This is the image I was talking about yesterday - me with the spider.  I was going to put this straight on the front page, but then I remembered how I would have reacted to photos of spiders before.  And still do to an extent.  The grin on my face was frozen at the time, it was more of a grimace than a grin.  But I did it, and that's really all that counts.

Today's mantra is "spiders are safe".  That's the lesson we all had to take away from the Friendly Spider Programme at London Zoo.  It was incredible.  I have a photo, that I'll post later when I get Photoshop working again, showing a Red-Kneed bird eating spider in my hands.  It was soft, and hairy and heavy... not unlike a kitten perhaps.  In any case, I can now trap spiders with a cup and cardboard sheet and take them outside.  That's a hell of a jump from yesterday, when I'd have to get Anna to do it.  If you have, or know someone who has arachnophobia, then tell them to try this course out.  It really is wonderful.

Tomorrow I get to face my biggest fear.  I'm going to have my arachnophobia treated at London Zoo.  They run a one day course of hyphotherapy and neuro linguistic programming to help with this affliction.  Nicely enough, they call it the "Friendly Spider Program".  Oh, and at the end of the course, we get to go to the invertebrate house and play with the spiders.  That includes handling a red-kneed bird eating tarantula from... well, I don't know where its from.  You see, I couldn't open the web page with the explanation.  I was too afraid.

We were doing a little spring cleaning earlier today, and I cleared out a shit load of junk from a box where I usually keep PC manuals and stuff.  In the process, I came across my handwritten notes for this blog entry that I wrote when we were in Istanbul a couple of years ago.  It brought back a load of memories, including some that didn't make it into the original post.  It hardly seems worth the effort now, but its nice to look back on little details you had forgotten.  
When we were finished blitzing the living room, we ended up chucking out the VCR, printer, scanner and about twenty video tapes.  I figured that if I left them outside near the bins that they would get taken, but I hadn't figured on the speed; they actually disappeared within an hour!  
I've listed my Synology NAS on ebay, as I've just installed a new server which I'm putting a RAID array in.  The drives are going to arrive on Thursday, so I should have about 1.2TB of space by Friday.  Hmmmmm.... one point two terabytes :-)

"More than anything else, this is the smartest aspect of what Mozilla has done with Firefox: It's a realistic browser, a worthy successor to the Navigator line. It's a browser that inspires an emotional response. You don't have to learn to like it with your left brain; you just like it."
That is a quote from today's New York Times. I have been struggling for years to verbalise exactly what it is that I don't like about the firefox browser, and it is this : I do not want a browser that elicits an emotional response.  I want to use a browser that provides me with a transparent window to the web.  I don't want the program to provoke an emotional response, I want the content to do that for me.  I want it to be an empty container, something that I can fill with whatever I need to satisfy my needs.  IE provides me with that because it looks like a Windows window.  It works, and it renders content well.  Microsoft messed up the web by stifling CSS development and producing a browser that bastardised the rendering of standards compliant code.  You know what?  I don't care.  What I care about is that the browser I use now renders content well, does it fast, and doesn't intrude on my experience with Windows.  Its a tool, nothing more, nothing less.