward: take the provided sleeping pills, go straight to bed and aim to sleep for four to five hours. Most important was to keep my eyes closed and relax. I woke up a few hours later, took the supplied painkillers although I felt fine, and then just dozed for the rest of the day, keeping my eyes closed as much as possible. I could see perfectly as this stage, and was able to get up and sync some podcasts to my iPhone so I could listen to them in bed.

I woke up the next morning with perfect vision (pardon the pun). Could see clearly, no pain, no problems. A post-op checkup had been arranged for early Saturday morning, and it’s recommended that someone accompany you to this, but I was fine so I put on my sunnies and got the bus into town. A quick eye test confirmed that I had 20/20 in one eye and slightly better than that in the other, then the surfaces of my eyes were checked to ensure the flap had resettled correctly and I was on my way.

I have a regimen of antibiotic and anti-inflammatory drops to follow for the next two weeks and my eyes are prone to dryness and I see slight haloes around lights at night. Both of those are known side-effects which typically wear off over a couple of weeks.

For those of you considering getting it done, do it. The surgery itself is easier and less uncomfortable than a trip to the dentist (and I don’t have a fear of dentists), and the post-op was about as uncomfortable as waking up the morning after a big night out going and realising that you left your contacts in, though obviously there’s no guarantee that that’s exactly how it will be for you.

Myself and a group of mates usually play a round of golf every weekend, and there’s been constant mutterings amongst us about joining a club. During the summer months, we’d mostly play at Woolooware Golf Club as it was relatively easy to get an early tee time so we’d have our round finished before the day got too hot. However, once autumn arrived and the days started getting shorter, it became much tougher to get on the course before noon, so we’d end up migrating between a few different courses depending on which one was available on a given weekend.

Over the two months we finally got our act together, looked seriously into joining a club. We weren’t interested in joining somewhere full of corporate types who were members for resume-enhancement purposes and while playing in the odd competition might be fun, it wasn’t particularly important. We were mainly interested in being able to get a good tee time on a good course, and taking the piss out of each other as we played.

Once we started looking into it, the costs associated with joining a club were relatively inexpensive. Leaving aside the one-off joining fee, if we were playing only half the weekends in a year it was more affordable to be a member than not. In the end we decided to join Eastlakes as it’s reasonably priced and a pretty down-to-earth setup. It’s a tricky course already, and they’re investing money with a view to bringing it up to championship standard, so it’s likely to challenge us for a long time to come.

Myself and Gerard went down this evening and signed up, and Simon, Clyde and Hilton are also signing up shortly so there’ll be a good group of us there. Now all I need to do is play five competition games so I can earn an official handicap, though apparently, just for initial handicap purposes, you can’t score worse than a double bogey. That might not work to well in my favour as I tend to score OK on most holes and have one or two blowouts to ruin my round. Still, there’s only one way to find out.

The last fortnight saw the IAAF World Championships being held in Berlin and plenty of outstanding performances, including Bolt’s 9.58 and 19.19, but the race that’s created the most controversy was undoubtedly the Women’s 800m, won comfortably by Caster Semenya. The problem seems to be that there are significant doubts about whether or not Caster is actually a woman. It’s clear from race photos that she’s lacking male genitalia, but otherwise her physique, facial bone structure and voice all suggest a maleness, as does the fact that she has shown testosterone levels three times higher than ‘normal’ women, and that she ran almost 2 seconds faster than the next woman, despite, in her own words, taking it easy for the last 200m!

Anyway, the IAAF have ordered comprehensive sex determination tests, which will take a couple of weeks to complete. For a more detailed analysis of what’s involved, this article at competitor.com, entitled What Is Caster Semenya? is worth a read.

Caster Semenya has become an overnight sensation. Regrettably it has been for her role in sport’s biggest current controversy – the question whether she might in fact be biologically part male. Some have simplified this question to a debate over whether Semenya is male or female, which is incorrect. Rather, the true question is whether Semenya may be intersex, which refers to a condition where ambiguous genitalia are present, and the genes don’t match up with the physiological development and appearance, making the classification of the person as either male or female is very difficult.

