Now, he's returning the favor and coming to visit us this Friday! Pretty exciting stuff.

Regardless of your political views, I think a visit to campus from the President is pretty darn special. Of course, it sounds like with the limited space in our largest auditorium (seats ~1300 people), it won't hold everyone who will want to come hear him speak, so they're going to ticket the event by invitation only with a preference towards students...but it sounds like for everyone else, they'll be webcasting the event live on campus too.

The subtitle of this entry was also my stretched attempt at trying to tie in a completely unrelated, but also important topic that comes up every year. Typically, in September and October each year, we travel across the country to give presentations about MIT. And, many folks come visit MIT's campus, whether it's for a couple hours or a couple days. Usually, when people come to our presentations when we're on the road, or come visit campus, we have a sign-in for students where people check off their name or fill out a form with their information.

Why do we do this? Well, it's really just for us to keep track of how many people came to the event. That way, the next year, we can try as best as we can to find a venue that's the appropriate size. Also, by collecting or confirming your contact info, it let's us know who you are and that you might be interested in learning more about MIT.

Of course, the natural follow-up question to that is often, "so does visiting campus or coming to an MIT presentation help my admissions chances at all?" This is certainly a valid question, as some colleges do track this type of information and use it in their admissions decisions. For those colleges, seeing that you came to a presentation or visited campus shows that you have an "expressed interest" in the school, and they try to use that piece of data to gauge your level of interest when deciding whom to admit.

But for MIT, that is simply not true.

Sure, we analyze the data to figure out whether the recruitment we're doing is working, and how we can potentially improve what we do on an annual basis, but at no point does information about whether you came to a presentation or visited campus have an impact on your admissions decision. We know that not every student has the time, money, or means to come visit - and that's perfectly fine. There's certainly value in coming to visit campus for you to learn about and experience MIT, but for our admissions process, it has zero effect on your chances of being admitted - no worries.

So rest assured, even if Barack Obama was applying to MIT this year, the fact that he's coming to visit campus on Friday doesn't mean he'd have a better chance of being admitted. Truly. (Although, I'm pretty sure he won't be applying - I think he's got some other job he's busy with for at least the next 3 years...)

One of which is from the San Jose Mercury News - "'Printed Chips' Could be Boon for Consumers" where they talk about some new technology that's being developed by a company called Kovio, which apparently was founded by MIT alum Colin Bulthaup in 2001, the year he graduated from MIT with a Bachelor's and Master's of Engineering in EECS. (Actually, it looks like since then, Colin's done way more than that...)

Pretty amazing stuff.

Meanwhile, one of my college friends sent me this article from Technology Review about the 2009 Young (under 35) Innovator of the Year.

It's my former GRT! ZOMG!

(For those that don't know, GRT stands for Graduate Resident Tutor; they're basically grad students at MIT who serve as your floor or hall's resident advisor.)

He's actually doing some pretty cool work on the security of RFID. You should read the article, because it does a much better job of explaining what he does than I can.

Anyways, enjoy. Hope y'all are enjoying (at least what's left of...or maybe what's not left of by this point) the summer!

THE SHARPE BROTHERS
A while back, on the front page of the Boston Globe was an article about two brothers at MIT who perform (juggle? spin? What's the correct verb for this?) diabolo (those of you who went to the Closing Remarks and Variety Show at CPW may recognize them as the closing act). I never ceased to be amazed by these guys!

If you want to see them in action, you should go to YouTube and search for "Sharpe Brothers" - they have some pretty sweet videos up there. :)

Speaking of YouTube, I found this video of someone who put together a short montage of the performances at the Closing Variety Show at CPW this year...a nice little taste of some performing arts groups at MIT. :)

PANDORA
By now, many of you have probably heard of (or use) this, but I'm in love with Pandora. There are, of course, many similar music sites out there like it, but after honing my station over the past couple years, I thought I'd share my station with y'all if you're interested. You can also go here to see how I defined the station, what I liked/disliked/bookmarked/etc.

