Thank you God for the Internet

As I was working on my computer last night, I had an epiphany of how lucky we were to live in the current era where everything is available to us at our fingertips. What do I mean?

Why, the Internet, the www., the dot com era of course! The Internet, a place where everyone can access these days, contain so much valuable information from the smallest of topics like fixing a specific problem on a specific cell phone to influential news like the new elected president of the United States (congrats Obama!!!). Experts from all around the world share their insights and experiences, and if you want to learn, you simply have to search, read up, take it with a grain of salt, and read more somewhere else. The amount that you can learn from this Internet thing is seriously limitless. I know it's common knowledge, but I just want to make a point.

From a universities' student stand point, life is so much easier for us than studying 30 years ago. The most common "work" assigned to a typical uni student are papers. Nowadays, all that is needed to find information and research is online. Sure books, bibliography and academic journals are great and more "reliable", but even uni libraries are switching most resources to electronic and Internet related methods. I am personally really thankful because I had an assignment to look for patents registered for my professor's revolutionary idea. With the ingenious resource of Google Patents, I completed this task within hours in comparison to days of work without (I would have had to look for registration papers and such from our national patent office, then proceed to international patent offices).

Moral of the story?
Knowledge is power. We can find information these days like never before. Go and search away. Find tools, gadgets, new websites that will help you in your area of interest. Google itself has numerous tools that are versatile and super powerful if you take the time to learn them.