Intersex conditions result from what are called disorders of sexual development (DSDs). Authorities have suggested three broad categories of this condition. The first is that of a masculinized female; the second is an under-masculinized male; and the third is true hermaphroditism. In Semenya’s case, it would seem that one of the first two categories – the masculinzed female or under-masculinized male – may apply.

It has also been revealed that Dr. Ekkart Arbeit, the disgraced former East German coach, has been working with Semenya, so perhaps we’re seeing a return to the dark days of giving women such massive doses of steroids that they’ve developed male features. This article, on one of Arbeit’s previous subjects, Andreas (nee Heidi) Kreiger, is indicative of how things were in the GDR.

By the time Krieger arrived at the Dynamo Club [at 13yrs old], the doping officials - intoxicated by the success of their athletes - had taken steroid violations to scarcely believable levels. An average teenage girl produces about half a milligram of testosterone per day. Krieger, by the middle of her career, was being fed 30 milligrams of anabolic steroids each day, far in excess of Ben Johnson, the Canadian sprinter, at the height of his drugs programme.

State scientists also developed STS 646, an anabolic steroid that caused male characteristics in women at a rate 16 times that of Oral-Turinabol. It was distributed to coaches even though it had not been approved for human use, not even in stage one clinical trials. Even Höppner expressed his doubts, telling the Stasi that he was not willing to be held responsible. But Manfred Ewald, the president of the sports federation at the time, insisted that they were necessary and ordered an additional 63,000 tablets. Krieger was probably one of the recipients.

Myself and Jacqui are doing the responsible thing and saving for a house deposit, so we’ve started paying a bit of attention to the goings on in the property market. Property crashes in the US, UK, Ireland and throughout the world gave a glimmer of hope that Australia’s over-priced property market would also deflate a little, but it hasn’t happened.

To ease their entry into the market, the Federal Government started offering between $7000 and $14000 to first home buyers, on top of the $7000 plus stamp duty concessions which have been offered by the State Governments for years. Most people think this is a great idea, but a moment’s thought shows that it’s completely stupid, as all it does is push up house prices by the amount of the handout. Sure enough, first home buyers now make up almost 30% of the market and prices in the cheaper suburbs have increased by up to $40000, so there are quite a few idiots out there paying $40000 more for a house in order to ensure they get a free $14000 from the Government!

Interest rates have been at historic lows, further encouraging first home buyers, and now that the economy looks to be on the mend, we’re being told that now is a great time to buy a house and that the main reason Australian property will never fall in price is that there’s a huge housing shortage. This adage has been repeated so often over the last few years that it’s accepted as gospel, but no-one ever provides any evidence for the claim. A financial site that I keep an eye on finally had enough, and in their daily mailout on Monday asked anyone for evidence supporting the property shortage claim.

The responses were forthcoming, and it appears that the evidence for the claim originates in the National Housing Supply Council’s State of Supply Report 2008, which claims a shortage of 85,000 houses in 2008. The funny part is when you delve into the report to find out how they came to that figure and learn that it’s based on the numbers of homeless!! They’ve added up the numbers of homeless sleeping rough, homeless sleeping with relatives or friends and unemployed people living in caravans. Then they’ve decided that the rental vacancy rate should be 3%, so have increased the ‘shortage’ to allow for it.

So there you have it. The reason Australian property prices won’t fall is because there are homeless people. Priceless!

Getting sized up for a bike fit last month made me realise that although I’m fit and healthy, I could do with some gym time. Sure, I’ve plenty of aerobic fitness, but I know I’ve plenty of muscle imbalances contributing to posture issues, both while running and cycling. For example, my stomach muscles are pretty weak, but my lower back muscles are quite strong, so my pelvis ends up tilted. Running and cycling take care of my legs, but I don’t do any upper-body exercise, so I figured it was time to join a gym and hit the weights.