For those that don't know about Pandora yet, it's basically free online radio, but you can customize your own stations by telling it which songs you like or dislike. It's based off of the Music Genome Project, where a bunch of people have gone through and assigned traits to tons of songs, so based on what you tell the station, it will play successive songs that have similar traits to the songs that you like or 'seed' the station with.

It's basically one of the awesomest things ever - if you've never seen or used anything like it before, you should. The only downside I have with it is the audio ads (which will occasionally play between songs), but I don't mind them that much - they happen so infrequently that it's not a big deal. Pandora also has some limitations for legal/revenue reasons (e.g., you can only skip a certain number of songs per hour, and you have to interact with the player at least once every 30 minutes or it will pause until you click to let it know you're there again (unless you pay a subscription fee that allows unlimited playing). But hey, they have to make money somehow, right?

(Actually, I don't pay the fee because - well one, I'm cheap, and two, I actually like the 'auto-sleep' that happens; if I forget to turn it off, I know it won't keep playing all day and drive my housemates crazy while I'm at work, hahaha)

What's your favorite kind of music? Do you have other sites like it that you use?

TV SHOW UPDATE
So, ever since my last post about TV, I've started watching a couple new shows. Most notably, I've started watching Weeds via unlimited streaming on our "family's" Netflix account. Unfortunately, only the first two seasons are on there, so I have to figure out how I'm going to watch Seasons 3, 4, and 5 (currently airing).

I also caved to Gossip Girl...I'm only part way through the most recent season, though, so I need to finish it at some point. I don't know why, but I just keep watching it. Just one of those guilty pleasures, I guess.

And as the summer* TV season begins, shows like Wipeout and I Survived a Japanese Game Show are some other guilty pleasures of mine. I'm glad Burn Notice is starting up too, but it seems to be going further downhill, imo. Speaking of which, House (formerly my #1 favorite show) has now dropped in my ranks - I really think that show is reaching its limits. Hopefully I'll be able to get around to some other good shows I've been meaning to watch, like Dexter and Mad Men.

Any other suggestions?


*a.k.a. bad

You all should definitely come to the Closing Remarks and Variety Show Saturday night. Details:

Saturday, April 18, 2009
6:00-7:30pm (Doors open at 5:30pm)
Kresge Auditorium

Link to the online CPW schedule entry

There are going to be 8 really amazing acts at the show (in alphabetical order):

- Bhangra (dance, Punjabi)
- Chorallaries (a cappella, co-ed)
- Imobilare (dance, breakdancing/hip-hop)
- Logarhythms (a cappella, all-male)
- Rambax (music, Senegalese drumming)
- Resonance (a cappella, co-ed)
- Ridonkulous (dance, hip-hop/modern)
- The Sharpe Brothers (juggling, diabolo)

(For those that don't know, "a cappella" is basically making music with only voices, no instruments. Rockapella is probably one of the most famous examples of a cappella.) Kim actually used to be in the Chorallaries, and I used to be in the Logs (back in our undergrad days).

These are, of course, just a sampling of the 60+ performing arts groups at MIT. There are also a lot of other cool performances going on throughout the weekend, like Next Act, Caribbean Steel Pan Jamboree, All A Cappella Extravaganza, and the 7th Annual Battle of the Bands.

(Click here for a full listing of the arts-tagged CPW events.)

Anyways, come to the Closing Variety Show, and say hi to me at the CPW Help Desk, Student Welcome, Meet the Bloggers, and other stuff throughout the weekend!

Have a safe trip, and we'll see you soon. Less than 14 hours 'til CPW begins!

I thought I'd take a break from planning to post a quick blog entry; I recently saw this amazing TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talk by MIT Professor Pattie Maes about a very cool, wearable device called "Sixth Sense." She, along with her research group (including one of her grad students, Pranav Mistry, who she calls "the genius behind Sixth Sense"), has developed this "Minority Report"-esque gadget, which she demos and describes in the video.

Check it out! It's pretty awesome...

I know it's been forever since I've posted anything; I've been insanely busy reading thousands of applications - probably many of yours, in fact! But I did want to write briefly about something really cool that I just heard about recently...

