Eye surgeries delay P1 opening 12 days (Caro blog)

Entry #37 (2013-12-16)

UPDATE (2013-12-17, 6 p.m. Central): The left-eye operation went well. Vision is still out of focus, but should improve tomorrow. Colors are fantastically bright. Right-eye operation scheduled in 10 days. Thanks for the many well wishes on Facebook and by email.

Today, I opened up with an epiphany. I no longer felt stubborn about the Poker1.com official opening.

Diane McHaffie, my more-than girlfriend and director of operations for Poker1 has been pestering me to move the opening from December 20 to the first day of next year. I’ve resisted.

Design changes and final functionality tweaks are happening daily. You can visit any of the pages in the top menu and see that the layout is complete, waiting for content to be selected. That isn’t really a challenging task. So, we’re almost ready to go.

Eye surgery

The truth is, I’ve been having trouble seeing. And coding and designing Poker1 has been difficult. My left eye is clouded over with massive cataracts and the right one isn’t much better. So, using my five computer monitors has required leaning in to just inches from the screens and trying to make out the letters. No fun. But no problem, either.

Tomorrow morning, I’m leaving the seclusion of Table Rock Lake and being driven by Diane to the big city of Nixa (a suburb of Springfield, Missouri) to have my eye sliced open, cataracts removed, and an artificial lens inserted. Ten days later, the same thing will happen to the other eye.

I’m told that this type of surgery and implantation is fairly routine these days. If there are no complications, I should be seeing out of the left eye the same day — and much more clearly.

Still focused

Right now, I’m mentally focused on completing Phase 1a of the Poker1 project, although visual focus is a bit more demanding. Soon, we’ll declare the site officially open. As you can see, the only major thing that remains is filling in the holes where content will go. I’m developing P1 in full public view, and you can follow the progress in the “Public P1 task list” on the right sidebar. Also, on opening day, a lot of content will be added to the 1,250 or so entries already in place.

Yes, I still think I could open on December 20, as planned. But I yield to Diane. Beyond the advantage of being able to triple check and fine tune, there’s a statistical reason for opening on January 1, 2014. We’ll be able to more accurately compare full-year traffic with pre-opening years.

Bottom line

So, I guess the bottom line is this. I’m having two eye surgeries — tomorrow and 10 days later. I’ve surrendered to Diane’s request and moved the opening to January 1. That’s 16 days from now. I hope my Poker1 family will understand and stay patient. — MC