The ultimate Engrish phrase?

October 19th, 2003

"Eternal Engine of Linguistic Massacre", a song title translated from Japanese, seems to sum up the entire Engrish phenomenon. It is song 5 on the second CD of the soundtrack of a Japanese game called Valkyrie Profile. But when I found the original title of the song and showed it to Gabe, he decided it was translated correctly and didn't make any more sense in Japanese.

Friends don’t let friends use IE

October 14th, 2003

Pop-ups kill.

Laid to governation

October 12th, 2003

Gabriel Neer: "Governating the countryside! Governating the peasants! Especially the women!"

National Novel Writing Month

October 11th, 2003

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.

False fire alarm

October 11th, 2003

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.

What’s new in Mozilla Firebird 0.7

October 10th, 2003

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Upcoming birthday

October 1st, 2003

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.

Strong Bad + Lord of the Rings =

October 1st, 2003

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