When we found out I was approved last week we were elated but we were also frustrated because all we could find out about was my first monthly check coming in December. There was no mention of back pay and no one could tell me why or what the deal was. So waited on the approval letter hoping it would have more information or maybe a check. The letter came and still no mention of back pay.

So today I called again and got a completely different answer from what all previous SS reps had told me. I was told today, for the very first time, that I had to be disabled for five months before I could receive SSID. There will not be any back pay.

How is it that government agencies can be so totally incompetent? How could I have been given the same wrong information by multiple people over a period of five months? And what senesce does this rule make anyway? Has some idiot determined that a person should lose their house before getting any benefits?

I wish I didn’t need SSID. I wish I could see normally and continue to earn a living. But the fact is, here I am and I’ve paid into the system my entire working life. It may have been unrealistic but I expected better.

Let me also say that I haven’t exactly been an Apple fan in the past. I’m a PC guy and have been for years. And one the biggest problems on a PC since the inception of the iPod is iTunes. To put it simply, iTunes on a PC just sucks! It has from the start and it still does. But now I have no choice but to use it if I want to put my music collection on my iPad or stay current on updates. I wish there was another option.

Then there’s the Safari browser. Yeah, that sucks too. I can’t believe the number of web sites I have trouble with because of Safari and they aren’t flash sites. I actually agree with Apple’s decision not to support flash because flash is a memory hog. No, I’m talking about simple things like scroll-bars on a web page that can’t be scrolled. On numerous sites I simply cannot see content “below the fold” and there appears to be nothing I can do about it.

Safari also doesn’t deal with the WordPress editor very well. Once I get beyond a couple of paragraphs I can’t convince Safari to keep the window where I’m typing which is pretty annoying since I can’t see what I’m writing. I can scroll back down but as soon as I type one character the window automatically scrolls back up on it’s own.

That’s enough of the bad for now, though I may have more to say in another post. For now let’s look at what works well for me.

Pinch zooming, which I believe has been around for some time on the iPhone and iPod, is a big plus. Many web pages wouldn’t be readable to me without it. But it’s important to note that pinch zoom doesn’t work everywhere. Primarily it works in Safari and in the email app. And sometimes, for reasons I’ve been unable to determine, pinch zoom doesn’t work in Safari. Also many web pages will only zoom so far and if you go farther it snaps back smaller when you lift a finger.

Fortunately there’s another option, the three finger tap. The three finger tap zooms the whole scree which means it no longer fit so you have to pan left and right as well as up and to see everything. This panning must also be done with three fingers. It is this feature, which is turned off by default, that really makes the iPad usable for me. The fact that it works everywhere means I can access menus and settings that would otherwise be out of reach for me.

Being a longtime PC guy means I’ve had to make some adjustments but they’ve been mostly painless. I’m looking forward to iOS 4.2 coming out next month which is supposed to add multitasking, folders and printing. Being able to print will make a big difference to me, as will being able to organize my apps into folders.

Apple has done a lot right in the iPad but there are real problems with Safari and Apple needs to address them. For most people the iPad is a convenience in addition to their computer. For people like me with major vision impairment it is a replacement that needs to work on the web.

I have an SUV that I used in my business.  My wife drives a car.  I’ve argued that we need to keep the SUV for when we travel.  We have a dog that usually goes with us and she’s not a small dog either at 50 pounds.  Traveling is much easier with the SUV.

Then there’s the MUCH nicer stereo in the SUV that I don’t want to give up on trips.  But my wife is reasonably arguing that we need the money we’d get from selling the SUV, not to mention the savings on insurance.  So I guess I’m going to be saying goodbye to the car I’ve driven since 2004.  Just one more casualty of vision loss I guess.

I don’t mean to sound whiny but this is all very hard!