Welcome to my brand new blog! I have long felt that I should put up a blog as a place to share thoughts and media and all the little digital snippets of my very technology-centered life. This blog will be a place for me to post information about my projects, photos, videos, recordings, interactive media experiments, thoughts, links, and probably what will generate the most traffic but leave those who actually know me totally perplexed, is lots of web programming how-to’s, discoveries, and open-source useful thingies. For those non-web-tech-people, let me explain… Blogs are a big part of what makes the interworld go round. People get stuck trying to do something, search a million places for the answer, experiment, and when they finally figure it out, they post it on their blog so the next person who has the same problem doesn’t have to look as hard. This happens to me all the time, but until now, I didn’t have a place to post my answers when I finally solved my problems. Now I do, so get ready for lots of useful geekery!

What finally pushed me over the edge and set up this blog is the fact that I am going to be traveling to India for my last semester of University. I will be spending the semester at the Indian Institute of Technology – Delhi with some of India’s brightest students. The IITs are an amazing system of 13 universities established to bring India into the technological world and the global economy. You all know where it’s brought the country now. Getting into the schools is extremely difficult (acceptance is around 1 in 60). Some kids study for years to prepare for this exam, because unlike the US, people in India actually want to be engineers… Imagine that! I don’t think I could ever get into the school normally, but I’m lucky enough to attend the school on an exchange without having to. I can’t wait to go, but I’m pretty sure I will not be seeing much of India until the semester is over. If IIT is anything like what I think it will be like, I’ll be working my ass off the entire time, just trying to barely keep up with these kids. One of my Indian professors at McGill who went to an IIT even told me

“If you want a cultural experience, go somewhere else. A’s at McGill are C’s at IIT. If you slack off, you will fail.”
-Unidentified CS Prof at McGill who knows I am a slacker

Regardless, this oppourtunity was way too amazing to pass up, and I’m just so thrilled to be done with McGill. On top of that, I’m actually saving tons of money on tuition by going to IIT, and McGill is even helping me out a bit because I’m the first student to go abroad to this school, and they are hoping to evetually set up a proper exchange program. Since this is my last semester, when I finish (in November) I will be done with university and ready to travel for a few months. I’m so grateful that I will get to see India as more than just a tourist. Hopefully I’ll actually know people from all over the coutry, speak some Hindi, and have a good list of places to visit from people who have grown up in India. Overall, I really haven’t spent too much time preparing or thinking about what it will be like, I just want to go and find out. I did something similar in moving to Montreal to go to McGill. I had never visitied, and when I showed up for the first time, it was to move into an apartment a friend had found for me. It made the whole experience much more exciting and I thought it was a great decision. Anyway, I’m leaving for Delhi on July 21st so I’ll find out what its like soon enough.

Stay tuned for lots of updates! I appologize in advance to family and friends for all the technical mumbo jumbo. I’ll try to figure out an easy way for you to view the blog without seeing my web development related posts.