The mere thought of paying 300 dollars or more for glasses made my stomach turn. In my opinion eye glasses and jewelry are the biggest racket around. It's just been marked up so much over the years that no one even pays attention to it anymore. Well one of the blogs I frequent outside of the technology field is http://www.lifehacker.com the basic premise behind the site (or at least one of them) is taking everyday situations or expenses and figuring out a way around paying full price.
I stumbled across an article on the site that talked about refusing to pay "the man" so much damn money for glasses. "Save bundles of cash by buying eyeglasses online ". I thought it was a great idea, granted there was a bit of un-easy feeling with ordering something like glasses online. It would be like ordering prescriptions online from china. But I read the article a few times over to make sure I knew exactly what I was getting into.
I went to my local eye glass outlet, well honestly, I went to about four. I tried on at least 50 pairs of glasses. Everywhere from the "no way in the world I'd wear those" to "hey I could see myself in these". I took pictures of me in each pair of glasses I liked, then I took multiple pictures of each pair from every angle I could think of. Lastly, I pulled out my trusty Ikea tape measure and measured the length of the glasses from one end to the other as well as each individual lens and the length of the bridge bar the connects the two lenses. You'll need to know all this information when trying to find the best match online to the glasses you found in the store.
Then the real work began, finding as close of a match to the best of the best glasses I found in the locations near me. Give yourself a bit of time for this, it takes a while going through the hundreds of frames. Matching up measurements, colors weights, materials etc etc.
I finally chose the pair that I wanted, now the interesting part. In a feat that I was almost positive would get a reaction like a mother scolding her child, I was off to the optometrist. The problem is that when you tell them you only want your prescription and your "pupillary distance" it's pretty much a dead give-a-way that you're going to be ordering your glasses online or at minimum from another vendor. This almost always, from what I've heard incites a flurry of discipline and sales pitches. Everything from: "you shouldn't order your eye glasses online, you never know what you're going to get" to "are you sure you don’t want to buy your glasses here, we're running a sale for fifty dollars when you get an eye exam".
This is all bull! First, those fifty dollar glasses end up being just the frames and after you get anti glare, anti scratch, lens transitions and all the other stuff to effectively take advantage of current technology, you're on a monthly payment plan! Resist the man I say! I got off easy and told the sales guy/optometrist that I was going to have a set of shooting range glasses made. Something they don’t offer at basically any store on the planet. Feel free to use my excuse, even if it's completely unbelievable… how do you even argue that one!? haha.
The rest is a breeze, just go to the site, and the frames you have bookmarked, choose your options, fill in the blanks and most normal pair's will be at your house in less than a week! I was told that if you do something like transitions or bi-focal, it costs a bit more and takes a little more time. However that is all relative because it can't physically cost as much as the retail stores will charge you.
Best of all, they are almost disposable, in fact I could have ordered 5 pairs for the price of just one at the retail store.
Just a few things to keep in mind when you get your prescription (which the doctor is legally mandated to give you a copy of). Make sure they write the prescription clearly, if you don’t understand the handwriting, have them redo it. Period. They won't like it because they aren't making any commission off of it, tough. Also if you get a "PL" on your prescription as I did, that means "0" so don’t freak out when you don’t see a "PL" on the drop down box when filling in the fields for your prescription strength. And lastly, you only get a very small window when you order the frames to make any kind of changes to your order. For example, I accidently chose silver instead of gun metal for my frame color. It was only one number off and I botched it, I called them up and was glad to hear an American voice on the other end. The woman explained that they get shipped almost immediately and that they would try to catch it before it went out. Unfortunately I didn't get so lucky but at 32 dollars a pair, if I didn't like them that much… I'd just buy another pair.
I'd HIGHLY recommend using this method to order your glasses hopefully you have the same experience I did, and if not… it was only 32 bucks so what the heck?
The final result....
Not the best picture but the only one I could find, this was in Africa.. Side note, if you ever get a chance to drink Iron Brew you need to.
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Email My wife and I just finished up a pretty epic whirlwind of a Euro backpacking trip. In two weeks we hit the UK, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg and Belgium. If you’re hard core you could do more, we spent 4 days alone in London, and we could have hit another country if we really wanted to. In my opinion the method we chose to do our initial trip was one that left us asking ourselves a few times, “Where the hell are we again?” and that’s exactly what we wanted out of the trip.
How to get from A to B
Where to stay
Ok now for some lessons learned.