One of my very good friends, Justin '08, is actually being featured on inc.com (along with his co-founder, Chris '09, and one of my other friends, Scot '08). They founded a start-up to help make learning foreign languages easier in foreign-language classrooms.

Go to http://www.inc.com/college to check them out and vote! You can also check out the Lingt website at http://lingtlanguage.com.

I asked Justin to write a little guest entry too, so he wrote a really nice piece for y'all about his journey here at MIT. Enjoy!

When I applied to MIT, I wanted to build robots. My heroes were Rodney Brooks and Marvin Minsky, and my future image of myself was in a white coat tinkering with the wired brain of some android. So, of course, I did what any MIT freshman hopped up on idealism and tech-romanticism does: I got a UROP. In Brooks' Humanoid Robotics Lab, no less. I was going to publish fifteen papers, file three patents, and invent machine consciousness in my four years at MIT, I was sure of it. I just needed to learn Linux first.

Building robots turned out to be harder than I had anticipated. I had built a little line-follower from tupperware, a comparator, and two photosensors in high school, but this was nothing like that. Instead of soldering together the guts of a robot, anticipating the moment when a dozen blinking LEDs would declare it alive, I was researching communications protocols and circuit compatibilities. When my grad student finally gave me an interesting project - to build a sound localization device (ears) for her robot - my initial burst of energy quickly fizzled when I found myself knee-deep in MATLAB dealing with microphone noise and trying to figure out what the hell a cross correlation was supposed to do. The whole thing was immensely educational, but I slowly discovered that I simply didn't have that white-coated future-self in me.

It wasn't much of an identity crisis since I had three years of MIT left to figure out what I wanted to do. I was a Course 6 major from the start, fairly confident that I wanted to work with computers. About two years in, though, I started missing my old pals in the Liberal Arts: namely language, literature, and politics - so much so that I skipped out on engineering altogether one semester and took Chinese, World Music, and two political science courses. I enjoyed this so much that I nearly dropped Course 6 for 17, before my adviser gave me some very good (and probably debatable) advice: an adeptness in technology would be more precious after graduation than a liberal arts education. I could read a lot and think hard to maintain an engaged interest in writing and analyzing world events, but I was unlikely to ever will myself to learn a programming language or systems architecture if I hadn't developed an intuition for technology in undergrad.

So graduation finally rolled around and I was thrust into the job market, delaying the inevitable by spending that summer setting up a computer lab for a primary school in Malawi. I hadn't applied and been accepted to any software firms or investment banks like most of my friends had five months ago, remembering well the misery of pounding out code in a cubicle during a sophomore internship. I had decided instead to apply to a handful of web start-up companies in Boston and the Bay area. Two of my earliest friends at MIT had dropped out to start companies and were doing quite well - the pace and challenge of start-ups seemed tantalizing, technically and creatively. When I got back from Africa, I flew straight to San Francisco, where I crashed on the couch of an MIT dropout and spent my days solving programming puzzles and interviewing with founders no older than myself. The passion and drive of all these entrepreneurial faces was deeply inspiring - I suddenly felt that overwhelming charisma that I had worn when applying for that first UROP at the robotics lab. In the same way that I had wanted to solder wires and create intelligence, I wanted to start my own venture that would consume my energy, combine my interests, and grow to be something bigger than cubicled code.

And so Lingt, a start-up focusing on building online technologies for foreign language classrooms, was born. I spent two summers in China during my MIT career - and it took all six of those months in addition to MIT's language classes to reach a point where I could really speak Mandarin. I saw an opportunity to leverage web technologies to help language students pick up the spoken language more rapidly in the setting that I thought learning occurred best - the classroom.

