I've worn glasses or contacts since I was in third grade. I actually needed them since about first grade, but I successfully hid my deficit by memorizing the eye chart as I waited for our annual vision test in gym class. I was eventually caught -- called up to read the eye chart before I'd had sufficient memorization time. The jig was up. The world had discovered what I had known for two years: I was sorely in need of a prosthesis. I'd concealed my poor vision because I was terrified of being burdened with the social stigma of glasses, practically the coolness kiss of death. The day I showed up at school with my new specs, my worst fears were realized when Mike Morris called me "four eyes." I knew then that life would never again be as carefree as when I just walked around in a perpetual blur.

As time went on, periodically getting a new pair of glasses became a kind of novelty. When you spend every waking hour with a prosthetic device hanging off your face, aesthetics are important. Choosing a new style of frames was like making a whole new change of personal style. At least it would have been, had I possessed any sense of style then. My typical choices tended towards clunky dark plastic frames that screamed out to the world in a shrill nasal tone that I was never, ever going to date a cheerleader. Or possibly anyone.

Fortunately, my older and wiser sister informed me that I was risking my social future if I considered going to high school without contact lenses. She was right, and so I began my slow, despectacled, painful climb out of geekdom. Other than in the eye-scraping duststorms of Senegal, I haven't worn glasses since.

Now I need a new pair of specs. Soon I'll be doing night shifts at the ambulance, and since I have to take my lenses out at night, I'll need some alternate means of telling my patients apart from bystanders, pets, and large shrubs. So yesterday I went downtown to have my eyes checked out and pick out frames for my new glasses. Susan came along to provide aesthetic advice, since she will be forced to look at my facial appliance more often than I will. With ample consultation with the amused staff, we finally picked out a pair. I think they make me look a little like Dr. Green on television's "ER" -- if I were older, balder, and making buttloads of money as a professional actor. I have high hopes that this subliminal touch will inspire confidence on the part of my future patients. If you can't trust Dr. Green (or a younger, unpaid and slightly less photogenic facsimile), who can you trust?

In other news, I had the bright idea yesterday to design a new font. This project serves absolutely no purpose other than allowing me to fool around with some new software geegaws, while wasting time that I should be devoting to my increasingly tottering pile of website work. Part of my rationale was to develop some new content that might draw additional viewers to this site. I get around 400 hits/day now, compared with about 35-50/day in 1997, but that's just not enough in the ongoing battle for attention. I considered creating a section to post an HTML reference sheet that I wrote for a website-design training, just to pull in a few folks, but who designs in HTML any more? Just pre-FrontPage dinosaurs like me, and they don't need reference guides. Most of the HTML tutorials I've found online are woefully out of date and chocked with so many useless tags that they're needlessly intimidating to beginners, if there are HTML beginners anymore. I was proud of the streamlined reference sheets that I drew up, which focused on the basic tags that I use for 80% of my programming. But I can't imagine it would be all that interesting to more than a handful of folks.

Fonts, on the other hand, are always useful to designers. I've spent hours combing the web for the perfect fonts for a new website. I figure a "deadly sins" font download will be like a big blue bug-light on my site's front porch, drawing in new visitors like helpless moths. The only minor technical issue is that I have zero experience in typography. I've passed more time speculating about what I would call my new font than I've spent creating it. So I downloaded some software that will (in theory) allow me to do the initial design on paper, then scan in my new font, manipulate it, and convert it to TrueType. I have no idea what my new font will look like. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say: ugly.

Eureka -- I'll have to call it "Ugly as Sin."