This is the eleventh in an ongoing series of posts that capture journal entries from my incredible trip to Zimbabwe in 1997. You can read more about my motivation for the journey and why I’m revisiting it now in the original post. I was 21 at the time I wrote this.
 
Part 11
7/8/97, Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe
I left the theatre meeting early, at noon on Saturday, to catch a bus into Harare. I was just going to walk to the stop nearest to the CHIYSAP offices, but Lance insisted on driving me to Makoni where the buses originate. It took 20 minutes just to get there! So I got on a bus there and after basically re-tracing the path I had just taken, we headed for Harare. The walk from the bus stop to the hotel was much farther than I thought so I was about half an hour late to meet Jayson (the South African boy I met on the bus from Johannesburg). It turns out that he only lives 15 minutes (walking distance) from the hotel so he had at least been there on time. We got into a taxi to try to find the 4th of July picnic for Americans that I had heard about from the embassy. It was in Mt. Pleasant, one of the poshest suburbs and pretty darn far away, it cost $50 Z to get out there! There was baseball, pony rides and one of those jumpy castles for kids, lots of tables with American theme stuff as well as a books and magazines table containing old American publications for purchase. Jayson, being only 18, wasn’t too excited about the name tags and the silly American flags. It was nice to hear familiar accents and eat hot dogs and hamburgers, but it only made me realize that I don’t much fit in among Americans either. The soon to be ex-ambassador was there and some Marines. There was a speech, they displayed the colors, played the national anthem, then we said the Pledge of Allegiance, it was all a little silly. We ate, drank several beers, then left. The taxi driver actually came back as agreed! We went back to the hotel for more beers and I called Graham’s (my friend in San Francisco who helped me organize this trip) friend Lucilia as we had arranged earlier in the week. She came and picked me up, I left Jayson to deal with his relatives who were coming to see his Grandma because she just got out of the hospital.

Lucilia had just moved all of her stuff into a new ‘flat’ and was still cleaning so she took me to her girlfriend Leslie’s house (an apartment). Lucilia is from Mozambique but she is here attending the University of Zimbabwe studying business. It is illegal to be homosexual in Zimbabwe so very few people are out. I would never have met these friends if Graham hadn’t initiated this contact. Leslie was very sweet, she works for an architectural firm in town and she is also a painter on the side. She is white and a native of Zimbabwe so some of our discussions touching race were colored by her views of black people which were not negative but occasionally ignorant. Lucilia, her girlfriend, is park black like me so she doesn’t have that much prejudice I suppose. I got to take a hot bath at her house and it was heaven! While Lucilia was cleaning up back at her new flat I talked with Leslie, we discovered we had a lot of things in common. Later Juan, another friend of Graham’s, came over. He was very cute and very gay, he helps run GALZ (Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe). We ate dinner: some chicken and broccoli baked in the oven with bread, then went to pick up another friend, Ruth. It was decided we would go to “The Tube” club first to see if it was crowded. It wasn’t so we headed to Xscape, in a suburb called Borrowdale. The people there were a mix of gays and straights. It was almost like the Blue Lagoon (at home in Santa Cruz, except that the music was different.

I spent most of the night dancing, it was a mix of predominantly ’80s music but it included some stuff like Michael Bolton, AC/DC and Guns & Roses which I didn’t find very danceable. Juan is a fabulous dancer and we spent a lot of time together after he had cruised the place and declared that there was no ‘eligible talent’ for him to take home that evening. Ruth had a bit of a crush on me I think, but I found her a bit abrasive. She knew I had a girlfriend at home. We danced all night and went home around 3:30am. Lucilia dropped me off at her place and she slept at Leslie’s house. It was nice to have the bed to myself. In the morning after several tries I manage to talk to Jennie on the phone. My Sprint card doesn’t work in Zimbabwe and I couldn’t remember the AT&T number so I had her call me back and I left money for Lucilia’s phone bill. It was so great to hear her voice. I think her phone bill is going to be huge though…

 
To be continued…

Last week was the 4th annual Xerox Innovation Group (XIG) conference in Webster, NY. It is an event that brings together researchers from all of our centers: Xerox Research Center Canada, Europe, India and Webster (my center) as well as the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). I was on the conference committee as the one of the keynote speaker chairs (I brought Professor Judy Olson to speak to our researchers about scientific collaboration over distance), so I was pretty busy during the event, helping with the logistics and networking with all of the amazing people in our organization.

