Living Here

This morning I began my day at Starbucks. My Travel and Tourism class met at Starbucks today so we could review our schedules for the upcoming weeks. After enjoying my latte and figuring out my class meeting times, I headed back to my flat for lunch. When I was finished with lunch it was time to meet for my European Business class. For class today we headed out to the town of Surrey to visit a business called Detica. This is a securities based company that balances its services between consulting and product sales. Some areas in which this company specialize include commercial media, consulting, telecommunications and border control. One service in particular is managing passport data for the UK government. This company takes in the data when a passport is scanned prior to departure for the UK and analyzes whether or not the individual would be a person of interest and if they should be investigated. Another software product that this company offers is called TxtReveal. This service can sift through a large amount of data and pinpoint keywords and specific terms to look for. The example that the Detica employees shared with us dealt with the Enron issue. The man typed in the word "shred" and the service pulled up all the Enron emails that contained such phrases. It was really interesting to see the capabilities of this software and know that this is how many crimes are solved. After visiting Detica, we took the train from Guildford to the Waterloo station. The train ride was about 45 minutes long and nicer than other train rides that I have taken thus far. There was enough room on the train for all passengers to have a seat, which was not the case on previous train rides. When I got off the train, I headed to my professor's flat to have dinner. After enjoying a fabulous Italian meal with a strawberry cream puff for dessert and wonderful conversations, it was time to head back to the flat. As I write this, I am munching on some yummy Target Monster Mix, which reminds me of home. Even though I am beginning to feel like a local, especially today, it is nice to have these special touches of home. :) I'll talk to all of you fabulous followers tomorrow. :)

AM