Back From San Francisco!

Well, my trip to San Francisco was absolutely amazing!!

My first-and-second-ever flights took place on Wednesday morning through to Wednesday night. We left the airport in Burlington, landed a couple hours later in Chicago, and then several hours later in San Francisco. On my second flight I had to give into my hunger and I actually coughed up $9 for an (obviously overpriced) turkey sandwich. It tasted great, but it definitely wasn't worth $9. It's just the airline business taking advantage of people who have to pack light and can't make room for extra food.

My first plane trip was a REALLY cool experience. Lauri, the awesome career services counselor for Vermont Tech., kept checking in on my to make sure I wasn't too nervous about the flight, but I was having a pretty awesome time watching the land below us disappear as we approached the clouds. I knew that the plane had to go fast in order to take off, but it is one thing "knowing" something from common sense, and another when you actually experience it first-hand. Our first plane was a tiny plane that you could barely stand up in. It had two rows of seats on one side, and a single row of seats on the other. There were so few people on the plane that my friends and I were pretty much free to sit wherever we wanted to.

I got some awesome video footage of the first plane taking off, and some awesome footage of the plane landing in Chicago. The famous airport in Chicago was the coolest one I saw during the whole trip. It had a brontosaurus skeleton, fancy ceilings with flashing neon lights, and several other really cool things that cannot be described with just word.

When we landed in San Francisco and checked into our hotel, a lot of my friends were starving. We ended up walking around the streets of San Francisco to get a feel for the place and get comfortable, but then we were absolutely surprised by the crazy amounts of homeless people. We sat in Subway... probably a block a way from our hotel, and while we were eating our sandwiches some crazy/old homeless guy with a big white beard was outside of the shop and he was making these growling and grunting noises. We probably saw 13 homeless people on Wednesday night alone... maybe even more. It's because the city is relatively warm throughout the whole year, so people can actually survive living outside. It's not like Vermont where we have our crazy Nor-easter snowstorms that can even make living inside a house difficult.

Thursday we spent the day taking an amazing tour of Google's 500,000 sq. ft. campus in Palo Alto, California... otherwise known as the famous Silicon Valley. Google has everything... free massage parlors, dining areas/cafeterias, swimming pools, gym memberships, laundry rooms, outdoor sports, Google bikes, and even reserved parking for pregnant women. Their entrance lobby even had two gigantic Android phones that were fully-functional! My friends were playing some of the games that use the touch screen controls, and it seemed to work amazingly well.

After leaving Google, we then headed over to Apple. A somewhat recent Vermont Tech grad from the Computer Engineering Major (who was also a Morey RA at one point), is now the Project Manager for two security teams at Apple! On Mac OSX, when you are asked for your password, his team helps write all of the code that controls that functionality. It was cool meeting him because he is one of my professor's old roommates, and he was also in the same major that I am now, AND he was once a Morey Hall RA like I am now. It's just cool for me to see someone who is doing so well, and knowing that I am at least kind of on the same track as he once was.

Friday was the day that we went to the 2011 Game Developer's Conference! We got to see developer's and designers work on technologies for the newest games right on the show floor. We watched as someone from AMD (as in the former ATi) mold a human face using a modeling program. I also got to see Crysis 2 being played in 3D and it looked pretty damn good. I ended up walking around the whole show floor several times, but it was cool being there because you have to be either a college student, or in the game industry as a developer etc, or with the press in order to go to this event.

Overall this trip was an absolutely amazing experience. California is such an beautiful state (in the right neighborhoods). We went down to Fisherman's Wharf and Pier 39 where you get a great view of both the Golden Gate Bridge AND of Alcatraz. We topped our trip off by eating dinner and having some drinks at the Hard Rock Cafe right in San Francsico. I had a Long Island Iced Tea (one of my favorite drinks)... it was mixed to perfection, and I was even allowed to keep the fancy glass that the drink came in.

I will never forget this trip, and I can never thank Lauri or Vermont Tech enough for making it possible. I went to California with some amazing friends of mine! Google! Apple! GDC! Pier 39! What more could I ask for?!

I can tell you right now though... we got back to Vermont and we were experiencing a crazy blizzard. I could feel the cold air a lot more than I ever used to because I had gotten used to it being about 76 degrees in San Francisco. It's too bad it is sooo f#cking cold here! Haha