But chop suey is Chinese food that is eaten by the masses

I've been listening to the Chinese Learn Online podcast for about a month now, in my first steps towards learning Mandarin. I did learn a little from a different podcast before we went to China last year, enough to ask a few basic questions and say "thanks" and the like but I had very little ability to understand it when spoken to me. I spen quite a bit of time sampling different podcasts over the past few months trying to find one that really clicked with me in terms of teaching style and variety of accents. A lot of them, like the BBC one for example, are meant to get a business person or tourist through a short trip to China. I'm more interested in really learning the language with essentially narrowed it down to CLO or Chinesepod. I felt like I was getting more out of CLO quicker, so I'm sticking with that one though Chinesepod is quite good as well.

A few things about it that I particularly like:

• they bring in different people with different regional accents
• extensive use of 'listen to this conversation and try to keep up'
• notes, tips, and worksheets

In preparation for my upcoming birthday, I can now say my birthday in Mandarin. It's a mouthful...

wo de shung rì shì liù yuè san shí hào

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You're the smartest person I know

The big national exam in China was earlier this month, analogous to the SAT. Millions of students took it and several large national papers highlight the top scoring students on the front page. This is what it looks like when a country values education.

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St Louis got the best of me

Historic Photos of St. Louis by Adele Heagney and Jean Gosebrink

As a transplant to St Louis from California I'm not as familiar with the past of my new home as those who were born and raised here. With a background in history I of course sought to rectify that as quickly as possible. I've read several very good books on St Louis and Missouri history and feel comfortable discussing the city with the natives. While I don't have a coffee table, I greatly enjoy a well done coffee table book. I can get lost in photos for hours and was thrilled when the Missouri History Museum had a collection of old photos on display back in 2004. When the publisher offered me a review copy of this book I jumped at the chance.

This book presents a broad look back on over 100 years of life in St. Louis. It is, as a coffee table book, very well made and of high quality in print and binding. Each page presents a sole picture with some descriptive text, enough to stir the imagination and let the viewer get lost in what life was like decades ago. There are of course pictures of the iconic buildings and events but there are also quite a few of the wonderful everyday milieux that make history truly interesting to me. The section introductions are jumpy as they try to describe a decad or two of history in a few sentences. Setting the context for the subsequent set of pictures is tremendously important and it would have been nice for them to be expanded a bit.

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And I can't help recalling how it how it felt

There are many tools around these days to help the busy person remain organized, taken to the OCD extreme with the GTD movement to which I've aspired and failed. My downfall is the reminders. They pop up to let me know it's time to do something and I have a remarkable capacity to ignore these pop ups. I have scheduled all sorts of routine maintenance tasks as reminders in iCal as well as various important events and projects. A notification pops up and herein lies the real problem: I hate being interrupted when I'm doing something.

I have always hated distractions when I'm trying to focus. Having kids means that's pretty much a constant. So I'm trying to learn to adapt to an interrupt driven life. Step one is I block out time for tasks after the kids go to bed. That eliminates the major class of interrupts though it does constrain those tasks to being things that can be done after dark. It's a start. I'm not sure what step two is...

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