Portlandia

this time GHC was held in Portland ( Nov 10-13, 2011) , Oregon, in Oregon Convention Center, nice place, and a major event that I always look forward to. Meeting with researcher, job hunting and above all, meeting friends. I also had a poster presentation this time, so I can claim that it was a productive tour.  I volunteered at the conference, participated in student research poster competition and visited my sister. Not to mention learnt about the public transportation of Portland. Not so much time to see around Portland this time, so there was just one day , and we planned to see Washington park, but found out the shuttle service to the park was not running, so we had to limit out tour to the saturday farmers' market and PSU. PSU is actually nice and the market is just at the corner, I loved the atmosphere: live music, food , fresh flower, pea-cock feathers, pizza, walking around the beautiful trees. It was fall, actually late fall, but in Portland it seemed that Fall is still in its full action, vibrant colors everywhere, red, yellow, orange, rows of trees, welcoming us, covering the sidewalks with their leaves. The food from the street carts were another charm, oh yeah, hot chili con carne with fried okra in rainy weather, yum.  We were waiting for the bus to return home and saw the police service getting ready to handle the occupy Portland movement people, added a bit of excitement to us, but nothing interesting happened . all day rain kind of forced us to move inside the mall and continue shopping ( as if no sales tax was not enough for us ! ) . The city was getting ready for Christmas while the decoration for Halloween was also still there. Hoping to see more of Portland soon, in nice weather with the flowers and beers.

tea, coffee, coke !!!

I read this post and those who visit my blog may find it interesting, so I am quoting some of the interesting parts..
http://www.gladwell.com/2001/2001_07_30_a_java.htm

The original Coca-Cola was a late-nineteenth-century concoction known
as Pemberton's French Wine Coca, a mixture of alcohol, the caffeine-rich
kola nut, and coca, the raw ingredient of cocaine. In the face of social pressure,
first the wine and then the coca were removed, leaving the more banal
modern beverage in its place: carbonated, caffeinated sugar water with less
kick to it than a cup of coffee. But is that the way we think of Coke?
Not at all. In the nineteen-thirties, a commercial artist named Haddon Sundblom
had the bright idea of posing a portly retired friend of his in a red
Santa Claus suit with a Coke in his hand, and plastering the image
on billboards and advertisements across the country. Coke, magically,
was reborn as caffeine for children, caffeine without any of the weighty
adult connotations of coffee and tea.
...Today, of course, the chief cultural distinction is between coffee and tea,
which, according to a list drawn up by Weinberg and Bealer, have come to represent almost entirely opposite sensibilities:

Coffee Aspect	Tea Aspect
Male	Female
Boisterous	Decorous
Indulgence	Temperance
Hardheaded	Romantic
Topology	Geometry
Heidegger	Carnap
Beethoven	Mozart
Libertarian	Statist
Promiscuous	Pure