A harmless ice-breaker had suddenly gotten kind of awkward.

I was on a first-year residence council and I had tossed out the idea that we go around the circle and each list our name, our hometown, and our favourite food. But when we got to my friend Sarah, everything went a bit astray.

“Bread. I love when a good loaf of bread has a really crunchy, hard brown crust that gives way to a soft, tender, melt-in-your-mouth center…” Sarah gazed dreamily off into the distance, thinking of rustic French boules, fresh out of the oven. It was very reminiscent of the When Harry Met Sally pie scene. Nevertheless, I understood: the perfect slice of bread can be heaven.

Baking and eating bread has served as the cornerstone of numerous cultural practices for thousands of years. The ritual of bringing yeast to life, hand-kneeding dough, patiently letting it rise, and finally baking it and sharing it seems almost instinctual.

Baking bread can appear daunting to a lot of home cooks, but it’s much easier than it seems. I’ve baked challah and flat breads for years, but I recently found the ideal bread recipe: very little effort and prep-time with that exact food-passion inducing result. Best of all, the recipe only calls for flour, water, yeast, salt, and honey, which makes my goal of baking it every weekend as a way to relax seem like a delight instead of a challenge.

Mix one and a half tablespoons of active dry yeast and a tablespoon of honey into three cups of warm (not hot – you’ll kill the yeast) water. Walk away for 15 minutes. When you return, the yeast should have produced a fair amount of bubbles and foam at the top. If there is no foam, this means your yeast was dead (you might have killed it with boiling-hot water), so start over with new yeast.

Add one and a half tablespoons of salt, and slowly incorporate six and a half cups of flour – I use five and a half cups of all-purpose flour and one cup of whole-wheat flour. The resulting dough will be sticky and won’t form a ball, but don’t worry. Cover it, and allow it to rise for two hours in a warm and preferably humid spot, such as the laundry room with a dryer running.

With floured hands and a floured cutting board, divide the dough into two loaves. Roll each into round balls. Let them rest on the board for 40 minutes. Before baking, pre-heat the oven to 450 degrees.

Three tricks for bakery-quality bread

1. While you’re pre-heating the oven, place a roasting pan on the lowest rack of the oven. Also leave your baking sheet in the oven as it pre-heats.

2. For an artistic look, just before you place the loaves on the hot baking sheet, use a sharp knife to cut a few shallow stripes across the top of the loaf.

3. When you put the bread in the oven, pour one cup of hot water into the pre-heated roasting pan at the bottom of the oven. Shut the oven door, and do not open it for 30 minutes. The steam trapped in the oven will create a crunchy, hard brown crust with a soft, tender, melt-in-your-mouth centre – and an experience worth dreaming about.

Internships make many bold promises. But whether it’s hands-on involvement, exposure to the field, or networking and learning alongside seasoned professionals, internships’ selling points all centre on giving participants an experience comparable to a full-fledged job. And like real jobs, internships can be difficult to come by.

Blame the economy, or the ever-increasing importance companies and graduate programs place on relevant and practical experience. Either way, the internship game has become as competitive as career placement and degree planning, with students requiring similar advising.

Enter the Arts Internship Office, the largest of the many faculty internship offices on campus. When not maintaining an extensive database of available internships for browsing and offering its own subset of internships for upper-year students, the office acts as an advising body for students in each stage of the internship-seeking process: narrowing the search, polishing applications, and training accepted interns. Unfortunately, not all students understand the process of applying for an internship.

“Many students come in to see us just as they’re getting into the process of finding an internship. We help them start from scratch: crafting a learning objective, finding organizations that best fit their needs and that they can contribute to,” says Anne Turner, Arts Internship manager.

The program also works with Career Planning Services, reviewing cover letters and CVs and making improvements when necessary. The AIO also keeps in close contact with other internship offices, departments, and faculties.

“Working with [other faculties’ internship offices] helps us highlight internship opportunities on campus as a whole. Additionally, most of the internships [the AIO] directly administers come from individual departments and professors, who have connections all over the world,” says Turner.

The AIO’s pre-departure workshops largely come in two varieties. Health and safety sessions invite a nurse and a representative from the Department of Foreign Affairs to brief students going overseas. Afterwards students meet with professors and peers in groups according to the countries they will visit.

The other training focus is a two-part series. The Preparedness Workshop equips students to deal with professional and cultural differences they may experience in their new working environment, under the guidance of a guest facilitator. The same facilitator checks up with students to receive feedback after the internship is completed.

Because most Arts internships are unpaid, the Arts Internship Office also provides Arts Internship Awards¬ – grants to alleviate travel and living expenses for qualifying students.

