Hotels Carolina Beach NC | "Island-Hopping In The Galápagos"

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Hotels Carolina Beach NC

Later we stand dazed on the dock in Puerto Ayora, having been ferried to Santa Cruz Island and driven here, to its town. Conversation in the group is muted: we do not know quite what to make of things. We have been to see Lonesome George, a famously ancient giant tortoise, the last of his line. Lonesome? He has five females for company (albeit of a separate subspecies) and as many human visitors as he could want. He appeared sunk in a hundred years of apathy, but then that would be hard to tell, on a tortoise, from an expression of sublime content. Puerto Ayora itself is a surprise. Although there are many uninhabited islands, the Galápagos has a human population of about 25,000. We were not expecting bars, restaurants and souvenirs. What were we expecting? Nature as we have never seen it? Contact with the extraordinary, some sort of transcendence? Patience: it is all to come…

The excitement begins on our yacht, the M/Y Galapagos Grand Odyssey (or Domenica, as the crew call her), anchored in rocking swells. The most recent luxury boat licensed for the Galápagos, she is definitely the deluxe option, granting a great deal of space to her 16 clients. We are welcomed by Xavi Cabrera: barman, steward and quite the kindest man who ever mixed a cocktail.

'We begin our navigation at midnight,' announces the guide, Fabricio Carbo. 'When you hear the engines take one pill…' Sleeping pills are a permanent offering, beside the chocolates in the saloon.

'Never!' I resolve. The Galápagos were a pirate hideout (a cache of their gold was discovered under the port's main street): would they have slept through their first navigation? Would the whalers? (Hundreds came here. Herman Melville had The Pequod pass the islands on its hunt for Moby-Dick.) And so I wake to the midnight clanks of the anchor chain. We set sail for Isabela Island. There is a huge penumbra around the full moon, as if its silver disc is the light at the end of a celestial microscope, focusing down on this distant world. Dawn comes with the anchor's rattle.

Hotels Carolina Beach NC | "Google picks winners of contest to buy 'Glass' smart eyewear"

Source     :  http://www.latimes.com
Category   : Hotels Carolina Beach NC
By           : Beach Hotel
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If you applied for a chance to purchase Google Glass, you may soon be getting contacted by the tech company.

Hotels Carolina Beach NC

The Silicon Valley giant said Tuesday it picked the winners of its "#IfIHadGlass" contest and will begin messaging them over the next few days to determine if they still want to purchase an early version of the smartglasses for $1,500.

Glass is a device Google unveiled last year that users wear on their heads like eyeglasses but the device has a video camera and a viewer. Users can live stream what they are viewing and have a video chat with other Glass wearers.

In February, Google launched the contest in which users had to write essays of 50 words or less on Google+ or Twitter explaining what they would do with Glass if they had the device. The company said at the time it would review each application and pick about 8,000 winners. Google did not say how many had won the right to buy the device.

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Among its winners, Google said it chose Max Wood, a firefighter from Georgia, who said he would improve fire safety by using Glass to make pre-fire planning maps, and Shannon Rooney, who said she would wear Glass as she toured Japan so her grandmother in the U.S. could see what she was seeing.

Other winners include Sarah Hill of Missouri, who said she would use Glass to show war memorials to veterans in hospitals; Hershel Taghap of Seattle, who said he would use Glass to show others what it's like to be a line cook at a restaurant; and David Moriarty, who said he'd use Glass to improve doctor-patient interaction for clinical trials.

"It’s been inspiring for the team to see such an enthusiastic response to Glass," Google said in a statement. "When you’re taking a moonshot this big, the encouragement and feedback along the way really helps a lot."

Google hasn't said when the winners will be able to purchase the device and receive it, but the company previously announced that winners will have to attend an event in San Francisco, Los Angeles or New York to receive the device. Google won't pay for transportation costs.

The company has said it hopes to release Glass to the general public before the end of 2013, but for now, Google is focused on testing out the device among a limited number of users.