sky, Author at Sky's Blog

Panoptix — Turn the Other Eye (The Other Eye’s Turn)

20 April, 2026 by sky

Second eye surgery just completed an hour ago. Seemingly a success.. The process was even more interesting because during the removal of the natural lens, the visual was a little different. This time it was more like dainty black ink splatters, not a big drop or splash. So it was little specks of black ink with some kind of fireworks-like white points of light. Wonder if this is related to what technique is being used, or skill, or experience. It was about the same duration of maybe a minute or so.

This time I requested they knock me out a little more, which apparently they did because I remember nothing of the lens implantation procedure.

Immediately thereafter we went for coffee and stickybuns at the nearby Saint Frank’s coffee shop on Polk Street. It’s one of those bright sunny San Francisco days. On the way home., Kathryn asked to be routed past more of the addresses I had lived at in the city in the past, so we went by Jackson Street where I lived for a little longer a year when newly arrived in the city. It was about seven or eight blocks away from Pacific Medical Center (on Buchanan St. in 1976), where I had an office and was working on a distance learning project for medical education.

There was an achy pain in the eye socket this time (unlike right eye two weeks ago), controlled pretty well by 500mg Tylenol. Maybe need to sleep mid-afternoon?

It’s probably obvious to you that my first eye (right eye) is really doing great and it’s easy for me to use the computer right now. This is consistent with my experience the first two weeks, and tomorrow when the eyepatch is removed, I really look forward to testing out full binocular vision and more of the near distance abilities of my new lenses.

Next Article ➜

Panoptix — Both Eyes, First Impressions

20 April, 2026 by sky

Both eyes now have Panoptix Pro IOLs installed. Bandage was removed at the clinic yesterday.

The second eye measured 20/20 vision immediately. It was pretty amazing when they removed the gauze dressing and I could immediately read the eye chart on the wall. They said “Read the top line.” I read the top line, and then the second, and then the third, and then the fourth, and then the fifth line going pretty easily to the 20/20 level. It was also clear that this correction was better than the first eye had been. (And that one was still excellent, at about 20/30.)

The day before this second surgery, wearing glasses over one eye and IOL lens in the other, I was seeing double. Couldn’t get stereoscopic or binocular vision to work — two images most of the time. Without glasses on I had some depth perception, but poor quality because of the one uncorrected eye.

It reminded me that a major reason I had trouble with baseball and basketball in grade school was that I had such poor stereo vision with glasses even at the age of 12 or so. Getting contact lenses as an adult was liberating to me, as it restored that critically-necessary stereoscopic component of my vision. And for 6 weeks, in the run-up to the surgery I had returned to that world of glasses. It had left me in a cranky mood.

Now with the bandage removed, my stereo vision immediately worked perfectly. (Had I been worried? Yes.) I knew I had been suffering some eye strain from the mismatch and it was really bothering me after two weeks of going around that way. My depth perception with glasses was terrible, and I was on occasion just kind of stumbling around. Never tripped or fell, but was pretty shaky at times because of it. Immediately after the bandage came off, I had no problem with depth. When leaving the clinic I could see steps on the stairway and cracks in the sidewalk. And avoid them, of course.

Within a couple of hours I again noticed a kind of “screen door effect” or moiré pattern in the new eye, on the outer edge of my visual field. I had noticed this after the first IOL implant (on the right eye) and it had become less and less visible over the week. The pattern was more visible in the second eye. At the edge of my vision there is a kind of a flickering screen door effect as I cast my eyes left or right. This is certainly due to the concentric rings of the lens. It kind of causes a bit of what I would call a flicker or stutter as I move my eyes left or right. It is more visible in low light, and I’d guess this is because my pupil opens to a larger size in low light, meaning more of the IOL surface area is involved, and consequently more of the concentric rings. This is just an observation and definitely not a malfunction at all. I think it speaks to the design of the lens and how the brain adapts to it.

Upon returning home from the clinic, I used the prescription eye drops for the very first time in the second eye. Then after taking a shower I noticed that my vision was clouded up like steam on a hot shower door, glass shower door. It was a bit unnerving — maybe some tapwater washed through the eye? Or maybe it was a lot of light scatter that the brain couldn’t yet filter out. But it persisted for a few hours and eventually cleared.

Reading text, and iPhone screen up close, are now absolutely focused and sharp. This had not been easy for me even with contact lenses, and especially in a dark room at night. Now everything is exceptionally clear and easy to focus on, even down to maybe 8 inches in front of my nose.

This is going to be great! Maybe I’ll give this writing thing a rest for a while now and check in after a few days or weeks.

