A winning combination

This is absolutely heavenly: Dipping Milano cookies into plain Greek yogurt.

Spring break dates

When is the last time your spring break matched up with those of your friends from back home (who go to different universities)? I was lucky enough to experience this maybe once in my four years of undergrad, and even then only with one or two friends.

I propose that Spring Break dates should be standardized nationwide (perhaps even worldwide, but I don't know foreign education systems).

I see absolutely no difficulty that this would present to schools, and it would make millions of people's lives so much better. The standardization process is simple too -- have the U.S. Department of Education decide on a week and inform every university.

Why hasn't this happened yet??

This country is a scary place

Sometimes, this country really frustrates me:
Internet Virus Frames Users For Child Porn

To summarize if you don't feel like reading: People are being imprisoned after their computers are getting infected by viruses which download child pornography. These people do nothing wrong, but end up being robbed of their dignity and reputation and incarcerated. The article gives an example of one man wrongly accused in this way:

Fiola was fired and charged with possession of child pornography, which carries up to five years in prison. He endured death threats, his car tires were slashed and he was shunned by friends.
...
The charge was dropped – 11 months after it was filed.
...
"It ruined my life, my wife's life and my family's life," he says.

What bothers me is this country's unrelenting stance on child pornography. I would understand if the people being punished were producing child pornography -- but to ruin their lives because there is a sliver of possibility that they were viewing child pornography? That is just unreasonable. Inappropriate interaction with real, living, breathing children is truly worthy of a severe and merciless punishment -- but we are talking about pixels on a screen here.

A very unnerving aspect of this is that it could happen to any one of us. This particular article talks about being infected with a computer virus, but there have also been cases of people being punished for unintentionally downloading child pornography over a file sharing system. Perhaps they were not paying attention to the filename, or perhaps the file was misnamed to mask it's sinister contents, I do not know the details. There is a news story of this happening to a 22 year old guy, and he is quoted as saying:

"It didn't appeal to me,' he said. 'I was looking for women my age, so I just wanted to download 'College Girls Gone Wild' and accidentally downloaded underage pornography."

Matt claims he quickly erased the files.

Frankly, I believe him. But now he is facing 20 years in prison and must spend the rest of his life as a registered sex offender, and I feel terrible for him. Imagine yourself in his shoes...
And as the end of the article shows, he's not alone in accidentally stumbling upon such vile material:

Internet searches reveal a large number of complaints from people who say they've accidentally downloaded child pornography through Limewire.

This is a scary prospect, and the fear comes from this country's irrational stance on the matter. I guess the take-away message from all of this is:
Be very, very careful what you click on and what you download.
Previously I had thought this to only matter in terms of keeping my computer clean of viruses/spyware/malware, but it seems that following this simple rule can also keep you out of prison.

Create and extract tar.gz files

This post is intended as a self reminder.

To create a *.tar.gz file:
tar -czf filename.tar.gz dirpath

To extract a *.tar.gz file:
tar -xzf filename.tar.gz

Explanation of -czf:
c: create archive
z: pass the archive through gzip (to create .tar.gz vs .tar)
f: the following argument specifies the filename to use

Explanation of -xzf:
x: extract from archive
z: pass the archive through gunzip (to extract from .tar.gz vs .tar)
g: the following argument specifies the filename (the archive file) to use