Eyesight Update - China Cancelled

Well, I just got back from the optometrist and she informs me my eye is getting worse, not better. What happened is the same thing that happened in Miami this year, but a lot worse. On Monday morning during Miami SES, I woke up blind - I could see light, but it was basically a bright white sheet of pain, rather than images.


The hotel doctor had me rushed by ambulance to the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, which fortunately is one of the best in the world. (Good thing I have travel insurance and credit cards. This insistence on American doctors for payment up front even when you are moaning in pain in front of them is annoying to us Canadians. But I digress...)


The Intercontinental hotel kindly lent me on of their staff to take me by the arm and walk me where I needed to go, and I was able to speak the next day, though giving presentations while unable to see was interesting. I had to wear what I called my Ray Charles glasses to keep out the light. It took about 3 weeks for me to get back to normal.




This time, apparently it's a lot worse. I guess I have dry eyes, coupled with tighter than normal eyelids, which is why I wear glasses instead of contacts (well, that and I'm probably the worlds worst eye patient. I can't handle anything getting near my eyes.) What happened is that sometime during the night the inside of my eyelid dried and stuck to the surface of my eyeball. In the morning, I woke up and ripped off a strip of the skin of my eyeball. If that sounds painful, you are right. Ouch!


But this type of thing should heal in a few days - the skin of your eye heals and grows back just like the skin on your arm. What's causing a problem with me right now is that I ripped the underlying layer of skin, too. So now every time I blink, the growing skin cells have nothing to stick to and get pulled off. More Ouch!


But wait, it gets better. Apparently the answer to this is to rub salt in my eyes. Really. I'm putting in salt water every 4 hours to deliberately irritate the eye for give the skin cells something to stick to. Yes, it hurts as much as it sounds like pouring salt into your injured eye sounds like it would hurt. This is why I sound like such a whiner right now, I'm getting practice whimpering every 4 hours...


Anyway. I found out today that apparently the oh-so-pleasant salt treatment isn't working, and I now have an emergency appointment with a specialist tomorrow morning.


I was also told at the same time that there was no way that I was going to be able to go to China next week to speak and moderate at SES Beijing. This was a blow because I really, really wanted to go (sorry Inway!). I just cancelled my hotel and airfare. I'm not having a good day. But when I cancel a trip to do my favorite thing in my favorite country, it's serious. If you know anyone who might be able to fill in for me on such short notice, please let me know.


Anyway, the long and short of all this is that I can see with one eye, but not for very long. This post has taken a couple of hours, off and on. I'll be AFK for the most part for at least a couple of weeks, I expect.


See you later...


Ian

I'm Blind...Again

Please forgive any spelling errors - I'm typing with one very blurry eye.

About 2 months ago, when I was in Miami, I hurt my eye and went temporarily blind. Well, it just happend again, and I can't see a thing.

I'll be AFK for about a week while it heals.

Ian

McAnerin International Inc, or "Why I've been AFK"

It's been quite a dry spell, blogging-wise here. Sorry about that. I'm going to try to post a lot more from now on. The reason has just been life in general:

• I went to China for a family vacation
• Then I went to China again (this time with the CSMT and SES Xiamen China). I also hit Japan, Korea, Macao and Hong Kong while I was at it. This took a while to recover from, but before I did...
• I went to Toronto SES, followed by a quick trip to Ottawa, where I got food poisoning from some bad escargot. Not pleasant.
• Then I got home for *1 day* and was off to Miami for SES Latino, where I woke up almost completely blind on the first day of the conference. Giving presentations while blind is not fun.
• Then I got home, barely began to recover and then had to go to SES Travel in Seattle. This was a much more pleasant experience, but I was still exhausted by the time I was done.
• My new accountant then informed me that my original plan to have a sole proprietorship (McAnerin Networks) in Canada and an incorporated company (McAnerin Networks Inc) in the US was not working out for me, and I had a 35k tax bill to prove it after taking every deduction I could think of. Ouch.

During this period, of course, I still had my clients to take care of and 3 kids and a wife who deserve to see me occasionally. As a result I've decided to take August off (or at least slow down a lot) and focus on my company and my family. Up until now, I simply haven't had the time to update the blog. I hope you understand.

So now, I've both begun painting the house and redesigning my company websites. The websites reflect the new name, branding and focus:

Corporate Site: McAnerin International Inc. - Internet marketing site focused on international SEO and international SEM/PPC.

Technology Site: McAnerin Networks Inc. - Hosting, domains, programming, design and other technical offerings.

Localized Sites: Canada, USA, China, UK, Japan, Mexico

Non-Company/Other: Mobile Site, McAnerin Family Genealogy Site

Since I'm the only website designer/programmer/SEO/etc for all of these, they are all in different stages of development, and several of them are not even active yet, though they should be shortly.

Why link early to a site still under development? Domain Delay (aka sandbox) proofing, of course. Thanks to Google, I am now forced to do something for a search engine I would have never done in the old days. The irony is that Google keeps telling people they should not do this, then designs a system where it's necessary to do so. I'll be ranting about this more fully in an upcoming blog post.

So in general my company is now McAnerin International Inc. now.

Over the next while I hope to share tactics on how to properly organize multiple local domains in such a way as to maximize rankings for each while minimizing any negative impacts due to duplicate content issues and so forth, using my sites as examples.

I'll also perform several tests and experiments related to international search marketing, both for my own information and as fodder for the book I'm writing in my (ahem) copious amounts of spare time (rolls eyes).

Ian