Monthly Archives: August 2003

Family, General Chaos

They Came From the Great Machipongo Inlet

You
wouldn't believe the size of the spiders we saw on the Eastern Shore
and the Outer Banks this August.   It left me wondering if
there was a direct relationship between the record mosquito population this summer and the size and health of the coastal arachnid population.

I thought about this again the other day as I watched Eight-Legged Freaks
on HBO (David Arquette's best outing yet–though that might not be
saying much). The movie was a great way to waste 99 minutes of your life;  I particularly enjoyed the  trapdoor spiders in the movie, and the “Gremlins”-like sound effects used to represent the scampering spiders as they overran town.

The movie reminded me of the giant orb spider (about 8
inches from leg tip to leg tip-sse the second photo at right) I saw in the brush when we stopped  on
the eastern shore of Virginia l–it looked like it could eat small birds that flew into
its web.

DSCN2419 And
I wondered: is this what global warming has in store for us? Wetter
springs, more mosquitos carrying West Nile Virus (or malaria, or
whatever), and bigger and bigger arachnids that will one day start
snatching family pets and dragging them into their sticky lairs? 
Will I have to face down a thirty-foot mutant tarantula in my lifetime?

Probably not.  But it's fun to think about, in some perverse, geeky,  sci-fi schlock way.

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buzzword compliance, General Chaos

I was thrilled when Userland's Jake Savin announced a WYSIWYG Radio and Manila  in-browser editor for Mozilla.   That was, until I realized “Mozilla” didn't include Safari, and I would have to use Firebird to really take advantage of it.

Don't get me wrong–I like Firebird.  Or at least, I like Firebird
when it works.   But Firebird on Mac OS X is a little flaky
sometimes, and doesn't behave like Safari in some important ways.

One of them is the last page cache–particularly in the case of the
WYSIWYG editor.  In Safari, if I accidentally click on a link or
launch a new page in the window I'm typing in, I can back-button to it
and the content is still there where I left off.  Not so in
Firebird. (Or at least in the WYSIWYG editor in Firebird.)

For instance–yesterday, while typing a fairly long post, I clicked on
an entry in my browser history to check for the URL.  Whoops, it
went to the page.  I arrowed back, and 20 minutes worth of typing
was gone.

Now I know why Dave always fixes his posts after he publishes them.

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