In the midst of all this activity, I was surprised with an Excellence in Science and Technology award, along with 5 other team members, for our work on on Open Xerox. Open Xerox is the web portal that hosts technology prototypes from XIG, making them accessible to the external user community well before the launch of a product offering. I am responsible for the design and usability of the site and it’s associated services. Here’s the text from the award:

This award recognizes the Open Xerox Team. It has over a thousand users and is being used to support RFPs, customer engagement and technology licensing as well as share R&D across the XIG and broader research community. Designed to combine technologies, facilitate transfer, ease integration into customer applications and host software at very different levels of maturity the proprietary platform also has built-in IP protection.

The team for Open Xerox is a cross-center team, including people from Xerox Research Center Europe (XRCE) and Xerox Research Center Webster (XRCW). Pictured (from left to right) are Irene Maxwell (XRCE), Sophie Vandebroek (CTO of Xerox and President of XIG), me and Mike Kehoe (XRCW). Behind us is the video screen that shows some of our other team members connecting via video conference from XRCE in Grenoble, France: Jutta Willamowski and Nicola (hidden off screen). Herve Poirier (XRCE) is also on our team and was present at the conference, but did not make it for the awards ceremony. We were all given a nice plaque and an iPad 2 for our efforts. I’m very proud of the team and the project so I decided to post about it here.

One of the fun things about working in a research center is that we are encouraged to publish and obtain patents for our ideas. This year I contributed to two publications that came out of my usability evaluation work on the Document Interactions project. Here are the references:

Eric Bier, Wei Peng, Zahra Langford, William Janssen, Patricia Wall, Jonas Karlsson, and Tong Sun. A story-based approach to making sense of documents. IASTED (International Association of Science and Technology for Development) Proceedings on Human-Computer Interaction, 2011.

Tong Sun, Jonas Karlsson, Wei Peng, Patricia Wall, Zahra Langford. “Managing Interactions in the Collaborative 3D DocuSpace for Enterprise Applications”, The 4th International Conference on Human-centric Computing 2011.

You can find the conference proceedings for HumComp2011 here.

This project also spawned a chapter in an upcoming book about online interview research to which I contributed content and illustrations. In addition, I have two patents in the application process for user interface innovations on two other projects, I’ll post here if/when they are finalized. I will eventually get everything formalized into my resume.

I’ve settled into more of a routine this week. With the exception of Monday morning (when my parents do their work), I spent most of my time at the Mt. Shasta office. I was up very early for 7am (10am ET) meetings most days so I usually finish up around 3 or 4pm. If/when I transition to full time virtual work on the west coast, that will likely be my regular schedule.

I’ve been taking all meetings on my iPhone, rather than using landlines, to avoid long distance charges. This tends to run the battery down so low that the phone can’t cover the remainder of the day’s activities (usually taking photos and using the GPS to locate hiking spots and restaurants). So I’ve been having to charge it again around midday. On long calls it sometimes drops me off the call after about 45 minutes. This isn’t a big deal, but it has been somewhat disruptive.

I had my weekly one-on-one with Pat on Tuesday, we used the video component of Live Meeting. It worked well and her video only dropped out once. For as many virtual meetings as we have in our organization, personal video is almost never used even though most people have that capability. We do have specific meeting rooms available in the Webster office that have built-in video capabilities for the group, but they are not used on a regular basis. I haven’t seen much advantage to adding video to a meeting when I am present in the room. It just makes me more conscious of my appearance, attention and attitude as it is reflected back to me on the screen. It does serve to keep me feeling a little more connected to my group out here so I would probably use it more as a virtual employee.

Between meetings I’ve been continuing work on my primary projects. For our upcoming internal conference I spent some time searching for images that would best represent our theme “Advancing the Edge of Innovation” on the program cover. Image searching can take up a lot of time and it is always difficult to come up with something that will meet the Xerox brand imaging guidelines which are very specific. Working with another committee member, I managed to come up with 6 options which I then placed in the cover design template and pushed out to the entire committee for voting. So far, my favorite image is winning so I’m happy!