I knew that I didn’t want to do any classes, and that all I wanted was access to a combination of free weights and machines, so most of the elaborate gym memberships were too expensive and a waste of money. Fitness First and other start at $80/month and I wasn’t going to use enough facilities to warrant that expenditure. Luckily, I found a local gym, Fresh Fitness, five minutes walk from home, which had a special offer of $379 for a year’s membership, or roughly $31 per month. I checked it out and, while basic, it had everything I needed, so I signed on the dotted line and went along for an assessment and to get a weights programme drawn up for me.

I told the instructor I’d prefer to be doing compound free-weight exercises, rather than using machines, and while that’s a bit adventurous given my current state, the program I have is aiming in that direction. The fun part of the assessment was when I had to do press-ups and chin-ups; years of neglect meant I could only manage eight press-ups and two chin-ups! Yes, two! Oh well, at least I can only improve from there.

Tomorrow will be my sixth session and the exercises which were killing me are now merely hard, the ones which were hard are easier, and the ones which were easy have warranted weight increases. The good news is I’m now up to 10 press-ups. I’ll be a brick shithouse in no time :-)

The Tour finished last night, or 2am this morning if you were watching it live in Sydney like me. It’s my July ritual, now that SBS are providing full, live coverage, and Jacqui knows that once early July rolls around I own the TV from about 10pm every night, unless it’s a rest day (for the Tour, not me).

This year’s race was somewhat disappointing. The return of the Team Time Trial was a farce. It hasn’t been in the race since Armstrong last competed in 2005, and all of a sudden makes a return just as Lance returns. Sure enough, Astana dominated, finishing the stage with their riders in 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th, providing them with a stranglehold on the race. More importantly, riders who were hoping to make a difference on GC such as Carlos Sastre and Cadel Evans, were effectively knocked out of the race after the 4th stage, losing 1:38 and 2:36 respectively. Hopefully next year Prudhomme goes back to a non-TTT course.

The return of Lance Armstrong turned the race into a bit of a soap opera as well, with more focus on the internal goings on of Team Astana than on the race itself, and his constant spin was a bit annoying. Contador was clearly the better rider, and all public pronouncements since Armstrong announced his return have been designed to reassure Contador that he’s the team’s No.1 rider. However, actions speak louder than words and it became apparent pretty quickly that Armstrong was No.1 and he would do everything possible to destabilise Contador, all the while uttering reassuring sound bites, proclaiming that he was riding according to team orders. Technically this was true, though as Bruyneel is firmly in Armstrong’s camp, “riding to team orders” does not mean “riding in support of Contador”.

Contador, to his credit, saw the writing on the wall a long time ago, and came to the race prepared for battle. He beat Lance in the prologue and put time into him on every mountain top finish, even when it wasn’t strictly necessary, just to hammer home to Lance that he had no chance. He mostly went along with Lance’s games in the media-despite heavy criticism from Lance and Bruyneel about disobeying team orders-but let his legs do the talking on the road. What they said was loud and clear: “I can take anything you throw at me and still kick your ass.”

Now that it’s all over, Lance is forming his own team with Bruyneel for next year and Contador will be on the move somewhere else, probably to Caisse d’Epargne. In a real scumbag move, Armstrong didn’t bother showing up to the team party to celebrate Contador’s win, preferring instead to have a few drinks with the investors in his new team. Wanker.

When I returned from Canada last year, I bought a cheap and cheerful bike so I could get back into triathlons without having to spend a couple of grand on a nice machine. The bike was fine, but I couldn’t help feeling that it was a bit too big for me. I never seemed to be able to get comfortable on the saddle, would get niggles at the back of my knees after riding for a while, and if I wanted to ride further than about 40km, I’d start to experience discomfort in my lower back. The end result of all of this was that I wasn’t doing very much cycling at all.

