Last week I was walking home from the train station and I saw the walking man sing light up at the cross walk, so I was in a hurry to cross the road. As I was jogging this picture (above) grabbed my attention and made me stop in the middle of the road for a moment.  Yes, it was the North Korean flag outside of the Hawthorne Hotel in Salem!

Now, I really don't know what the hotel's logic is when they hang different flags outside of their hotel.  Initially I thought it was relating to some convention or gathering but I haven't determined that for a fact. If there were a super secret north korean spy convention in Salem last week, their cover was blown lol ;-)

A familiar take on what toys do when you're not around (see Toy Story for example), but with video games as the protagonist.  Pretty awesome!

A few weeks ago I completely (by my own error) erased my contacts on my Mac, which erased all my mobileme contacts, which erased all my contacts on my iPhone...major #facepalm moment. In any case, through a combination of having backed up my contacts on Yahoo a couple of years ago, and by virtue of not having my iPod Touch connected to the network I did manage to retain the textual information for all my contacts. I just needed to update (and add to!) my Yahoo contacts and sync those back down to my mac...which would then sync with mobileme (and thus my iPhone).

I decided, this time around, that since MacOS Lion allows you to cross sync with Google and Yahoo, I ought to be syncing in multiple locations! The added benefit of Google is that it also looks at your contacts, and if they exist on their network it updates their photos - that is pretty cool!  The one issue is this: Once I started putting people into categories on my mac (Classmates, coworkers, etc.), I started getting duplication on Google, which in turn meant duplication on my Mac...which meant duplication on mobileme and my iPhone.... oh #facepalm.  I did already de-dupe things once on Google and once on my Mac, but they are duplicated again.  Luckily it's not that bad - it doesn't affect all my contacts, and the worst case scenario is having the same person in my addressbook three times.  I guess it's better to have some duplicates, rather than missing all you contacts, eh?

This past summer I borrowed quite a lot of books from my school's library. Since I am a staff member the loan period is quite generous, so I could take out a box full of books and have them due back in October. Pretty sweet. So I decided to look at my GoodReads list and get as many books as I could find at my school which has the generous loan period.  After reading quite a few books from cover to cover (and really enjoying them), I came across a series of books including Ascent of Babel and Chomsky's Universal Grammar that seemed quite boring.

The books were actually not bad, it's just that I had covered the salient points covered in those books in my linguistics courses, so that was a bit of a let down. On the plus side I did skim through these books and I did pick up a few tidbits that I did not have covered in my coursework, but I find that it's not nearly as much fun to hunt for information in a book - I prefer to be immersed into it.  I did get Mind and Society by Lev Vygotsky, part of which I read for my psycholinguistics course, but I think (or at least I hope) that the rest of the book I have not read is not something I covered in class.

I decided to focus my attention to a book that I knew was all new to me: Freedom. I had listened to the first part of the narrative, Daemon, in audiobook format and it was quite an engaging story. I tried finding Freedom as an audiobook as well through my library, but there appear to only be available in eAudiobook  (overdrive) format and my public library doesn't have this book as an MP3, so I did the next "best" thing: get the digital edition from overdrive (again at my public library). It would be better as a paperback version, but I didn't want to wait, and the electronic version was available for immediate checkout from my library.  I honestly can't wait for these books to become mini-series. The story (thus far) is pretty effing cool!

άπαιχτο! (awesome!)