Arachnid Intelligence(?)

Every morning last week, there was a spider web attached to the car. An active one, with a spider in the center, waiting for flies, moths, and possibly small rodents. It would anchor one side to the carport post, and the other side to the driver’s side rear door. This resulted in me walking around through another carport, tossing my stuff in the back from the front seat, then gleefully ripping the web apart as I drove out of the space.

This happened three or four mornings in a row.

You’d think the spider would tumble to the fact that “Hey, this giant metal thing moves every day! Maybe I should attach my web to something else!”

Eventually it did. On Friday, it stayed outside and used the post and the roof instead, and by Saturday it had gone somewhere else. But it seems to be a common failing in spiders: we went by my parents’ house one night last week and there was another one, stretched from the olive tree to the minivan.

The world keeps getting smaller

Given the lack of decent radio stations in the LA area (I swear, every frequency is filled, but they’re mostly crap), I find myself occasionally listening to a San Diego station that sometimes comes in clearly. (It’s a step above Star, at least.) It’s about 80-90 miles from here to SD. I was listening to them today, and when the song ended, the DJs came on and announced that they were broadcasting from Disneyland. About 10 miles away. In the other direction.

Current Music: Eh, it would just get stuck in your head.

Blast from the past

Wow. We just turned back on a website account for a customer whose domain was “hijacked” a year ago (IIRC he didn’t renew on time, and someone snatched it up). Apparently he gave up trying to get it back, because he asked us to set it up under a new domain name.

We hadn’t moved the files at all, so all we had to do was change the name in our config. (And fix an error in a CGI script that probably relates to a Perl upgrade, since it presumably worked before.) But the site…

Let me just say it was already old before he lost the domain name. It probably looked old in 1999. Everything’s centered, it’s got blink tags, animated GIFs, a clock and a Java-based music player.

But the thing that caught my attention was the “Netscape Now! 3.0” button.

(Netscape 3 came out in 1996. Windows 95 was still new, IE was barely usable at its own version 3, NCSA was still working on Mosaic and Netscape was still charging money for its browser.)

Current Mood: 🤔nostalgic