It's nice to have my midterm crush out of the way. True, it was a very short one, relatively speaking (though my body disagrees after all the hours I forced it to stay awake). But by unfortunate chance it happened to land right in the middle of a good deal of other stuff I had going on. And by truly unfortunate chance I ended up in a class with a professor who believes 12-15 page take-home midterms are fun to write.

I'm currently looking for a new text editor. TextEdit, the program that comes free with OS X, is certainly better than SimpleText (and it would be much better than AppleWorks, too, if it only let me turn on automatic curly quotes), but it's no good as an HTML editor for some reason. When I open up a page in TextEdit, instead of finding the plain code I expect I get all kinds of messed-up images and tables, as if TextEdit were an ill-conceived web browser. It's very frustrating if all I want to do is view code or make a very simple change, and I don't want to wait for Adobe GoLive to boot.

Good news: Casey Newton, the former proprietor of newtonline, has apparently decided web sites aren't immature college habits after all and has launched a new site called newt : case. Casey Newton ... newt : case ... get it?

PARC had a "fire" today. Fire in quotes because we only think it was a real fire this time; other than a few scattered reports of "haze" or "smelling smoke," no one I know of actually saw said fire. But something must have happened in the basement (that's where the indicator said the alarm went off) because just as I was printing my long-delayed "table tent" ad for RCB Field Day, piercingly loud sirens went off all through the building. (Strangely enough, just about everyone I think went out the front doors of the building instead of the purported "fire doors," even though it was the middle of the day and they were open. Shows what creatures of habit we are.) I dashed out my door, cursing -- then I went back into my room and grabbed a jacket -- then I dashed out my door again and went outside. Several people had neglected jackets and even shoes, figuring it was a drill and we'd be let back inside soon. However, we learned that was not the case when two University Police cars pulled up outside PARC, shortly followed by three -- three -- speeding fire trucks. Two fully geared fire fighters went into the building with two not fully geared UP officers, and after a while they came out and said we could go inside again. So in the end, nothing really happened, and for all that nothingness PARC will probably get slapped with some sort of fine. And more than likely, we'll never know why.