July 1st marked the end of the financial year, and after a bit of diligent saving, I have some spare cash set aside, earmarked for a new bike. I’ve decided to make the upgrade to a full carbon frame, but before doing so, I figured that the best thing to do would be to get a professional bike fit. I booked an appointment last week with Steve Hogg, who’s well known as a bike-fitter amongst the cycling community, and a regular contributor on cyclingnews.com answering readers’ fitting questions. Rather than being fit on my existing bike, I got Steve to assess me and work out my ideal frame dimensions, which I could then use to determine which bikes would be a suitable fit, and which were no hopers.

The process was really interesting, not least because Steve’s approach differs from the usual “measure limbs and adjust accordingly” approach used by your typical bike shop. He quickly noticed that all the various muscles surrounding my hips and lower back were extremely tight, with my right side worse than my left, resulting in an imbalance which was causing most of my issues on the bike.

When standing up straight, the distance between my hip & shoulder on my left side is 4cm greater than that on my right, and I also support 6kg more through my right leg than my left! That’s the direct result of being a lazy bastard and not bothering to stretch after golf, running or cycling, so he gave me a choice between signing up for a yoga class, or following the exercises in Kit Laughlin’s Stretching & Flexibility book. Since I already own the book (though clearly haven’t been using it) I chose that option.

Once my major structural flaws were noted, the rest of the process was fairly straightforward, with some adjustments to my cleats to get my knees tracking properly, followed by working out my ideal seat height and handlebar position. The whole process took a little over two hours, and I left with a detailed breakdown of the major flexibility/structural issues which need to be addressed, a detailed understanding of how those issues affect how I feel on the bike, and a template of my ideal bike setup.

Now it’s time for some bike shopping! :-)

DISCOVER magazine has uploaded the transcript of a recent panel on climate change they hosted in San Francisco, in conjunction with the National Science Foundation. The panellists explain in simple terms how we really know that it really is us humans causing the problem, and not natural processes.

Audience member: What is the most compelling evidence you have that human behavior is actually warming the planet?

Caldeira: To me the most compelling evidence is the fact that the stratosphere—the upper atmosphere—is cooling while the lower atmosphere and the land surface are warming. That’s a sign that greenhouse gases are trapping energy and keeping that energy close to the surface of the earth. I mentioned that in ocean acidification, you actually see animals that should make shells unable to make shells anymore. You could demonstrate the same kind of effect in a bell jar in the lab. There is a level of certainty about it.

One of the panellists, Stephen Schneider, addressed the question of anthropogenic causes as purely a statistical issue. Assuming we knew absolutely nothing about how the environment works…

If you were a cynic and you asked about the probability of the ice sheet in the north going up, it’s 50 percent. Going down? Fifty percent. And the South Pole going up? Fifty percent. Going down? Fifty percent. Probability they are both going together? Twenty-five percent. What’s the probability of the stratosphere cooling while the earth gets warmer? Again, assuming we knew nothing, 50 percent. Troposphere warming? Fifty. The probability that one will go up while the other goes down? Twenty-five percent. Same thing for other patterns, like the way high-latitude continents are warming more than low-latitude ones are. With any single line of evidence, you can say, “Oh, well, there’s still a 25 percent chance it’s random,” but what happens when you put all these events together? The probability of all these events’ lining up the same way is pretty darn low unless we are dealing with global warming.

Finally, the point about the debate being settled:

Caldeira: Climate science has reached the point that plate tectonics reached 30 years ago. It is the basic view of the vast majority of working scientists that human-induced climate change is real. There is a real diversity of informed opinion on how important climate change is going to be to various things that affect humans, and there is a diversity of opinion on how to address this problem, but the debate over human-induced climate change is over.

When asked whether they were optimistic about our ability to deal with the problem, Schneider replied

The first time I was asked that question in a public place was sometime in the 1970s in front of a congressional committee. My answer was a little bit like Ken’s. I said, “I’m technologically optimistic and politically bleak.” That proved to be a pretty good forecast for the next 35 years.