Contrary to the fleeting half-life of my interest in robotics, my passion for entrepreneurship is proving more sticky. Making sure you find your job interesting is good, but combining your interests (in my case technology and foreign language) to create your job is heaven. Business meetings, marketing strategy, and even the occasional art design keep the right side of my brain very much alive, which is perhaps the greatest benefit of choosing entrepreneurship over grad school or a "real job." Whether my co-founder Chris and I succeed or fail is besides the point (so far so good); by putting together a business that was able to secure a few partners and make technology that people wanted to use, we have escaped our destiny of being pigeon-holed as the "tech guys" for the rest of our lives. So, don't ride college like an assembly line conveyor belt. Abandon those things that don't interest you and figure out a way to combine those things that do. You'll be much happier and better for it on the other side.

Best wishes for a safe and happy new year!

1. I have not blogged in quite a while.
2. I finally have a small breather of vacation time between reading Early and Regular applications.
3. The end of the year is near, which always calls for lists and countdowns.
4. I've been meaning to write a post like this since the big TV premiere weeks in September, but traveling got the best of me.
5. Now that most shows are taking holiday breaks, I've been able to catch up a bit on my shows, and thus there is a smaller likelihood that something will get spoiled for me in the comments.

[Important sidenote: I watch almost all my TV online and/or several weeks after its initial airing, and I absolutely hate it when something gets spoiled for me (similar to most people, I assume) - so PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE no spoilers in the comments! If you absolutely have to reference something from a show that'll spoil it - even if it's already been aired - please put a disclaimer above it!]

Anyways, as you've probably figured out by now, I'm a big TV fan. I watch a lot of TV. So, in the spirit of Advent calendars*, I'm going to countdown my top 25 favorite currently airing TV shows (along with the network it airs on, in case you're curious):

25. Cash Cab - Discovery Channel
24. Dancing with the Stars - ABC (yes, I admit to watching this show...)
23. Dirty Jobs - Discovery Channel (Mike Rowe is amazing)
22. Best Week/Year/Night Ever - VH1 (does anyone else auto-download the Best Night Ever podcasts in iTunes?)
21. Mythbusters - Discovery Channel
20. Any Food Network show with Paula Deen, Bobby Flay, or Giada De Laurentiis (as you will see below, I love watching food-related shows, even though I hardly cook at all)
19. Throwdown with Bobby Flay - Food Network (see?)
18. Unwrapped - Food Network (Marc Summers brings back childhood memories of Double Dare on Nickelodeon...)
17. America's Best Dance Crew - MTV
16. Survivor - CBS (yes, I also admit to still watching this show, although I missed a lot of seasons between the first two and the more recent ones)
15. Ace of Cakes - Food Network (I think if I ever met Duff or anyone at Charm City Cakes, I would have a heart attack.)
14. Iron Chef America - Food Network (even though it doesn't quite live up to the original Iron Chef, this show is still highly entertaining.)
13. How It's Made - Discovery Channel (I could watch this show for hours, if only there weren't other TV shows distracting me from it...)
12. The Office - NBC
11. 30 Rock - NBC (Tina Fey is a comedic genius and all-around superstar)

And now, on to the TOP TEN:
10. LOST - ABC (only a few more weeks until the new season begins!!)
9. The Amazing Race - CBS (a show I am NOT ashamed to admit I watch. I don't care what you say, this show is amazing. It's right there in the name!)
8. Project Runway - Bravo
7. Brothers and Sisters - ABC
6. Desperate Housewives - ABC (this show has had its ups and downs, but this season has been pretty good imo)
5. Ugly Betty - ABC (always a feel-good, warm and fuzzy pick-me-up)
4. Top Chef - Bravo (again with the cooking shows, but this time on a different network)
3. Family Guy - FOX
2. How I Met Your Mother - CBS (NPH is amazing. 'Nuff said.)
1. HOUSE - FOX (I just love the writing and acting on this show. I can't get enough.)

