Saturday in San Fran

Saturday was also a long day, but some real moments of success and getting used to the city and seeing more tourist style little insights into San Francisco's America...

Spent most of the day in the hotel working. Mainly in Leif and Tom's rooms, which have great views across the city to remind us that we aren't still at Nottingham University or our office.

The GPRS problem got resolved at 1pm in a frenzy of excitment, when the SIM cards we had suddenly started working, Leif and Capra accidently used one thinking it was one of the SIMs that did work and we were on... All six of us jumping around the room setting up PDAs. Sounds very sad when written down but after a day or tearing our hair out it was very exciting.

Did our first full test with the new version. Several issues now being sorted out, the heart rate monitors and GPS are acting strange now, just to wind us up some more on a sunny sunday morning...

Worked until late and split up to focus on what we needed to do. Me, Matt and Robin ended up roaming the streets late into the night, caught the end of the Chinese New Year parade in Union Square, which was exicting although only really got to see the SFPD strutting their stuff.

Completely forgot to watch the red eclipse which was a real shame, but heads were down at the screens!

Found a great Turkish restaurant a bit further out from the downtown area we have been in so far, really busy. Had a shocking walk back, the streets where lined with homeless people, so obviously with no health care as many of them were severly disabled and hardly any of them were white. We've seen loads of begging and homeless people, at times it feels like India, it was like the area around the hotel I stayed in, in Mumbai. People living on a square of pavement each. Proper Skid Row, in one of the richest cities in the world. It makes you sick.

Maybe I just don't see it in England, I know it was getting more like this in the 90s in the UK but not on this scale, and I have never had this feeling of such obvious apartheid in the UK.

Anyway, it is Sunday 8am so back to work on the heart rate monitors, hopefully today will be a bit easier and involve lots of running around testing in the streets.

Pictures to come... and there will be some of me (Rachel) for my Mum and Dad who have complained it is just pictures of the geek boys - sorry guys I will stop calling you that soon and it has been agreed that Matt is a nerd not a geek (: