Day 3 - phones?!

So today the day began relatively uneventfully. We did get to catch the shuttle 15 minutes later than usual, and we arrived in class and Charles was no where to be found... so while we waited and played Facebook Scrabble Jessica gets up in front of the class with a box and proceeds to tell us that they have a surprise for us. Since Charles wasn't going to be in until 11:00 AM, she figured giving us the surprise then was probably a better idea, since we were bound to waste at least 30 minutes of class time playing with it if they gave it to us later. she wanted us to guess as she was pulling it out of the box, and i don't even know what I was thinking.. somebody shouted out "books!" and there was a general murmur throughout the class, until she pulled out a phone. a Google Nexus One phone. For us to keep! i'm still kind of in awe of the fact that someone handed me a brand new phone today for me to keep... although it doesn't work with Verizon service, i should be able to get my GoogleTalk up and working so I can at least text and talk while on wiFi.

We had a different guy come in to talk to us in our after lunch sessions. He works in the part of Google that does Streetview, so he told us all about what he does, and we talked about how the different algorithms work for finding faces in the images to be blurred out and how to resolve problems between the known maps and the GPS maths of the Streetview vehicles- which include cars, vans, trikes, and snowmobiles.

We also started working on a concept for a diversity poster show that we're having on friday, although we'll spend more time working in our three- or four-person groups tomorrow on that.

Food today was mostly uneventful.. or as uneventful as Google food can possibly be. There was more corn soup at dinner, and I had to endure two of the Google employees talking about how disgusting it looks. If only they were brave enough to take a leap of faith and try some... we had real corn for dinner tonight too.. which of course was also very good. I tried some organic pomegranate blueberry juice today that was delicious. It may have just surpassed the odwalla pomegranate limeade as my favorite drink i've tried here. Although i still haven't tried that pomegranate Fizzy Lizzy...

One quick picture before I head out. I would upload more, but my files are so big that it takes a really long time.. the internet here isn't the fastest. This is Stan, the flamingo herder.. he's a cast of a real T-Rex skull and he's typically covered in the flamingos he's herded. It looks like a few of the flamingos have wandered away.. and a few have wandered into his stomach!

~Lynn