June 30, 2009
The Joys of Summer
by Becca Priddy at 3:42 PM
Tuesday - [undisclosed location]
Last night, around midnight, my mom’s other photographer, Robert, showed up. He just got in from Norway and drove to town to meet us. He brought his 15-year-old brother Patrick along with him this year for his first trip as a spy photographer. It’s his first trip to the U.S. too; I hope he doesn’t think the whole country is as hot as it is here!
We got a late start this morning, but my mom wasn’t worried: Robert and Patrick left for the desert early. I was still tired when my alarm went off so I put a pillow over my head and went back to sleep.
When we finally got going, we drove around town checking all the hot spots before leaving town in the afternoon. The gates at the BMW garage were opened again, but still no prototypes were in the lot, nor the ice truck they use to keep their computers cool in the desert heat. Feeling a little disappointed, we moved on, over the hills to the places we usually find booming with test cars. Unfortunately we didn’t see much more than the GMC trucks from Monday.
It’s been fun driving for my mom this summer, Infinity gave my mom an EX35 for three weeks while we’re out here. It has all these cool features like satellite radio, radar cruise control, and my favorite, lane departure warning system. The last is pretty neat, especially if you’re driving for long distances. For example, if you get distracted and you start to get close to the line on the side of the road, it beeps at you, slows the car just a bit, and gets you back in the middle of the lane. It’s just the type of thing that is completely unnecessary in a car, but I guess it’s just what you expect when you spend so much money on a vehicle.
Without much to see today, we started to head back to the motel. We ended up running into a small moving truck with some Honda motorcycle prototypes. I can’t exactly tell you what they were… they were all covered in black camouflage, and they didn’t even say Honda on them, we just know from all the summers we’ve spent spying in the desert. We snooped around, pretending to use the port-a-potty on the side of the road, sneaking a glance at them before dilly-dallying around waiting for them to take the covers off so we could snap some pictures. They never ended up taking off the covers to put the bikes back in the truck, as you can see. Lots of car companies do this, sometimes even loading full size cars into trailers only unzipping the window portion so they can shout commands to the driver. However when we got home we found out Robert had been snapping pictures of them all day long! SportRider.com bought the shots and they’ll use them tomorrow.
When I got home I started talking to some friends online, checked my Facebook and e-mail, and decided that in my spare time I’d find something entertaining to do online. I actually found something worthwhile of my time trying to figure out how to use. GE launched a site a little while ago with something called augmented reality to advertise for their new smart grid technology. You need a printer and a webcam to play, but it is definitely worth your time. Here’s a video that explains it…
It’s definitely worth trying, but you need to allow popups. If you’re having trouble, click on tips on the left hand side of the screen (especially mac users) and you should be able to get it to work.
It’s off to dinner for now, hoping for more cars tomorrow!