I love driving, and living in North Carolina has made me appreciate nature more than/equally to high rise buildings in cities like Chicago. I am also getting used to driving without a GPS with help from AAA maps and their trip planner website.
So, yesterday I drove to a small town in south eastern Minnesota called Harmony, with my parents. On the agenda was a drive on the “Historic Bluff Country Scenic Byway“. The plan was to spend a couple hours at “Niagara Cave”, one of the best undergroud caves …

Everyone knows what I am going to talk about. Do we really need to spend hundreds of dollars on textbooks we’d really not use after the semester is done with? This isn’t just an American issue. Textbooks, even in India, are pretty expensive, especially at the higher education level.

So, I was driving on MN-55 in my lovely car, with my parents with me, when this beat-up Toyota/Honda overtakes us, and the girl waves at me like she’s never gonna see an Indian guy again!
Now, this could mean 3 things:

She was really proud of her beatup car overtaking my Mustang.
She knew me.
My car was blowing deadly black smoke.

Of course, number 2 is the first thing that comes in the mind, and your parents’ mind, but I doubt it. Number 3 is ruled out. My car is awesome!
Now, if only …

Very often, I come across blogs of friends or acquantances with extremely lengthy and/or profound posts. These kind of blogs are generally pretty interesting for a number of reasons.
But first, broadly speaking, I have found blogs to be either one of the following types:

Rehash of the hottest news with added commentary.
Lengthy posts with lots of metaphors, literary gems, and historical research.
Random short, sometimes long, ramblings (possibly like my blog).

Now, the thing I have observed with bloggers with profound posts is the fact that most of them are actually not as interesting …

The folks at the Pew Internet & American Life Project have created an online survey for bloggers about their blogging habits. If you’re a blogger reading this post, I strongly urge you to participate in it. There are about a couple dozen questions, and it would take about 10 minutes of your time.
Some of the questions from the survey that I would like to see statistics for are:

Do you make money from your blog?
Do you research the facts before posting something?
Do you blog specifically to educate others? …