As I’ve stated before on this blog I’m a technology late adopter, slightly ironic in my position I suppose but there you go. I embrace new commercial and consumer technology but actually don’t like paying a premium for it. I wait until the early adopters have paid top money and the demand curve has levelled out before I get mine. However, I might be going soft, I broke with tradition this year and allowed someone to deploy technology on me physically, as an early adopter – because it just sounded cool.

Two weeks back I let a talented surgeon point femtosecond laser at my eyes to correct for the impact that years have taken on the muscles, and to improve their general suitability for the purpose of seeing things. The cool bit that got my attention? A promise of zapping two lenses in to one eye, which was originally designed a very very long time ago with just one, to give the prospect of proper near vision – so I can still see to mend fiddly things without the annoyance of glasses – in addition to having corrected distance vision.

The concept of bursts of pinpointed energy, a quadrillionth of a second long, blowing bubbles in to my corneas, targeted in real-time by a vision system that tracks the movement of my eyes and pauses proceedings if they move out of tolerance – was really quite impressive and it is an experience, if you understand at least some of what’s going on, I actually recommend it!

All I need now is my half century-old brain to figure out what it’s supposed to do with the multiple images it now receives, so that as I write words on this screen which is a couple of years older than the laser technology used on me, I don’t need to keep closing one eye! It takes time apparently; I’ll let you know how that bit of the technology goes.