For Open Xerox this week, I’ve been doing some research on mobile website design. I have worked on several mobile applications on the iPhone platform, but I haven’t yet done a mobile website design. There are programs/services that you can use to create a mobile version, but we will probably develop our own for Open Xerox. Xerox.com does not yet have a mobile version, so I’m hoping I can be a little more creative with the design. This may even be an opportunity for me to influence the future mobile design of Xerox websites, but I won’t hold my breath. Right now I’m in the research phase, looking at the trends and existing sites that are doing creative things. I also need to understand how the sites will be displayed on a variety of mobile platforms (I have an iPhone so I’m a little biased). I’ll probably start sketching some ideas out next week. We have a great development team on Open Xerox so I know that they will be able to implement anything I come up with.

Working for Xerox, there are many things I do that I can’t write about here because they haven’t been released to the public yet or we don’t yet have patent coverage on them. One one such project, I’m primarily providing high level design direction, but I also have the opportunity to address some challenging design issues. One such issue I’ve been exploring this week is how to express the social value of a digital object (such as a blog post, news article or image). There are some very basic ways of expressing this out there (such as number of likes, tweets, diggs, votes, ratings etc.). But they are fairly one dimensional. The Facebook ‘like’ takes it a step further by adding the number of your friends who liked it. I’m trying to come up with some more multi-dimensional ways to capture value and to present them in a more visual way. For example, how many of my friends and friends of friends have read/used this object, how many of them have shared it, how did they rate it? I’ve been doing lots of thinking and sketching on that this week. I don’t have a complete solution yet, but I’m getting there. Who knows, maybe I’ll get a patent or two out of it…

I’ll be taking a long weekend off to do some traveling down to San Bernardino, CA to visit relatives. Then traveling back home on Tuesday. I should be back to my regular, non-virtual work by Wednesday. This has been a fun experiment and I look forward to doing it again sometime soon!

It turns out that my parent’s office is not as available as they led me to believe. Either that or I did not make it clear that it would be difficult for me to work in the space while other people were in it. I think that this has been an unusual week which necessitated extra use of the space by various parties. For the past two days, instead of going into the Mt. Shasta office, I have set up shop at the dining room table.

I’m relatively comfortable here. I think the back and neck problems mentioned in my earlier post were caused by my attempt to replicate the way I work in my office in Webster. There I often sit and work for 8+ hours straight with few breaks, eating at my desk and not taking a real lunch. This isn’t really very healthy and in a home/temporary office space this has become much more apparent. So I’ve been taking more breaks between tasks, getting up and walking around, petting the cat, going outside to pet the dogs or pick raspberries from the garden, and actually eating lunch away from the computer. For the most part, I’ve been able to focus and get things done.

Connectivity is somewhat of an issue here. For people who live in rural areas, options are limited. Until only recently my parents had dial up Internet access. They can’t get regular DSL or cable access here, satellite connections are apparently unreliable (although my brother has had good luck with his in Trinity County which is more remote). Now they use Verizon MiFi which involves a small wireless slab that projects a network in the neighborhood of your devices (you can see it to the right of my laptop in the picture). It works pretty good but I’ve discovered that it will only last for about 3 hours before it needs to be charged again. My parents only turn it on when they want to check their email. On top of this, I don’t get cell service (AT&T) unless I go out into the front yard. Luckily I don’t have any meetings today or tomorrow and I should be able to have more access to the office in Mt. Shasta next week.

I brought all of the files I need with me and I have been downloading relevant documents from email then working on them offline to conserve battery time on the MiFi. Today I did some work on the Xerox Innovation Group Conference materials. I’m on the planning committee of this internal conference that takes place next month and things are starting to kick into high gear as the date approaches. I also gave some feedback to the UI designer on trailmeme.com. We’ve needed to re-evaluate the landing page goals and design for a while, but other more pressing issues have taken priority. This week I think we are finally zeroing in on an appropriate update. I then spent some time on Open Xerox, a portal where the public can experience various technologies from our global research labs. Xerox Interactive Marketing has recently updated the style of the xerox.com website. Associated websites like ours have a little while to update their sites to match the new branding. Our team is eager to make the switch so, after a meeting with interactive marketing last week, I reviewed the new guidelines and made a list of the things we will need to change in our template. Luckily it is not a complete overhaul so we should be able to get it done fairly quickly.