Sunday, December 13, 2009

Vegetables has cured my vision

Never I have eaten vegetables as plenty as I did for two weeks now. Unintentionally, it has cured my eye problem. Three years ago, I noticed that my left eye is blurred compared to my right eye. This condition, however, is not obvious when the two eyes are working together. Only by closing each eye alternately that I can observe the difference.

I was forced to eat lots of vegetables as my attention is still tied to my projects. And the accidental cure of that illness is a good example of a solution that takes in a form of inconvenience.

In my place, there's no need to buy vegetables if you only have the guts. Me, being accustomed to street life before, I know very well what to do in times of financial crisis. Sidewalk vendors selling vegetables, I once found out, they would just dump rejected vegetables beside them, waiting for the garbage truck to pick them up. And that is where I got plenty of vegetables supply for my food. A little rice paired with lots of vegetables is a good stuff already for the hungry stomach. It is said that vegetables are good for the health, but I have not experienced its therapeutic effect on the body until just the other day.

Because of my blogs, everyday, I have to visit a public library. After using the computer, I would usually sit down for an hour to read something. There I knew what's the problem, and how serious it is. There were even times that when signing my name, I couldn't clearly see the lines where I have to write my name. When that happens, I need to focus intently on that specific spot before my eyes could adjust to the light. The other day, I was pretty much surprised when I was able to write my name immediately and without problem. After I was through blogging, I picked up a book and started reading: the printed letters appeared so clear in one glance without straining my eyes. My eyes' new condition really startled me. To know what's happening, I closed my right eye with the help of my hand so I could view things with my left eye alone, which I know has a problem. But what I expected to see was not there -- the blurred has gone -- I saw things in the same strength and clearness as my right eye. I almost couldn't believe that I was healed by the humble vegetables by the sidewalk.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Book design improvements

Just the other day, I accidentally resolved a problem I encountered concerning the page layout of my book. The problem lies on the labels I placed at the side, top, and bottom part of each page, including page numbers. For a year, I stopped tinkering on my book project to give way to other projects that caught my attention. Now that things have been set up, I once again found myself browsing my book's content and layout. My mind was faced again with the problem I had mentioned. Now, I studied closely the Header and Footer functionality of MS word 97, the one I am presently using - old, but still very useful for my work. Since my laptop computer is running on Japanese Operating System (OS) and Japanese applications too, my job is totally not easy. All my electronic writing equipment are Japanese. This inconvenience led me to study the Japanese language on my own. When working with my computer, I am always aided by dictionaries. I am patient enough to painstakingly decipher the instructions, until I got used with them. 

This time, as I tinkered again with the Header and Footer, I found the trick where you can detach each page header and footer rendering them independent to the rest of the pages. Because I had done my page layout already, what I did is bind them together and paste them either to the Header or the Footer, and, surprisingly, they snapped back to their places. And when you switch to page view, they are now locked into place, unidetable. In this way, I can freely edit the text of my book without destroying the layout -- a very convenient way. And not only that, I think, it can preserve the layout of the file when viewing it using other computers running in newer version of MS word.

How thankful I am to have given the idea to make my work complete. It's more than 300 pages book. Today, I finished rearranging the layout until page 75. The process is slow but soon this will be completed.