David Baron's weblog: November 2002

Thursday 2002-11-28

Sunday 2002-11-24

The concert on Friday night went well, despite a rather strange day preceding it. (The Yale Glee Club's buses crashed into each other while getting on the highway as they were leaving New Haven. A number of students had minor injuries, but thankfully nothing serious. However, it was serious enough to delay their arrival by almost 4 hours and prevent about 10-15 of their members from being at the concert.) We really need to find a way to rehearse in Sanders Theater with a simulated audience (i.e., something that doesn't reflect sound filling the wooden seats), so that we can be prepared for being unable to hear each other during the concert.

I spent almost all of yesterday out, although I did spend the morning trying to understand the various slightly different concepts of intrinsic widths that Mozilla has. (There are way too many, some of them may be the same, and they're implemented uniformly badly.) All to fix a mostly-unrelated bug whose fix causes a regression with intrinsically sized right floaters. This (and other things) are pushing me closer and closer towards giving up on the current reflow organization and starting some major refactoring.

But I spent most of the afternoon at the Harvard-Yale football game, with a bunch of other members of the Harvard Glee Club, along with some members of the Radcliffe Choral Society and Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum. We sat right behind the band, in cold weather that gradually got colder as the sun set over the edge of the stadium, and watched Harvard beat Yale 20-13. And I even understood a good bit of what happened. And then I had dinner with a bunch of friends who graduated last year, only some of whom are still in the area, and went to their apartment for a while after dinner.

Thursday 2002-11-21

It's nice to wake up in the morning and find pro-Yale and anti-Harvard graffiti drawn in chalk all over campus. And some signs, too, reminding us that Yale has a full week for Thanksgiving break.

Some (partly sarcastic, I think) words of wisdom from my economics professor: It all comes back to zoning, really, in the end. (after moving from financial aid as a form of price discrimination to explaining selectivity of admission in terms of Cambridge zoning regulations that prevent more dorms from being built).

Friday 2002-11-15

The New York Times is reporting that:

The Bush administration said today [Nov. 14] that it would place as many as 850,000 government jobs -- nearly half the federal civilian work force -- up for competition from private contractors in coming years.

This is scary. This means that the Bush administration is planning to dismantle the Pendleton Act, which is one of the most important laws in US history (along with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787).