Andrei has been hacking on a toy that uses the OpenCV library to find faces in images. I was feeding it some images to try it out, and it found a “face” in an unexpected place in this image from my wedding. Kind of creepy.
Author Archives: Jeremy Cole
Vasona Light Rail Extension Opened
This weekend, the VTA‘s Vasona Light Rail Extension was finally completely opened!
The Fruitdale station is a short 10-minute walk from our apartment, and takes me all the way north to Mountain View with no transfers. It takes 56 minutes to get to the Lockheed Martin station, nearest to Yahoo!, so it’s pretty comparable to taking the bus, train, and employee shuttle. The nice thing, though, is that I’ll get a solid hour to work instead of several 10-15 minute blocks.
The other upsides: It’s about 5 minutes from here to downtown San Jose, it runs every 15-30 minutes most of the time, and it runs from 5am to midnight, seven days a week. No more taxis back from San Jose Diridon unless we arrive after midnight!
Borregas Bridges Public Meeting
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.
My cubicle at Yahoo!
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 2nd 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.
Homeless in San Jose
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”.)
Jeremy Cole 
