Indistinguishable from Jesse

My girlfriend is going to participate in National Novel Writing Month. She assures me that I will see her at least once during the month of November.

South has about one false fire alarm a year, usually due to kitchen non-fires. When there was a fire alarm at 6:50am last Friday, many students stayed in their rooms the whole time. I do not think this is a coincidence.

I took time to get fully dressed, and even then I was one of the first students in the parking lot. Only a third of the students in the dorm came to the parking lot during the 10-minute alarm. Some students came out of their rooms briefly, saw Michaela waving her burnt toast around, and went back into their rooms. The rest either slept through the alarm (unlikely, given how loud it is) or decided to stay in bed.

In California, it is illegal to "impair the effective operation of a [fire-protection system], so as to threaten the safety of any occupant or user of the structure in the event of a fire". So it's clear that we can't reduce the sensitivity of alarms in the dorm just because we find false alarms annoying. But what if we think a reduction in the false alarm rate would make residents take fire alarms more seriously? Could we argue that making the detector near the kitchen less sensitive would make the alarm system "less impaired"?

Cornell University has taken steps to reduce false alarm rates in dorms. They were able to do so with the encouragement of the Ithaca Fire Department and presumably without breaking any New York laws. This is encouraging, even though I live in California.

If all goes well, Mozilla Firebird will be released early next week. Here's a list of changes since 0.6 that I consider important.

I will turn 21 on October 13, 2003.

On an unrelated note, here's the list of Mozilla bugs I reported that are still open and the list of bugs I'm voting for.

Dan Cicio and Pamela Rettig outdo Strong Bad in their modification of Strong Bad's Kids' Book.

Eleanor Casey: Failed Romance.

If you really must write your own [romantic poem], then remember - it doesn't have to rhyme. Specifically, you should never ever ever try to rhyme the girl's name with something. Never. Even more specifically, do not try to rhyme "Eleanor" with "smell of her". No.

If I ever write a poem comparing Helen to cantaloupes, I will be sure not to mention the process of smelling the melons to determine ripeness.

I'm taking a Pomona class called Acquisition of Language. Here are some notes from the first day:

Why study acquisition of language?

• Lets you see mechanisms behind language.
• You can see dramatic changes over short periods of time. For example, most kids start having real conversations around 3 and a half.
• Kids are cute.

I like this class.