And thanks for the sympathy! It worked wonders!

[Eye] I have a small tear in my cornea. If my eye dried out overnight (central heating, restless night, alcohol) then when opening that eye in the morning the lid would pull on the tear making it worse. I couldn't face any change in light intensity for a couple of hours without the feeling of a sharp needle in the eye. Liquid tears for the best part of a year did the trick. NEVER use eye cleaners like Optrex though. How did I do it? Would you believe a poke in the eye from a sharp stick?

[Boolbar] Recurrent corneal erosion, if you want a name for that; not uncommon, and as another of our correspondants will tell you, v painful. Artificial tears (lubricants), preferably unpreserved, used regularly, are really the only thing that helps.

[Lib] Get thee to someone with a decent slit-lamp biomicroscope :-) So cool, eyes seen really close... but you're probably fine by now. Owwww, anyway.

[BtD] Lime and other caustic burns can be REALLY bad. *shudders* (oh, and if anyone was wondering about first aid for them, force the person's eyes open and wash wash wash. Oh, and wash. Forget about those piddly little bottles of eyewash, shove their head under a tap/hose/shower. Stay there for 20 minutes, the caustic action keeps working even if you've apparently flushed it all out.)

Oh, and another thing - heed the warnings on eye drops to discard after opening (unpreserved) or a month after opening (preserved). Trust me, I *know*.

... I meant, gently hold. but make sure the eye is open. They will thank you later. Honest. *resists posting pictures of what can happen if you don't*

[flerdle] Ta for the name. The only fun part of it was visiting the Doctors who shoved some fluorescent dye in my eye to see what was going on. I had green glowing eyes for the next hour.

Oh yeah, that stuff is fun, and it stains clothing wonderfully. If you blow your nose, your sn... anyway, fluorescein (the dye) also glows under UV light. Something not to mix with contact lenses, because they absorb it.

flerdle] Even more reason to do it - especially as halloween is just around the cornea (waak waak).

I just suffered one right now -- I brought up www.bbc.co.uk and right there was Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. My retinas decomposed immediately in defense....

[Boolbar] Being the other correspondent which flerdle speaks of, I can agree that it's bloody painful. The offending item was a corner of a piece of concrete board, and so I agree with flerdle that there was a good chance of there being some nice cuastic damage there too. It's been fifteen months, and I'm getting less frequent and less severe pain now, but still... I'd really rather not have to deal with it.

One unexpected benefit of our new house is that because it has aircon, we have no need to run fans in the windows and so I no longer sleep in a breeze which stops my eye drying out so much.

Top tip: drink water before going to bed, then some more after you've been to the loo in the night.

"Manchester will celebrate a Europe-wide transport initiative - In Town Without My Car Day - on Sunday when part of Deansgate will be closed to traffic." This seems just the sort of thing to stagger around drunk during. Anyone? I can be in town between around 12:15 and 21:00.

Is one fully participating in this pedestrian and velocipedic celebration if one drives most of the way to town and then proceeds on foot? How much walking distance does it take to cancel out the sin of driving?

[Nik] I wonder if someone will go mad and drive through the ribbon? :)

Aha ! Further to discussions in the Lock Cup, I googled mc5 and discovered the angrycake link - the rab.org one don't work no more.

Hello! waves

[Nik] I would love to join you but am flying off to Dresden on Sunday morning. [Blob] It does you know, you're probably trying to go to the wrong place: http://www.rab.org.uk/mc/ redirects you here.

snorgle it looks as if my prediction of last week was out and gil ran out of steam. But I see that rab your playing the long game with a couple of slow burners.
But the League is nicely poised for some upsets tomorrow's divi payout especially from Dujon who got the jump on me buying the same stock but an hour or two earlier.

(Where 'momentary' is defined as 'any period of a few minutes or so'). That was meant to happen. I finally got around to removing the old disk completely. Much quieter without it, and the various bits screwed back on. There's still going to be a further outage, for RAM, and RSN, but given my propensity to not do things, that could be days, weeks, or aeons.

[Nik] I don't spect anyone else noticed. I got a range of Awuga! Awuga! alerts, which did little but alert me to the fact that these pages deal better with error conditions than I thought. Which is a reason to be cheerful, to those of you who are listening.

Mm, that caused me a bit of a panic. Turns out I'd forgotten to start mysql during boot, though. Whew.