Now, in all honesty, I don't have enough time to keep up with every single episode of all of these shows (though you'd probably be surprised at how many I actually do keep up with). However, there ARE more shows that didn't make the list, for various reasons. Here are a few more lists of mine:

Shows I Used to Watch, but Am No Longer Watching (in no particular order)
(either because I don't have time for them anymore, or they've gone downhill**...)
- 24 - FOX
- American Idol - FOX
- Big Brother - CBS (I was forced to watch this in the summers because THERE IS NOTHING ELSE TO WATCH IN THE SUMMER)
- Grey's Anatomy - ABC
- Private Practice - ABC
- Extreme Makeover: Home Edition - ABC
- Heroes - NBC
- Friday Night Lights - NBC
- Numb3rs - CBS

Shows I Try to Catch When I Can, but Not All the Time (in no particular order)
- The Daily Show - Comedy Central
- The Colbert Report - Comedy Central
- Kitchen Nightmares - FOX
- Dinner: Impossible - Food Network
- Samantha Who? - ABC
- Man vs. Wild - Discovery Channel
- The Mole - ABC

Favorite Shows that are No Longer Airing New Episodes, but Must be Included in a List of Some Sort in a Post Like This One
(R.I.P., my beloved shows!)
1. Friends
2. Arrested Development
3. Seinfeld
4. Rob and Big
5. America's Most Smartest Model (not as epic as the others, but still a wonderfully hilarious show)

Shows I've Always Wanted to Get Into More, but Haven't Been Able to Yet
- Scrubs
- Dexter
- Weeds
- Other suggestions? (And do not say "The Hills" or "Gossip Girl". Not gonna happen. Well...we'll see about Gossip Girl. I may cave on that front.) And if you have ideas on shows from my top 25 that you think should be cut, I welcome your input as well!

Yes, I watch a lot of TV. And yes, I watch a lot of bad TV. But now it's all out there on the table, guilty pleasures and all. So now it's your turn - what are your favorite shows?

*Unfortunately, these TV shows don't come with little chocolates, but wouldn't it be awesome if they did?
**...or they were terrible to begin with, and I've finally come to realize it

But with several blog posts in the past few weeks about how terribly hosed people are, I thought I'd bring some balance to the conversation. I remembered a guest post I wrote a couple years ago (back when Ben was still here - BEN WE MISS YOU!) - this was actually in response to an admitted student who was deciding whether to enroll at MIT, but I think it also applies to people thinking about applying to MIT. I thought I'd post it again (recycling is good for the environment!).

(Btw, I find it funny that in Ben's original post, he wrote about missing me while I was off at grad school, and now, I'm reposting this as we all miss Ben while he's off working at a different school. COME VISIT US BENNO!)

You can just check out the link above, or read below, where I've copied the basic gist of the entry:

So, some context: Mikey received an email from a student who had been admitted to MIT and was concerned that everyone else would be much better prepared than she. Recognizing her concern as a very common one, Mikey asked her if we could publish their correspondence. Here it is:

So, mainly at this point I am very excited for MIT, but I am having some second thoughts. Concerning my peers. When I applied, I was well aware of the fact that MIT attracts the best and brightest... and I'm a bit worried that I'm not as bright and shiny as the others. For example, almost all the people I've talked to have been to the IMO or at least the USAMO or have won some science competition or another (Westinghouse, YES, Intel, take your pick) or have patented something, or have taken their school's science club to nationals. And I've never done any of that... I'm basically a kid who likes math, cats, plants and some plumbing and thought MIT seemed like a cool place because everyone was always building one thing or another, all the time.

But now I'm worried that I won't be able to catch up to these kids and as a result, coming in with no research experience or major math competition experience or etc. will pull me far behind my classmates and I'll struggle to get good grades (I know grades aren't everything, but I'd like to get decent enough grades to apply for graduate school) or find research opportunities or basically show professors that I have something to offer... when in fact I'm not sure I have anything to offer in comparison to the rest of the class of 2011.

I was really psyched to go despite the notoriously huge workload because I was pretty sure that I'd love doing the work, no matter how much there was (I really enjoyed, for example, doing stoichiometry problems and math problems... they're fun for me, but I don't have any true talent for them... I'm a "peasant" of a student, not a "poet" if that makes any sense at all), but now I'm more worried than anything. Please feel free to be honest... if you think that my sort of person can still do well at MIT, that's great... but if not, be as brutally honest as necessary!

