i went down to harvard square this morning to pick up alisa, who needed some help translating from chinese to english for one of her papers. walking back to my place, we passed by a chinese food truck and alisa decided to get some lunch, some shrimp medley with rice. inside my house a cold bagel was waiting for me (alisa called me right when i was about to eat).

her paper was on the conflicting styles of musical education in taiwan over the past 150 years. she'd found a lengthy chinese essay on the very same subject and was hoping i could help translate. the problem was there were too many technical chinese words i didn't understand, and every single sentence had to be further translated for me into layman chinese before i could translate it into english. so we found out pretty quickly that what she wanted to do wasn't going to work. speaking of work, throughout the day i was on standby with client S and would occasionally bash away on my desktop PC to finally upload another version of the code for testing. alisa stayed the whole day, and would've probably stayed longer if i didn't have something else to do in the evening. before she left, i helped explain in chinese an english essay she had to read for tonight about "embodied narrative" and how it applies to music. it was a tough read, and even i barely understood it.

i went to a lecture at the harvard museum titled, "friend or foe? the complex relationships of caterpillars and ants," given by naomi pierce. it was interesting if you heart insects, otherwise it could've been a little dense. basically, there are good number of butterflies in the world who rely on ants to take care of their offsprings. the caterpillars get protection in exchange for producing honeydew laced with amino acids. this is a particularly complex relationship as any who's studied butterflies know that they also rely on a particular host plant to feed their caterpillars so several conditions have to met in order for this to work. i noticed our speaker had a macbook pro to run her slideshow and i wanted to know what program she was using because it had some neat visual effects peppered with audio and video files. also i never knew this, but author vladimir nabokov was a havard museum curator in the 1940's, and made several significant contributions to the field of lepidoptery.

burmese money

i made corn chowder from a can for dinner, trying to use up my remaining one gallon of whole milk. earlier my scanner had arrived and i finally got the opportunity to test it out. the canon lide 70 does a good job with flat things but i tried scanning some objects and it failed miserably. i like the fact that it's usb-powered so no unwieldly plug to carry around though.