General:
The good thing is that in most countries we found that MOST Burger Kings and McDonalds' have free wifi. So if you like that crappy kind of food you can eat there and sync up. Or just get something to drink
I'd suggest bringing a small netbook, we brought an Asus EEEpc and it was nice to use when i got tired of trying to pull stuff up on a little phone (a phone that didnt usually work correctly )
If you hate carrying change around, you’re going to hate the currency. With 1-2 euro/pound coins, you can’t toss out these coins and since we already covered that everything cost, you have to keep the coins with you.UK (London): Avebury . It’s not as grand as Stonehenge but you can get right up close to it and it’s just as mysterious.Ireland (Dublin, Cork, Blarney): Italy (Venice): France (Paris): Luxembourg (Luxembourg): Belgium (Brussels):
Lastly, I realized one thing about going to all these places. Regardless of which country you're from, if you wear those huge sunglasses that cover 2/3 of your face, you'll still look like a goofball.
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I thought it necessary to split my TechEd Africa and all my other African experience because I could see it becoming quite a long blog post with a ton of pictures. In a struggle to keep things short and sweet but also providing some great representations of the time I had there, I needed to be descriptive for sure.
We were met at the airport by the wonderful and kind-hearted Veronique Palmer (@veroniquepalmer ). She even held up a sign with our names on it. Unfortunately she listed Joel Oleson before Eric Harlan, but we talked that over and next time we come to Africa she’ll She took us for a late night tour around Johannesburg, got us some local currency, cooked us a home cooked meal, let us use her 3G modem and even offered to give up her bed! I refused naturally, representing my American brothers; I couldn’t in good mind take this poor woman’s bed from her. So after an unconscious night of sleep on a very comfortable couch we were up the next morning and ready to start our epic journey across southern Africa.
This was an adventure to go down in the Eric history book. I pray that I’ll get a chance to do it again, this time I’ve been threatened by my wife that if I don’t take her… a charging elephant is not the worst I need to worry about. That’s honestly fine with me as I felt really bad that she didn’t get a chance to experience it with me, yet on the other hand I'm glad I had the company I did. It gave me no real excuse not to go way outside of my box and outside the box I went.
Let’s name some of the exotic foods I ate: Springbok, Ostrich, Kudu, Wildebeest and Smoked Impala. Now I know that might be out of most people’s boxes, but for me it was a far away planet. This coming from the guy who really doesn’t like mushrooms! The not so exotic but still farfetched for me was some authentic Ethiopian food (loved all of it except the mushy rice bread stuff) and some prawn curry.
Honestly though, this was just the beginning of the out of body experience that was South My guide for the trip, Joel Oleson (@JoelOleson ) did whatever he could to keep my word to myself and do whatever I could to make me feel as uncomfortable as possible. Later on the way home, he mentioned that he knew I was approaching my limit in some cases and was One of those times was parking our car, with all our clothes and valuables at a South African border hotel. Packing only what we needed to get by for a day and walking across the border into Mozambique. We didn’t have a single solitary plan, we had no transportation, no hotel, no idea what we were getting into when we walked through that final check point.
Piling into a minivan packed full of 14 other people and pointing on a map to the capital and where we wanted to go just blew my mind. After getting there, finding the only person English speaking person we could find in a Portuguese speaking country we finally found a hotel. By the way I remembered so much of my Spanish from high school those 36 hours I was really surprised. To an English speaking person, Portuguese and Spanish are pretty similar, especially in the basic words.
I saw my first real burning pile of trash, and was amazed to see a goat munching on the same pile. That was certainly interesting. I don’t say that to down Mozambique, it was a beautiful country I would certainly go back if I had the chance. Now I just know what to expect in some of the lesser populated townships and rural outskirts.
Prior to the walking trip into Mozambique, Joel and I spent a few days in Kruger National Park. Yes the same Kruger where “Battle at Kruger ” was captured on film. One of the most raw things that could probably happen in a fenced off albeit enormous nature reserve. Almost immediately we were given the opportunity to stumble across a massive elephant. We were blown away that an animal this size could even be this close physically to us. It literally could have taken four steps and been on top of us. Simply amazing.
There was some decisions in the beginning whether to drive ourselves or hire a tour guide. I have to say that if you plan to do what we did; renting a car is the only way to go. Don’t let the stigma we hold prevent you from doing this. It was more than safe and was a great experience. I’m so glad we got talked into doing this self tour!
We got to see five of the renamed big six; collectively we can’t understand how the hippo isn’t considered in the “Big 5”. So we decided to come up with our own marketing ploy and call it the big six including the hippo. Oddly enough, close to where the Battle at Kruger video was shot was also where the most leopard sightings where. Including one woman who almost rubbing it in described how she saw a leopard kill an Impala, drag it up a tree and feed it to her cubs. Keep in mind the leopard is one of the hardest animals to spot in the wild. The cheetah and wild dog were the only more rare to spot in that reserve, we didn’t see either one of those either. I guess it’s just another excuse to go back.