So how was your experience at MIT? If you don't mind, can you tell me a bit about yourself? Like, were you one of those USAMO kids?

Thanks again for your time, and I hope I don't sound too hysterical :)

And here's Mikey's response, which I love:

Don't worry.

I had never heard of "Intel", "Westinghouse", or "IMO" before coming to MIT. I did not know a USABO, USNCO, or USPhO existed. I didn't even know science fairs and research competitions existed. No joke. I took the "pre-AMC" (back then it was called the AJHSME, and the AMC was called the AHSME - American (Junior) High School Math Exam), did okay on it, and never went any farther (I had heard of the AIME but wasn't even close to being considered for that test). And I felt exactly like you even before I applied to MIT. "MIT students are way smarter than me... I must've gotten in by accident... I'll be like the dumbest one there" is what I seriously told myself. And I totally get your "poet" vs "peasant" analogy... people would talk about how "elegant" a math proof was, or how "neat and interesting" the solution was to that physics problem, while I would just sit there and say "heck, did I at least get the units right?" or use brute force to solve the problem in a way that took 20x longer than it should have and said "hey, I still got it right in the end, who cares if it took 2 hours instead of 2 minutes?" Haha.

But anyways, back to the original point. I came to MIT, and seriously, I probably had way more fun than I was supposed to. (Hanging out with friends in my living group, going on road trips, having spontaneous parties, watching TV shows and movies, playing video games... Not all the time, but most of the time. Don't tell my parents.) Over my four years, I sang with an a cappella group, helped record and produce 2 CDs, sang in a classical group, was part of a religious club, did a UROP, and made many lifelong friends and memories.

But wait... what about the academics?? I graduated with a 4.8 GPA (out of 5.0) - and I honestly had a blast. (I hope that didn't come off as arrogant - I just wanted to let you know that you can have a lot of fun and still get good grades in your classes!)

Believe me, there was definitely hard work involved (it was not ALL fun and games) but really, you wouldn't have been admitted if you we didn't think you could not only survive but THRIVE here academically, socially, emotionally, physically, mentally (and every other "lly" way). MIT is about educating the entire student, not *just* the academics, and the college experience is not *just* the classes - it's EVERYTHING. You literally passed through *at LEAST* 5 different rounds of screening before you were definitively admitted to MIT; we said "not only can she do the work, but she's going to have fun, she'll add to the campus community, she'll be able to make great friends, and above all, she's a great match for MIT." Or something to that extent.

Yes, there are geniuses at MIT, even for MIT standards. I met plenty of them throughout my four years. But you know what? I couldn't even tell for most of them - I had plenty of friends where I didn't learn about their special and unique talents until after having known them for 2-3 years (examples: I didn't learn until junior or senior year that some of my friends consisted of: California State Nintendo Champion... a child TV show star... placed in the Putnam for more than one year... went to Africa to help vision-impaired children... worked on the Human Genome project... owned his own design company... etc... etc... etc...). But when people get here, everyone pretty much leaves a lot of that at the door (unless it comes up specifically). They're all students just like anyone, eager to meet new people... and it was incredibly exciting to have friends like them.

So don't worry. I know exactly what you're going through, and as someone who's been through it all and is on the other side now, I know you'll be juuuuust fine. :)

I know many of you out there probably have similar concerns, and I hope that helps address some of them. Point is, MIT is hard work, but it's also a lot of fun! Then again, I'm sure Snively would point out that I should have a disclaimer that I studied biology while I was here...haha.

Edit: I just read Cristen's most recent post, which I recommend reading as well - I agree wholeheartedly!

So this post's title obviously isn't from a song lyric, but I must credit "hcs" for getting the last one correct! Guster is another one of my favorite bands...

McAllen, Texas
September 12, 2008 - September 17, 2008

I spent a nice weekend in McAllen, eating some great food and hanging out in the Valley. I had cabrito for the first time, which was fantastic. I actually met up with Louann, one of my friends from Michigan, who is down there doing a Teach for America placement at one of the local high schools. She's starting her second year, and is already teaching AP English classes. We had a great time catching up.

