The good news is that my retinas are okay. The bad news? None really; my vision is stable for the second year in a row and my eyes are fine. I'll call that a win in just about any playbook.

I had a scary incident a few weeks ago. The vision in the central portion of my right eye blurred and began to do what I can only describe as 'sparkle.' There was no pain and no other change, just an area the shape of a crescent moon in my central field of vision that was strangely prismatic.

It went away that same afternoon. Geof was right to question my blood pressure -- low as usual -- and there were no side effects.

I was glad to confirm that all was well. Ever since my mother had her cornea transplant thanks to Fuchs' dystrophy, I've been more aware than usual of how fragile my sense of sight is, and how lost I would be without it.

I got the full battery of tests, though, and the optometrist saw no indication that anything was amiss. He said it might be an indicator of future migraine issues. (He asked if I'd ever had headaches that might be considered migraines. The answer is, thankfully, no.)

My new batch of contact lenses are ordered. My prescription still requires my lenses to be special-ordered, but they'll be here in time for the hike next month, which was my real intention. Hiking and photography in the sunshine? Sunglasses, please!

* * * * *

In other fronts, the drupal upgrade on cat.net is mostly done. This was my first major-version drupal upgrade, and it wasn't pretty. I think I've caught most of the problems, and I've clearly learned a lot from minor-version drupal upgrades in the past. There's a lot to like about drupal, but there's also a lot to be frustrated about. I get the impression from friends that wordpress upgrades are a lot simpler.

I had been under the impression that drupal's site administration section was receiving a major overhaul in version 6.x. I've seen evidence of some changes, but nowhere near the wholesale changes I had been expecting.

Contributed modules are in varying degrees of disarray; some are completed and available, some are available only as patches from versions intended for 5.x, and some just aren't updated at all. I ran into two gotchas last night -- modules that only ran under PHP 5 after the upgrade. Guess what I don't have easy access to. Frustrating, considering that core still works with PHP 4. I would move to PHP 5 if I could, but it's not as simple as a purist would have you believe.

So -- the migration is mostly done. Barring a move to PHP 5, I've lost access to two modules I liked. I had a corrupted search index table that took me a while to rebuild. I've re-established the monthly archives and the glossary of entries by title, though neither are in exactly the same places they were in before, and I haven't figured out how to fix them yet.

On the flip side, though, the backend runs a lot faster, and the jQuery support seems much more robust.

The upgrade process did what I needed it to do: give me real, hands-on instruction on what it's like to migrate a full website from Drupal 5.x to 6.x. It's shown me that I really should migrate the library's beta site to 6.x before we go live, but that it's not going to be an exceptionally pretty process.

It could be worse, though. I followed directions, and as a result I had no data loss. I guess that's the important part in the end, right? Vision still correctable to 20/20 and a personal website that still contains years of your useless blatherings?

Right.

I guess that means I should get back to my flickr project. You need more old photos of me to laugh at. After all, if I am not here for your amusement, why am I here?