Rain, Bocce, Immigration, Accessibility, etc.
On Sunday I walked across San Francisco with ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
ayanosuke, stangerous and our housemate Chris. Although the Bay to Breakers race had begun long before we reached the city and we got lost within several minutes of starting, we eventually caught up to the crowd of 70,000 or so people in exotic costumes. It took us about three hours to finish the entire journey but we weren't in much of a hurry. Annoyingly, by the time we returned to Palo Alto it was raining very heavily and we got thoroughly drenched walking home from the Caltrain station. It stopped after a while and I'd hoped that would be the end of it when I went to hear Donald Miller speak after dinner but it began raining again and I got completely soaked for the second time that day on my way back. This is not the California I was promised...
Because Monday was the day a large portion of VMware Engineering played musical offices, my team got the day off to play bocce. None of us had ever played before so there were no existing skill advantages but the teams somehow ended up pretty unbalanced by sheer chance. Christian was on the good team. Although my team lost horribly, I still enjoyed the game a lot and would like to play again, especially since it's absurdly cheap.
Immigration is dominating the news here these days because of a bill that aims to reduce the number of illegal immigrants entering the US while allowing those who have already been here for a long time to go legit and move towards becoming citizens. But, as usual, the issue is heavily politicized. Last night I had a lively and well-researched discussion with several others interested in the topic. While the most contentious issues remained unresolved at the end, we all learnt some interesting points about the situation from each other. Personally, I don't think it's feasible to actually prevent sufficiently determined people, of which there are many, from crossing the border in search of low-paying jobs in miserable working conditions as long as the alternative continues to be even worse and the government here neglects to penalize those who persist in employing illegal immigrants. We also discussed the related issue of English being on the critical path for escaping a life of poverty.
Today was my first day in our new office. I've moved from a 2-person office to a 3-person one. We still have a nice view but now it's behind me instead of facing me. On the other hand, I'm much closer to the washroom now. Overall, I can't say it's better or worse than my old office.
In our Designology class today we explored what it was like to accomplish a couple of routine tasks while pretending to be either blind, lame or armless. I attempted to go to one of the Stanford libraries and find a book without using my arms at all while another student accompanied me as an observer. I discovered that getting around is not much of a challenge without arms because I see where I was going and walk around with no difficulty. Opening doors was only a problem when they required handles to be twisted and pulled but most doors could be opened by throwing my weight against a push-bar or using the buttons designed specially for that purpose. Looking books up on a computer terminal proved more daunting because, although I made a serious effort to use my nose and feet to operate the computer, it was virtually impossible to see what I was doing with my nose and even my extreme flexibility was insufficient to let me operate the mouse with my foot while it was on a surface at waist-height. None-the-less, after watching my faux-blind partner nervously meander around in utter disorientation, I think I'd rather be armless than blind. We actually spent a fair bit of time after that attempting to design a device to make life easier for the blind. Our combined efforts culminated in a lightweight head-mounted device that used a videocamera and sonar to recognize objects in the vicinity of the wearer and keep them apprised of their surroundings via audio cues or synthesized speech.
pleased
