My eyesight’s not bad, only slight short sightedness, but I took to wearing my glasses all the time in school because it irked me to have to keep putting them on and off to see certain things. On a bit of a whim I decided to give contact lenses a try, and I had an optician’s appointment today to check I was OK to get some, and have them fitted.

After a few tests and some pondering she put a pair of 2-week lenses in for me to try out, and let me have a wander round town for 20 minutes to check they were comfortable and fitted properly. It was so cool, you don’t realise how much glasses suck until you’re given the opportunity to see clearly without them. Peripheral vision without turning your head! And contact lenses won’t wear holes in the sides of my nose, I don’t have to take them off to go rowing (or swimming? dunno), and I’ll (hopefully) stop compulsively poking myself in the nose to push my glasses back up (which I do even when I’m not wearing them).

Whilst graced with such visual lucidity I dropped in to Carphone Warehouse and discovered my O2 contract was ripe for termination, so got myself a new Nokia 6630 on Vodafone 3G. I went back to the optician and she took the lenses out and ordered some for me, and then discovered I have to wait up to a week for them to arrive and go back for a lesson in poking myself in the eye, etc. It was intensely frustrating to walk back in to the optician with contacts on and out again with my crappy old glasses.

In other news, I discovered Galloway & Porter (a bargain/factory return bookshop in Cambridge) have a large number of foolishly cheap O’Reilly books in the basement, so I bought four (Perl Bookshelf, Perl Cookbook, C# Nutshell, SQL Nutshell) for only £30. Wahey! Returning to college I found out that my Nokia 6630’s locked to Vodafone and nobody’s cracked the locking codes yet, so I can’t put my O2 sim in – I’m unable to use it until next week when my number ports over. Roll on next week!

What do people use to manage and publish their photos? I’ve got a new digital camera (Canon IXUS 500 if anyone is curious, great for the price) and already have over 1000+ photos from it and photo CDs, and 7 films that still need developing. I’d like a web gallery that does this:

• Stores the originals sensibly (filesystem ideally) and without modification
• Generates sensibly-sized slides and thumbnails for web viewing and ideally caches them
• Allows me to easily rotate pictures for viewing, either preserving the original or doing it losslessly
• Allows me to arrange pictures into galleries and associate captions, and ideally move them around
• For bonus points, reading EXIF data such as times and orientation
• For double bonus points, integrating with WordPress somehow to handle linking/inclusion would be cool

A program that did these and had a good export to web feature would be acceptable also. But generally, I want the moon on a stick. Anyone got any recommendations?