Unfortunately, it appears to be a good forecast for the next 35 years too. While I’ve no doubt we have the technical ability to fix this, I think we’re too stupid to get our shit together and actually do it. The general populace doesn’t understand science at all, so they’re largely incapable of critically evaluating the scientific evidence and coming to an informed decision.

You might expect the media to inform them, but the mass media is relatively useless too. In this era of newspaper cutbacks specialist science reporters are often discarded, leaving generalist reporters to write science articles, resulting in discredited anti-warming “science” being given equal time and giving their readership the impression that there still is a scientific debate on the topic.

Unfortunately, that leaves personal experience, and by the time the general populace realises they’re directly seeing the effects of global warming, it’s almost certainly too late.

Earlier this morning I had to sit my citizenship test as the final hurdle before I can apply for Australian citizenship. I call it the Anti-Muslim Test as it was brought in after the Cronulla Riots, partly out of concerns that Muslims weren’t fully embracing Australian culture and were part of some sinister plan to encourage Sharia Law. Complete nonsense of course, but the test was the result, as was an extension of the waiting period between becoming a permanent resident and being eligible to apply for citizenship from two years to four.

The test is supposed to ensure that you’re aware of your rights and your responsibilities as a citizen and have a passing understanding of the history and government of Australia, and can speak English. Sample questions are “Who is Australia’s Head of State?”, “How many levels of government are there?” and “Are newspapers free to say what they want in Australia”, with the corresponding answers being “The Queen”, “3”, and “Yes - as long as they don’t defame someone or incite hatred/intolerance”.

The barrier is set pretty low; there’s 20 multiple-choice questions, out of which you have to get 12 right. There are also three questions on values which result in an instant fail if you get any of them wrong. You get 45 minutes to do the test, but, as a guide to how easy it is it took me 90 seconds and I got 100%! I also didn’t bother studying for it, skimming the citizenship booklet only once, though I am at an advantage in that I grew up in a Western-style democracy, speak English and have already lived in Australia for close to 10 years.

Despite passing the test comfortably, it turns out I now fall foul of the new waiting period requirements as you are no longer permitted to count time living in Australia before you were granted permanent residency. So now I enter what I call a ‘citizen-in-limbo’ period where I’ve met all the requirement, but have to wait until March 2011 before I can do my citizenship conferral ceremony. Bit of a shame really, as this September will see the 10th anniversary of my immigration and I was hoping to have become a citizen before this date.

In the aftermath of 9/11, governments around the world swung into action trying to ensure that their polices agencies were able to root out all terrorist threats within their communities. These efforts usually included passing some form of stop-and-search laws, whether it was people being taken aside for ‘random’ searches at airports, or being stopping in the street and having their bags searched.

At the time, there were lots of complaints that racial profiling was being used, and that Muslim communities around the world were being unfairly targeted by the new laws, or at least their implementation. Now, it turns out, in the UK at least, police have addressed these concerns, not, as you might expect, by ceasing to unfairly target the Muslim community, but by randomly searching non-Muslims to make up the numbers.

Examples of poor use of section 44 abounded. “I have evidence of cases where the person stopped is so obviously far from any known terrorism profile that, realistically, there is not the slightest possibility of him/her being a terrorist, and no other feature to justify the stop.”

He later said that while the police should not discriminate racially, it was equally important that they should not balance the statistics. “If, for example, 50 blonde women are stopped who fall nowhere near any intelligence-led terrorism profile, it’s a gross invasion of the civil liberties of those 50 blonde women.

“The police are perfectly entitled to stop people who fall within a terrorism profile even if it creates a racial imbalance, as long as it is not racist.”

So, rather than come up with a terrorist profile which is more in-depth than “is a Muslim”, the cops just hassle people who don’t match any terrorist profile to mask the fact that they’re continuing to unfairly target Muslims.