The application deadline for the 2010 Arts Internship Awards is March 22.

The AIO recognizes that their databases are limited and students will invariably find internships on their own. Nonetheless, they assure students that their services are not at odds with individual efforts.

“Students often think we can only help with internships set up by our own office, but we help in many ways – put students in touch with someone else in the country, inform them of the country’s political situation, help them obtain credit and awards,” says Turner. “Even students who don’t have a good idea of where they want to look can get on the right track after coming to see us.”

When the Internet was invented in the mid-nineties, it presented numerous new challenges to the engineering and computer science world. Never before had so many people been connected through so many links simultaneously. Today, approximately 100 terabytes of information are transferred on the Internet every second, and transmission can be complicated to understand.

The Internet is a massive inter-connection of different computers. Each website is stored on a server (or multiple servers) somewhere in the world, which in turn connects to an Internet service provider – servers are never linked directly to personal computers. This means that when you type “www.facebook.com” into a browser, there’s no direct link between your computer and the facebook.com server. Instead, messages are sent through dozens of other computers before arriving at the appropriate machine.

When you are using the Internet, your computer is not transmitting all of the information at once. Instead, it sends out packets, which are small chunks of data with a destination, source, encryption scheme, and the actual data. These packets are sent from your ISP out into the Internet to numerous servers. Every time a server receives a packet, it looks at the address on it and either stops and reads it if the packet is for that machine, or sends it on through its connection. This continues until the message reaches the desired location.

To avoid duplicate names, each computer is assigned an Internet protocol address. This IP address is unique to the machine, and serves as the identifier for all communications between the computer and the Internet.

IP addresses are generally assigned based on geographic location, which is why many services are able to identify the location of your computer when you connect to their server. Some servers selectively block people from certain geographic regions, or ban users based on their IP address because they don’t want these people to use their service. A classic example is when you want to view a television show or movie on a foreign website, such as NBC, CBS, or Hulu. These companies broadcast their shows and media to viewers for free because of the revenue they make from advertisements. Unfortunately, the rate paid for advertising is based on viewership only in the network’s home country, so they block foreign IP addresses, which don’t acquire revenue. This gets complicated when you want to watch the most recent episode of House, but don’t want to pay three dollars on iTunes (or watch on a pirate website, where the quality is almost sure to be terrible).

Proxy servers act as a middleman to accessing these services: proxy servers are machines in a different part of the world that access websites on your behalf, and send the results back to you. When you connect to a proxy server (a Google search will reveal a list of such services), the proxy server forwards your message to the destination website, with a different return address. This fools the website into thinking it’s talking to someone else. The proxy server then sends the results back to you, without the discriminatory website knowing. Keep in mind that this process may violate the terms of agreement of certain sites, so approach with caution.

Safety: Windows and doors can be securely closed and locked. Aside from the landlord, only you and your roommates have copies of the key. There is a working smoke alarm.

Tenants: Other students are living in the building.

Superintendant/Landlord: One or both live either in or nearby the apartment building, and are available in case of emergencies.

Laundry: Laundry facilities are inside your unit, or easily accessible at minimal cost.

Signing the lease: It is normal for the landlord to request references for a credit check or a co-signer (e.g. a parent) for students without a steady income.

Rent: Expect your monthly rent to increase every 12 months.

Subletting: Your landlord should enable subleasing. If you are going to be away for the summer, or plan to go on exchange, it’s a good idea to sublet your place.

Maintenance: The landlord plans to repair any problems you have found with the place, and assures you that they will maintain the dwelling throughout your lease. Be forewarned that any repairs needed as a result of the tenant are not under the responsibility of the landlord.

Safety: The door and windows do not lock properly. Your unit backs onto a dark alley, but the windows are not protected by bars. There is no smoke alarm, or it has not been tested to assure it works.

Tenants: Your landlord is your downstairs neighbour and the baby upstairs screams.

Superintendant/Landlord: Neither lives in or close to the apartment. Your landlord has not provided you with any emergency contact information. You share no common languages, making communication an effort in interpretive sign language and gestures.

Laundry: Facilities are available, but there are not enough machines to meet the demand and they are constantly out of order.

Signing the lease: The landlord asks for a deposit outside of the first month’s rent, a key deposit, postdated cheques, or credit card, passport, bank account, and SIN numbers.

Rent: The landlord raises the rent mid-lease or terminates the lease before it expires (i.e. if she kicks you out, that is a problem).

Subletting: The landlord forbids a tenant to sublease without a valid reason.

Maintenance: Your landlord has made no indication that he/she intends to fix any identified problems with the apartment. Note: holes in walls, funky-smelling gas stove, and frost in the freezer are not good signs.