Double Blind

Microsoft is setting up a building in Richmond, BC. There are plenty of articles (e.g. at the Tyee) with speculation, but ignore everything you are hearing about it since the following is closer to the truth:

The USA H-1B visa has been the standard route for tech companies to get people from foreign countries to work in the USA. There is a restriction of 65,000 H-1B visas per year and thus it is very difficult to obtain. What happens is that for one day in the year, the “window of opportunity” opens and companies can apply for H-1B visas for their prospective employees. Since the USA receives far in excess of 65,000 visas, a lottery process ensues and companies are told months later which people received and which did not receive the visas.

Frustrated at the process, Microsoft is going to try another route: The L-1 visa, which has no restriction on quantity. All that needs to happen is that you have to be an employee of a foreign subsidiary of a US company for a year and then you can come to work in the USA for five years once you get the L-1.

An interesting quirk of the USA immigration system is that if you are married, your spouse can come to the USA but not work if you have an H-1B visa. If you have an L-1 visa, your spouse can come and work in the USA.

Anybody in the Lower Mainland that wants to get a job with Microsoft that doesn’t want to move to Redmond, WA, you are totally out of luck. I continue to find it funny how the local politicals say that this is a huge economic coup for British Columbia when actually we’re just serving as an immigration bypass for US corporations.

I’m back in action, but I feel somewhat mentally disabled. I always feel this way when getting back from travels so it will take some time for posting to resume its usual irregular volume.

A small story from the travels that I’m currently on…

Picture: Tenson Scott and myself

The Cayman Islands consist of three islands. Grand Cayman is where most of the tourists go, and two smaller islands, Cayman Brac and Little Cayman are about 80 miles northeast of Grand Cayman. Right now I am on Cayman Brac.

On Cayman Brac, on the northeastern side of the island is a rather knowledgable fisherman named Tenson Scott. He is also an accomplished jewelry creator. His speciality is working with Caymanite, a type of rock only found on the Cayman Islands. Caymanite is white, orange and red and when polished and prepared the correct way looks beautiful. When you talk with Tenson, he will have all sorts of stories to discuss, including how he can catch fish (Mackerels) without a hook, simply by being smarter than the fish. His knowledge about making Caymanite jewlery is extensive (including where to get the raw material on the Bluffs of Cayman Brac) and most remarkably is all self-taught. Despite being 70 years of age, Tenson mentioned that one has to keep their minds engaged and keep asking questions to not get stale.

His shop is on the northeastern side of the island, named Nims. It is an innocent looking place and you can easily miss it while visiting Cayman Brac, but certainly one attraction of the place is Tenson.

The other wonderful thing about the “sister islands” is that you have all the wonderful aspects of the beach, but none of the tourists.

I’ll be back by the end of the month.

It’s time to go on holiday again. Posting may be sporadic between now and late November.

How do you turn a sphere inside out?

This Google Video is an interesting exercise in abstract geometry – something we rarely receive in every-day life but when we do get situations that require such skills, it really comes in handy.

For mathematics-type people, when you create infinitely tight curves (i.e. “sharp bends” or corners), the definition of this is when a point along a function is not continuous and differentiable at every point.

If you’re running with Bluehost and using a Wordpress installation, please keep in mind that there is a “problem” with the 2.3.1 upgrade – the Bluehost mail servers are configured to not send emails with “from” addresses that it does not recognize. The Wordpress engine uses the “wordpress@domain.com” format of email address, so to fix this problem you will have to create an email account with the name “Wordpress” and your comments should resume normally. It’s a kludge, but it’s one that will work.

The best post-Halloween tactic is to buy the chocolates the day after Halloween, when they are traditionally discounted. So I had to do some grocery shopping shortly before Halloween and I remembered the price for the kilogram bags of small Halloween treats.

The morning of Halloween, I stopped by and noticed that the prices were the same, except there was an orange sign saying “up to 50% off selected Halloween candies, prices as marked”. As far as I could tell, they didn’t discount anything although people were clearly picking up the product, thinking they got a good deal.

I did notice on another shelf where they were selling costume-related material, that there was an orange sign saying the same thing except it said “prices reduced at the cash register”.

I guess if you want to market product that people expect to be on sale, you just say that the price has been reduced, except you don’t reduce it.

There was a truck tanker which crashed near Yale on Highway 1. The highway was shut down for the better part of a day. Attached is a (blurry) picture of the oil spill – note the dark spot on the road is not a shadow, it’s the oil itself.

Look at this article. Looks pretty innocent, right? Now try highlighting some text on the screen and you will see that a popup will come directing the phrase to answers.com.

I find this incredibly annoying AND a security exploit waiting to happen – what if this popup directed you to some porn site? The Santa Barbara Independent will not likely do that, but what if the site operator was maliciously intended and decided to lace one in five hundred pages with malicious content? As soon as you double-click on a word, the code gets loaded into your browser and it’s off to the races.

Whenever I browse the web sometimes I indiscriminately double-click on words or highlight lines – it’s a very unconscious thing, but I find it helps with my reading. When sites have this sort of mechanism it really screws up how I want to read the site – they are trying to shove something down my cranial tube and I don’t like it.