For the past few days I've been hitting it up in downtown Pittsburgh, home of the Steelers, the smallest T ever, and a downtown that is closed by 5:00 pm (thank god the restaurants stay until at least like 9 ). There are some fun areas during the day, though, like the strip district (get your mind out of the gutter) that is a long strip on the outskirts of downtown brimming with all sorts of fresh food, such as bread and fish, and cool trinkets and the sorts. I also attended an arts festival, which featured art from all over the country from as far as Hawaii. I saw some incredible work, including these drawings that transformed famous pieces of writings into art. The next day, while I was meandering around downtown, a gay pride march began with people shouting, "We're here, we're queer, our families are real!" After the march, a gay pride festival started with bands, lots of food, and sumo wrestling (well pseudo sumo wrestling, you know with the suits)! It's so funny when people go down because they have so much trouble getting back up.

Now, why I'm really in Pittsburgh is not for the arts or for shopping, but because of the American Society for Engineering Eduction's annual conference, which is taking place in the Pittsburgh convention center. My parents always come so I decided to tag along and register. Today I'm going to attend a few lectures by MIT professors (including two bio(medical) engineering professors and explore the exhibition hall filled with companies showing off their amazing products. There's many companies from Mathworks (Matlab) to SolidWorks to National Instruments! I plan to wear my MIT shirt during the day and see what happens, sort of like an experiment. Anyone interested in seeing what happens? I already had one person in the elevator stop me and say, "Are you from MIT? I was class of '61!"

Well I better be off. I have many fun pictures that I want to post, but cannot because I only brought my firewire cable, and unfortunately the iPhone (along with all new iPods) does not have the firewire chipset for transferring data and syncing. I'll definitely post them later though once I'm home. Ciao!