My hotel was right next to a Tony Roma's (great ribs!) and Logan's Roadhouse (tasty bread). Tony Roma's had a special where you could get a 3-course dinner - appetizer, ribs entree, and dessert - for like $15. Mmmmm. Aside from the cabrito, I didn't really get a chance to have some authentic Mexican food (which I know many would yell at me for not doing), but when I'm traveling, sometimes I'm just so tired that anything more than a 2-minute drive is simply too far.

Anyways, after visiting a few schools, we hosted a central meeting on Wednesday, 9/17 at a place called the Echo Hotel. There was a decent-sized crowd of about 120 students, parents, and others at the meeting. There were even a few people who drove all the way down from Laredo (about 3 hours away) to attend.

I got to meet 3 really cool ECs, one of whom actually teaches math at the same school that Louann teaches English! What a small world. After the meeting ended around 10pm, some of us went to Chili's (one of the few places in the area that was still open after 10).

Laredo, Texas
September 18, 2008

6am. The crack of dawn. I sleepily roll out of bed, eyes drooping like Droopy the Dog's cheeks. My legs feel like cement blocks. I slump into the shower, allowing the hot water to wake me up and wash the previous day off me. Feeling refreshed, I get ready, pack everything up, and check out of the hotel.

7am. After gassing up, I start my 3-hour drive up US-83, snaking along the US-Mexico border. One thing that I noticed throughout my time in South Texas (and especially on this drive) is that people generally do not like to exceed the speed limit. In fact, they like to drive 5 miles under the speed limit. I don't know if it's a culture thing or if the police are extremely strict or what, but it was VERY different from Michigan or Mass.

10am. I arrive in Laredo, check in to my hotel, and head out to my meetings for the day. I get excited that this hotel actually has FOOD NETWORK (another post on my love for TV to come), but unfortunately I'll only be here for one day.

11:30am. I've been using a GPS unit this entire time to help me get from place to place, which has (for the most part) been extremely helpful. It's like my new best friend. I even contemplated giving it a name. But in Texas, I've run into two main problems:

1) The highways here have service roads that run parallel to them. This poses a problem when the unit can't accurately detect whether I'm actually on the highway, or the service road next to it. Particularly when I'm in the right lane on the highway, and it suddenly tells me to "turn left" off of the overpass.

2) In fast-growing cities like Laredo, the maps on the unit were severely out of date/inaccurate. In one instance, I was on the highway, and the exit I was supposed to take no longer existed. So I figured, get off at the next exit, and either turn around and go back the other way on the highway, or find my way to my destination. So I take the next exit, and all the while problem #1 is plaguing me because I'm in a spaghetti-type junction, so it starts going crazy trying to figure out which road I'm actually on.

At this point, I actually start yelling at the thing because the voice won't stop screaming directions at me: "recalculating...recalculating...drive 0.3 miles, then turn ri--drive 200 feet, then turn--recalculating...when possible, make a u-turn...recalculating...recalculating..." I continue on the ramp I'm on (as there's basically no other choice), and finally see a sign: BRIDGE TO MEXICO.

Oops. Omgomgomg what do I do.

I start to pass all the signs about border policies, firearms, etc. and am furiously looking for an exit to turn around. As I approach the tollbooths, I see out of the corner of my eye this tiny sign pointing to a dirt road that says "Back to U.S." I merge over 6 lanes, get on the path, and finally make my way back towards my destination.

Once I get to my destination (according to my GPS), I'm basically in the middle of a field. Literally. There are no buildings around. I drive until I find a church, and manage to get directions from a friendly pastor in the parking lot.

I also had a scary encounter where the GPS unit almost guided me the wrong way on a four-lane, one-way highway off-ramp. After that, I made sure to download the latest map update and updated my unit.

Due up next: my trip takes me to San Antonio, Austin, Seattle, and New York City. For the solution to the last post's title, you can go here. Personally, I was referring to the Chantal Kreviazuk cover, but there are plenty of great versions of that song. Can you guess where this post's title comes from? (No Googling answers!)