After our trip through Kruger and our time in Maputo, we cruised through the Kingdom of Swaziland. Where the food, drink and condoms flow like water. Condoms?! Yes that’s right condoms, unfortunately Swaziland holds the title for worlds highest AIDS rate per capita. Forty percent of adults between 15 and 50 have the virus. That means in a few years 40% of the 1.1 million people in this entire country will be dead and gone. A sobering reality, hence the box of condoms at the border gate.
That said the country was awesome, with high peaks and low valleys watching the sun set was I really do regret not being able to spend more time in the Kingdom of Swazi. The people were so nice and the beehive huts were way too cool to not stay in for an additional night. But we had a six hour drive down to Durban and Microsofts TechEd conference.
For more on my experience at TechEd go here: http://www.ericharlan.com/Moss_SharePoint_2007_Blog/teched-africa-recap-a149.html
After our time in Durban, Joel and I flew over to Cape Town to meet up with Zlatan Dzinic (@zlatandzinic ). We were coming over to speak at Cape Town’s first SharePoint Saturday. The event was great, the crowd was awesome and it was really well organized for putting it together with such short notice. Look out for Cape Town to be one of the SharePoint power houses of
In between our flight out of the country and SharePoint Saturday Cape Town, we would have been insane not to take part in the local flare. That meant, Penguins, Seals and Great white sharks. How can you go to Cape Town and not go shark diving? We couldn’t think of one sane reason not to so Zlatan, Joel and myself took the 2 hour drive out to Gans Baai and hooked up with the Crew at Shark Cage Diving for our day on the water. We got up close and personal with seven 5-6 meter Great The sheer size of these things is physically impossible to describe, you must see it in real life to understand. One moment that sticks out in my mind while in the diving cage is when a larger of the seven sharks approached the cage head on. At one point you couldn’t see the tail, you couldn’t see any fins, and all you saw was face and teeth. The head was so wide it physically obstructed my view of the rest of the shark. All I remember thinking was wow; this thing is the pit bull of the sea. Its Jaws were so muscle bound and protruding that this animal looked two dimensional in the water when looking at it directly from the front. Hopefully we get back our underwater pictures and we find we caught that moment on film.
I’m not a huge animal lover, nor did I go to Africa specifically to do this safari and shark It was a blast both in getting to know a fellow technologist in our drive across southern Africa as well as getting to take in all the beautiful and strange activities. Activities that seemed to become more and more normal as our expectations of Africa were wiped away.
I will say that we had the nicest people on the planet there for us during our journey, in some cases giving us their phone for a week, offering up their couches, and taking time from their lives and families simply to tote us around for a few days. The trip wouldn’t’ have been the same without the interactions from these people.
Thanks for all your kindness Africa. Buy a Donkey.. Wait what?
Lekker om jou te ontmoet
Enjoy more of the pictures, I know those moments will be implanted in my brain forever…hopefully you all get some enjoyment out of them as well.
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13. "Cash Cab's" cab number is 7N78, he's followed by a newer white Ford van (chrome grill) and works mostly out of the lower middle to west side. I will find you Ben Baily and I will win all your glorious cabbie bucks goodness!
14. Bring an umbrella, or buy one from one of the 50,000 people hustling them on the corner when it rains. Why you ask? Re-Read #5 then imagine if all those people had umbrella's with little pointy metal things just waiting to sail through your eye! An umbrella is the only good defense against a hoard of other conspiring umbrellas!
15. When its near the end of a work day, cabs are getting off too, some are leaving the city some are coming into the city. So if you want to get a cab quickly, walk to the the street that is pointing in the direction you're ultimately going in. If you are going south and you are on a one way street pointing north, its possible that all the cabs are there leaving town and the only way you'll get a ride is if you are going in that direction. It took me 3 cabs pulling away from me while I'm in the middle of the street to figure that one out.
And a few photos...
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Email So i need a little help picking the new me. I've narrowed down the STYLES of glasses i like from the thousands to only a few. Some fit me to a tee (T?) and some are a little out there for me but I'm willing to shake things up a bit. So leave me your comments and tell me which number you think is more "ME".
Click for the full sized version
Pair #1
Pair 1 up close
Pair #2
Close up #2
Pair #3
Pair #4
must have missed the close up of this pair. looks kinda like pair5 just thinner and lighter frames (burberry?)Here's a side view
Pair #5
Seriously, not these but the photo is funny. My hand looks insanely huge
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