jcole’s weblog

I attended a public meeting in Sunnyvale tonight about the Borregas Avenue Bike and Pedestrian Bridges project. The project involves building two bicycle and pedestrian bridges to connect Borregas Avenue: one over Highway 101, and one over State Route 237. This would provide for a much safer North-South corridor through Sunnyvale for bicycles and pedestrians, and would connect the neighborhoods on the respective sides of each highway with each other.

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I realized that I never really made the requisite “I’m working at Yahoo!” gallery additions showing my work environment or the very cool campus that I am working at. Here’s a few samples of where I work!

I have a cube on the 2^nd floor of a 4-story building on the main Yahoo! campus in Sunnyvale, California. I posted pictures of it on Flickr and added some notes to explain things. You can click the thumbnails to get more detail about my cube inside and outside.

Like any large city, San Jose has a lot of homeless people. According to one site, as many as twenty-thousand people are homeless in Santa Clara county at any one time. Many of them live in San Jose (being the largest city in the county, and the entire South Bay).

We regularly see any number of different, fairly normal-looking people, picking through our dumpsters looking for cans and bottles to collect the deposit on and recycle. It wouldn’t surprise me if there was one person who regularly came by and went through the dumpster. What surprises me is that there is competition for our trash.

Over the past few weeks, someone has established residency in our parking lot. He has a smallish RV that he parks in the same spot every evening, goes to bed, and leaves early in the morning, likely to go to work.

What can we do about the homeless in our city? (And no, I don’t mean “to get rid of them”, I mean “to help them”.)

While she was cooking bacon, on my Weber Baby Q grill, directly on the grill (note that I had nothing to do with this):

Helena: Why is it smoking?
(Jeremy and Eric proceed to laugh.)

Good stuff. Grease was literally pouring out of the bottom of the grill into the catch pan. Yuck.

Yes, you read that right! It’s… raining!

It hasn’t rained a “measurable amount” (as the weather service says) here since June, so it’s been a while! And thunder, to boot!

YES!

Tonight, at a party:

Eleanor: We’re all guys, right?
(awkward pause)
Eleanor: I hate my ovaries!

I wish you could come back, em dash. Nobody knows how to use you anymore—and I miss you.

I think what finally killed you was Microsoft Word. They tried to be smart, they tried to create their own standard. They tried but they failed, and you were the casualty. Now all we get are underscores and question marks, and the occasional gibberish, when we could be seeing beautiful em dashes.

Even the Washington Post often can’t figure you out:

“I feel his language is encouraging _ he seems to be discovering a reality, the same reality that I see,” said NAACP President Bruce Gordon.

You’re a complex little beast, but I was your friend. I still want to be your friend. Come back to me, em dash.

Andrei: You joke, but that bulldozer gets the chicks like you wouldn’t believe…

Heard over the cubicle wall today:

Guy1: Did you just call me handsome?!
Guy2: Yes I did.

Nice out of context quote.

Yep, comcast is sucking today once again, and much worse this time. Pings from a few moments ago:

--- yahoo.com ping statistics ---
156 packets transmitted, 100 packets received, +4 duplicates, 35% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 20.443/2443.189/24998.629/5055.897 ms

--- jcole.us ping statistics ---
141 packets transmitted, 109 packets received, +1 duplicates, 22% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 68.351/477.976/5021.407/929.860 ms

Do note the +4 and +1 duplicates. Heh.