Google, Day Two

Day two began with breakfast at the Cupertino Inn: a paper cup of coffee, bowl of cheerios, and half a waffle. Again, the Dartmouth team continued in the anti-social vein and sat outside instead of inside with everyone else. I personally didn’t think we were the ones being anti-social at this point though since I just can’t comprehend why anyone would want to sit inside when they can be outside for breakfast. Because team Dartmouth was sitting outside for breakfast we were the last to leave the hotel. Because we were the last to leave the hotel, we were also the last to arrive at Google. We were about a half hour late to Google. Not the best impression, I’m sure.





Tuesday was meant to be a day full of workshops on Google Earth and SketchUp. That is exactly what it was. As expected, it was one of the most boring days ever. I felt bad that I was so uninterested in everything the Google people had to say to us, especially since the people themselves were pretty interesting. What I gathered from the whole day was that the Dartmouth team had no architecture students on it (well except for one, but he wasn't really a team player) whereas a majority of the other teams were comprised of architecture students. This means that the Dartmouth students really could have cared less about learning more about modeling buildings in SketchUp.
This is not to say the day was a complete loss. I did learn about this website called walkscore.com where you can find out how walkable your neighborhood is. This would be really useful if I lived somewhere besides Hanover. We also made the only practical suggestion of how to improve SketchUp. While the other questions and suggestions were quite complex and not at all for the average user, team Dartmouth aptly suggested that the selection color not be the exact same color as the y-axis. This double use of the color was incredibly confusing during our modeling endeavours. As soon as our team leader, Jess, made this suggestion, the SketchUp guy told us he could show us how to fix that immediately. He went into some window clicked some buttons and all of a sudden we had changed the selection color. I think he missed the point of our suggestion. It is bad practice to have made those two things the same color and we should not have to know the back roads of SketchUp to make the program functional.
After hours and hours of sitting we finally got to the point on the schedule labeled "free time." Free time was supposed to have consisted of at least an hour of time to ourselves but had been shortened to 20 minutes. There were several reason we fell behind, but the most exciting of which was because we had a surprise visit from Sergey Brin, Co-Founder & President of Google. WOW! Too bad I had no clue who he was. But everyone who worked there was all excited and this one guy sitting in the front row was obviously star struck (to put it mildly). I thought it was pretty nice that Sergey took the time to say hello and take a few questions. He was actually asked one pretty interesting question about how Google can help people, how it can be a beneficial company to the world. I don't think he was fully prepared to answer that question since he kind of stumbled through an inconclusive answer, although he did direct us to google.org.
Back to free time, which wasn't free after all since we were all told to stay in the room we had been trapped in all day. This was another dull 20 minutes. Finally we got dinner and then went back to the Cupertino Inn.





Honestly the second day isn't much to write about, but the third day was spent in San Francisco, which was quite fun.
(photo credit goes to Jess for all of these)