Bill Daul’s NextNow (#3)

4 March, 2026 by sky

NextNow meetings and events were frequently augmented by Eileen Clegg’s Visual Insight documentation techniques. (This started, to my knowledge, in that second or third NN meeting at Fort Mason, where the World Cafe process was used, and Eileen drew one of her murals based on meeting content. See photo to left.) The last NN collaboration for Eileen was the 2015 meetings I previously mentioned (photo to right – one of the discussion tables at one of these events).

View a sampling of V.I. work online.

At the beginning of a meeting there might be a long horizontal paper unrolled across the wall. Eileen would, from start of meeting, begin sketchhng out words, clouds, little people, relationships, all the way thru the end of the meeting. These murals served as conceptual records of the meetings — embedding not only ideas, but interrelationships. Particularly relevant to NextNow was her Engelbart mural, viewable on VisualInsight.net

Bill Daul’s NextNow (#2)

3 March, 2026 by sky

May I refer you to the Buddhist concept of Beginner’s Mind for a moment?

This is what I’d call a state of inquiry, in which one discards any pretense of sophistication and critism, and simply observes — takes in all aspects of what is happening, and reserves judgment and critique.

It’s actually akin to the state of mind that works best when you’re first viewing a film. You observe a lot, but initially there’s limited information, so an approach in which you let it all flow in and hold your judgments ’til later can be the best strategy.

I think Bill’s approach is often similar. At least at the beginning, before sparking a conversation, he often puts people together with no detailed plan for outcomes, and basically makes or “holds the space” for something to happen. He makes the introduction — and lets it go from there. You can be sure he doesn’t do it randomly — there’s always some hint — but it leaves plenty of space for exploration.

Wish I could give you concrete examples. In my case there some fuzzy cases. My professional life has been in Computer Science. But it has been often at the fuzzy edge of what used to be called “man-machine” interfaces or communication. It meant working in 3D visualization, data visualisation, “art” to some degree, and ultimately with Digital Audio Workstations and the composition of music. Along the way various NextNow events included people with interesting ideas and projects that influenced my work — and for sure influenced it visually.

PS: For the 2015 events, I just now found the third page link, so March, April and May are now all accounted for.

Bill Daul’s NextNow (#1)

2 March, 2026 by sky

Tonight I sit and share with you my thoughts about our friend who we sometimes call “Mr Human Glue” who has played a creative and interesting role in our lives. At least in mine.

How I Came to It

Way back in the 1970s I created a technology project at Northwestern University where we sought to introduce and experiment with online communication and education. As a young professor I was into the tech and because we were so far “ahead of the curve” part of my role was to discover and meet other experimenters in related work. At some point a fellow called me up (or wrote on paper!) to say that he had a grant to “call people up and introduce them.” I believe it was an NSF grant. My friend who team-taught a seminar with me — Bob Johansen — and I had some number of such calls, introduced and moderated by this facilitator, and relationships were sparked that went on for decades.

I say that by way of introducing here the concept of “professional introducer.”

Not an entirely new concept, of course, because we know that centuries ago artists had studios where they worked together and often novel ideas arose, musicians and intellectuals had salons, and the univeersity concept certainly served to cross-polinate (ccompared to guilds and trades).

Bob and I had done a collaboration at Northwestern — teaming up to create a Seminar on College Teaching (so-named by our Dean Claude Mathis) in which we intentionally brought together graduate students and faculty from many departments, using this mix to spark new ways of viewing and supporting and conducting education (and expanding our use of “distance learning” technologies). (I’ve writen some about this Computers And Teaching project.)

NextNow

So it must have been 2003 — Bill Daul came along (but no recollection of how we met) with his idea to formally bring people together, which he named NextNow, and it was familiar and very natural. I “signed up” immediately. I don’t recall whether NextNow had coalesced around Doug Engelbart already, or not, but early NextNow meetings such as the one at Fort Mason (using World Cafe as its structure – this may have been only the second NextNow meeting) included a wonderfully broad participation from all over the San Francisco Bay Area. I can’t overestimate how many people I met thru those events – they were miraculous. (Also see Engelbart on Wikipedia)

NextNow meetings were held at many venues, though Doug’s house may hold the record, and events held at or with the collaboration of MediaX at Stanford I think were some of the most fruitful.

For a long period – perhaps most of the life of NextNow – operations, events and meetings at The NextNow Collaboratory in Berkley played an underlying structural role and provided more of an ongoing physical presence than the more “itinerant” meetings.

When I decided on a career redirect in 2015 I celebrated by putting together a paroxism of several NextNow meetings in downtown San Francisco (in March then April and May) we used a model we’d been improving over the years – presentations; small groups; re-convene and synthesize. One of many models the group had tried.

In conclusion (of this one note) I want to recognize publicly that Bill’s work as founder and listener-in-chief allowed me, and certainly a number of others, to meet new people and new-yet-connectable ideas, over a period of maybe a couple of decades, that otherwise just might not have happened. And there was often a special synergy when people “collided” from disparate disciplines.