prudential mall:

boston public library:

copley square:

trinity church (richardsonian romanesque):

vietnamese lunch in chinatown:

boston common:

beacon hill state house:

granary burial ground:

downtown crossing + government center + faneuil hall + quincy market + haymarket:

learning how to make mantou buns:

packages were waiting for me when i got home: insulated thermos and my replacement foscam webcam. the 3 thermos was for my godmother, but i was supposed to keep one since i gave her my unused thermos. unfortunately all 3 thermos had dented caps, not sure why. i sort of wanted to exchange them back for my pristine thermos but i was afraid it was too late.

i played around with the foscam FI8910W webcam later in the evening. setting it up with tethered ethernet was as simple as plug-and play. getting it to work with wireless took a little longer, only because i didn't have the password setting set correctly. once that was done though, the camera worked flawlessly via wifi. despite being 640x480, the picture quality seemed better than the zyxel. it also didn't have the annoying habit of being stuck in infrared mode (you can turn it on/off). but the coolest thing about the foscam webcam is the ability to remotely pan and tilt. it can pan 300° and tilt 120°, with only a very small blindspot directly behind the camera. tracking is nearly silent and the motion is very smooth. on the negative side, although it does have audio support (input/output), it has the same problem as the zyxel in that it uses the VLC-plugin which currently doesn't work on any of the OS X browsers. hopefully those foscam engineers can get a fix in the next firmware update. also the tracking buttons are kind of small when viewed on a smartphone and even when seen on a tablet, they're kind of hard to click on (they work best on a computer). other than that, it's a pretty sweet webcam.

one of the things i learned is that you don't really need exact dates when pointing out historical buildings. just a ball park number is good enough. for instance, the massachusetts state house was built in 1798, but numbers don't mean anything for people who don't have a good knowledge of local history. better to say it was built after the revolutionary war, which everyone can remember and understand.