It was the day before the conference. There wasn’t much to do except register, get your NFC enabled badge and maybe do some early shopping at the Google store. Registration opened at 2 pm sharp, and even though there was a big line the process went smoothly. You just had to scan your registration QR code and pickup your badge and t-shirt. (On a side note, the difference between the L and XL size is quite large, pardon the pun. I felt like goldilocks trying different beds, except there wasn’t something in between those two sizes, but I digress). After registration you had a chance to buy some goodies at the store, which has all kinds of things from plushies to a $170 seatbelt bag (yeah, it’s made out of seatbelts). And there was a registration booth for the game Ingress, which is a location-based AR-type of game that’s currently only available for Android.

That doesn’t mean that the rest of the day was boring. There was a Glass Photowalk event that was quite popular, maybe because one of the prizes was a Google Glass. The only problem is that in order to qualify for the prize, you had to be a U.S. resident. They couldn’t tell me if this was their restriction or Google’s, but I’ve seen so many foreign people with glasses that I think it was theirs. There were also two parties that I knew off, the I/O Kickoff party at the Hattery, and the Facebook I/O Kickoff party at Jillian’s. I went to the latter one, and got a yellow t-shirt, food and a couple of beers. I didn’t see much interaction between Facebook people and attendees, but I wasn’t paying too much attention. The food was good, though, and it was an open bar.

Today should prove to be more exciting. I hope.