The monsters that lurk, and other snippets

When faced with a spider, what course of action do you take? Do you:

a) ignore it
b) run screaming, close the door on it
c) thwack it with heavy object
d) trap it carefully and deposit outside
e) back away gently and run to get nearest person to deal with it

Generally you can determine the relative size of the spider by my response - tiny ones get (a), slightly bigger ones get (c), anything a couple of centimetres across or bigger get (e). I have been known to use (b) for very large ones when there's no one around, in which case when someone is available I'll grab them and make them apply option (c) or (d).

The reason I mention this is that last weekend there was a large - about 3-inch diameter - spider in our front hall. I managed to use (b) because no one else was there and I was just about to go out. Apparently someone (c)'d it when they returned, which was good. A few days ago there was a similarly large spider in our lounge, which also was (c)'d.

The more worrying thing is that yet another one was found upstairs in the bathroom yesterday. Which leads to the disquieting thought that there may be a nest of them (do spiders have nests? A nest of spiders?) lurking Somewhere in the house. Urk. So now when I try to get to sleep I'll be imagining a cluster of large spiders creeping and making their way to me in the dark...

In October there's a Terry Pratchett signing in the Basingstoke branch of Ottakar's which I fully intend to go to, seeing as I couldn't go to any of his May signings. In order to find Ottakar's in Basingstoke I need a map, so I had a look at the specific store information, including a friendly link saying, "Store map".

"Goody," I thought, and clicked it, whereby a popup window opened with no image displaying, since no image existed at the URL it was pointing at. Now this was two weeks ago and it's still not been fixed, so I whizzed off an email to their "Internet team" telling them about it.

The reply mentioned that it had taken them a while to update the website since Ottakar's have recently taken over Hammicks, and consequently "not all of the new stores have maps". Surely then you'd take down the link to "Store map" rather than just take down the image and have a 404 error when the popup window is opened?

That aside, she did find a map for me. What she did was to go to Streetmap, bring up the relevant map, Print Screen, open Microsoft Word, paste the entire screenshot and then save the whole thing as a .doc and email it to me. Would it not have been easier simply to email me the URL (which I then had to type out from the screenshot so that I could see it at a decent size)?

Grr. These things annoy me.

My confirmation of the 4-year Comp Sci course at Warwick came yesterday, following two obligatory acceptances of the 3-year course that I was warned about when I phoned to straighten things out. Yay for that.

And I start work tomorrow, which may mean severely reduced blogging from now on. I'll try my best to still post several times a week, but we'll see.

And finally, something I was pointed towards a couple of days ago:

5 Secrets to a Perfect Relationship

1. It is important that a man helps you around the house and has a job.
2. It is important that a man makes you laugh.
3. It is important to find a man you can count on and doesn't lie to you.
4. It is important that a man is good in bed and loves being there with YOU.
5. It is important that these four men don't know each other.