In an interesting article in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell discusses the history of the admission systems for the Ivy League schools in the US, especially focusing on Harvard. One of his points is that the admissions procedure was changed from one focusing purely on academic merit to one focusing more on “the whole person” [...]

Two of Canada’s three leading national newspapers had the following news on their front page: SUV sales down because of high gas prices. That made me very happy. I remember discussing high gas prices with a friend I was staying over with in Arkansas (this was before Hurricane Katrina, but gas prices were still high [...]

One of the reasons the iPod family has been so successful, apart from their sleek design and shrewd marketing, has to the whole ecosystem of services and gear that has grown up around the players. You can buy bags, belts, microphones, radio transmitters – you can put linux on them, use the notes function to [...]

I spent about a day walking around in New Orleans, checking out the French Quarter and downtown. (It feels very strange watching scenes of devastation from New Orleans today on TV, when I was there only a few days ago.) I then made my way to Gainesville, GA., where I would stay at an ecological [...]

As some of you might know, I had very ambitious plans for yesterday. I was scheduled to leave Fayetteville at 8:15 in the morning, spend a few hours on the bus to get to Little Rock, visit Bill Clinton’s Presidential Library for a few hours, go on to Memphis, spend all evening walking around there, [...]

After having left my luggage safely in the hands of the kind populace of Fayetteville, I trudged into town to explore. I quickly found the main drag, Dickson street, got a free deodorant as a gift to incoming freshman in the bookstore, and chanced upon the university. Not only did they have a very kind [...]

So I just got off the bus in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a little town half an hour from the Wal-Mart world headquarters, and two hours from Bill Clinton’s presidential library in Little Rock. It’s a tiny bus station, not Greyhound like I’m used to, but Jefferson Lines. I am not meeting my hosts for a few [...]

Albuquerque I arrived in Albuquerque from Tucson at around 9AM on Wednesday, dumped my luggage and set out to explore. I walked around all day in the sun, eating some great Mexican food at a place where they were even playing one of the most popular songs down in Sinaloa (Que se queda con ganas, [...]

Just two small things I picked up on the bus trip from Tucson to Albuquerque. Phone crime in Mexico In Hermosillo, Mexico, criminals called several pharmacies in town, threatening the employees’ lives, and demanding that the employees scratch phonecards and read the codes over the phone (as you know, you don’t need to own the [...]

Travelling When my family used to travel, they did it very differently than I do now. They’d be working hard all year, saving up vacation days and money, and then we’d often go off on a two week jaunt to for example a Spanish island, spend lot’s of money on hotels, food and airfare, and [...]