Another reason to like Portland

I flew out of PDX (Portland Airport) tonight, and even though I accidentally ended up spending more time with TSA agents than intended, it was still a positive experience. I hit "bad luck" twice in the security line.

First, I set off the metal detector. (And I was not wearing anything that I hadn't worn "successfully" through airport metal detectors before.)

Second, my bag accidentally contained a banned item tucked way down under an extension cord and some crushed granola bars. Off to secondary screening I went. After a quick back-rub and pat-down, the agent started going through my bag. After the first pass, the agent couldn't find anything so he put it through the x-ray again, and started digging through one of the exterior pockets. After finding the object, he asked if I wanted to ship it home for about $10. I did, so we walked over to an ATM-like machine from ReturnKey Systems with a simple touch screen interface. He put the object in a pouch, fed it into the machine, and left me to punch my information in and swipe my credit card.

The thing that impressed me the most, is that throughout this whole thing, the agents were friendly. They weren't acting as if they hated their job. They spoke English well. And they did their job: they found an object that shouldn't have been there. Something another airport missed. Oops. (On the other hand, they didn't make me pull my one-liter bag containing 3.4oz or less bottles of liquids out of the bag. I didn't mind.)

Why can't airport security be this nice at the airports I regularly traverse?

Tarred and Feathered?

A few days ago, the below message came into one of the perl.org support queues. I had to share it:

I dowloaded (sic) a file from this site. It had something like "tar" at the end of the file name, like an extention (sic). It must be some sort of compression--I don't know. I have nothing that recognizes this ext. If you're going to compress your files, why not use the "zip" format like everyone else on the planet? What benefit is there to using some unheard of compression system that people have to jump through hoops of flaming fuel oil to use?

(For the non technical readers, "tar" or tape archive is an archive format popular on UNIX. For all intents and purposes, its just like "zip", but 10 or 20 years older, and still in wide use. A quick google search for tar file would have told him all this.)