Today we had a much more leisurely start than yesterday. We only had to be up by 0900 with a muster time of 0950. We were given the opportunity to visit Palantir, who do not normally accept visitors, as well as have lunch with a couple of their engineers. Our wakeup was later than the day before which we thanked the stars for. After breakfast and our morning briefing, we were off. The ride to Palantir was fairly short and it was not long before we stopped outside a nondescript building. We stopped for a couple of minutes outside to confirm we were in the right location before we were led in the front door by security. We went through the typical sign in process and were led into a room that looked like it was built to be a safehouse. We were met by this guy named Alex, who was our presenter. The original plan was for Alex to present for half the time and Damian for the other but that was scrapped. We kept on asking questions of Alex and there just wasn’t enough time. Alex took us through their work in development of the couple of products they offer. He also explained that he couldn’t go into any details cause of their work with “3 Letter Agencies”. It was fascinating to look through their history and see what made the company they evolved into. After Alex’s talk we were taken to the lunch area which happened to be in a completely different building. The exterior of which was the best building we have visited on this trip.

We had lunch with a couple of the engineers who took us through their day in the life and their experiences working within the security sector of technology. The lunch they had at Palantir was the most healthy and tasty lunch we have had so far on this trip. It was the first chance we had gotten as a group to have a properly balanced meal. It was all delicious and it was very saddening to have to leave. Post Palantir we made our way to Intel to take a guided tour of their museum.

We were taken around by one of the workers who explained how much the company had evolved from boards that would have hundreds of hand soldered parts to chips the width of a human hair that had trillions of connections. We also discovered that the reason Intel switched from their original number based chipset to name based chipsets was entirely trademark based. Apparently they had been told by the supreme court that they weren’t allowed to trademark a set of numbers. Hence they switched to the Pentium and the I series we know today. It was also fascinating to go through their creation process and how they developed the chips in their clean rooms. Their clean rooms are so clean that if you were to collect up all of the pieces of dust across the whole facility, you would be lucky to find one. After the tour we took a look through their gift shop and made our way back to the hotel.

Because we got back so early we were given a couple options for dinner. We could either stay in the hotel or make our way down the street to the Safeway nearby. Jake, Jun, Ollie and I all stayed and played some poker. That is until we discovered that Ollie had never seen The Greatest Showman. This shocked us to the core and we had to turn it on in the background for him to watch while we played. Though the movie wasn’t finished we did get through some awesome games that led to my victory, of course, and fun all around. Post game we made our way to a nearby chain. It was Italian night for us and we made our way over, stopping at an ATM for some cash along the way. There was a little trouble but we quickly fixed it and arrived in the large group as per usual. There was much to choose from on their menu but Gaffy and I both decided Calzones were the way to go. This was a mistake. The calzone was the size of a Xlarge pizza in Australia folded in half, full to the brim with meat and the most disgusting cheese known to man. I ate half of it before I had to call it quits. After nearly throwing up this calzone outside we made our way back. It was just Jake and I for the pre sleep poker but after a few quick rounds we went to bed.

Goodnight