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Rob is 20,118 days old today.

Entries this day: Blindess Work Yurika_lesson

Blindess

8:04am JST Thursday 28 January 2010 (day 14554)

Being legally blind without corrective lenses hasn't stopped me from appreciating being able to navigate pretty well in a fuzzy world, so long as it's relatively well lit. Though I'm not wearing my contacts now, I recognized the actually blind man who often (always)) rides the 8:05 train to Shibuya. Each day that I've seen him, someone will escort him to the line and then onto the train where there are enough physical landmarks that he can easily find a seat. Today I happened to approach the line at the same time as he, asked if he was on the "8:05, right?" and showed him to the line and then onto the train once it arrived. Part of me wanted to ask him several Qs to "get to know him," but that might be just cause he's blind and I feel sorry for him. Tehre's another guy who I see a lot on the train who I have wanted to meet, but have never chatted with him, so why should I with a guy just because he's blind? Hmmmmmm.

pRight now i'm largely typing this blindly. I can just barely see the fuzzy line underneath the fuzzy set of lines is slowly growing, and recently into its second fuzzy line. I wonder sometimes what it would be like to be rea... well, for *me* to be really blind, after having een me wtih ability to see and really use my eyes to make money as a programmer. I've done experimental experiences for example going from my room in Sakura House Motosumiyoshi to the shower downstaris, taking a shower and cgoing back to my room, all in the middle of the night with no lights on, and my eyes closed. The house was relatively small, so lots of physical landmarks I clod continuously touch all the way.. almost all the way. The table in the kitchen was slightly dynamically positioned, and the charis around it even more so, so I had to be careful through that zone.

Sometimes I will walk with my eyes closed to see how far I can go without crashing.. well, that's only if I look ahead say five or ten or twenty meters and say "aight let's walk to there" and see if I can make it without spooking myself into opening my eyes. In these experiments, I rquite enjoy the sense of knowing how far along the N meters I've traveled. I can almost exactly know as I'm crossing the exact point I had chosen before clsing my eyes. How does that work? What is that sense called?

Sometimes I even do that while ridingTJ Bike. Then the distances are well more than when walking.. 20 meters minimum. Obviously a bigger component of the spookiness is the time required to traverse the distance. I've ridden maybe fifty meters that way.

But what would full time blinness do for me? I guess it would force me to switch to massage and ISIS as ways to make money, instead of being online all the time. That's interesting. And it'd be a bit tricky to navigate my surroundings, but apparently it can be done. Hmmmmm. I'd certainly walk a blot more slowly. Hmmmm.

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Work

8:46pm JST Thursday 28 January 2010 (day 14554)

Pretty good work day today, part of which I spent installing Django on the machine name django on this domain. So far it just has a customized Hello World. Learning Python seems like it'll be easier than learning django.

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Yurika lesson

8:41pm JST Thursday 28 January 2010 (day 14554)

I enjoyed a good lesson with Yurika, for which I'm thankful. Her homework was largely perfect so we spent some time with my iPhone, looking at how to spell its after she had a question about the meaning of "it has its ups and downs," and was surprised when I said it's a relatively common phrase.

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