First they used zip ties to handcuff suspects, now a Judge duct tapes defendant's mouth. What next, trade in the electric chair for a whoopee cushion? Sheesh!

I've started reading The Lord of the Rings again, starting with The Fellowship of the Ring of course. Actually, I just finished reading The Hobbit first, a very cool prequel to LOTR and a lot less dense. Its weird how a lot of the story still feels familiar to me even though I last read it like a thousand years ago. Anyways, I came across this cool poem during today's reading session. Tolkien sure had a way with words. I think he was Marilyn Manson's dad, in spirit at least.

It was so quiet this morning, I only did 2 deliveries the whole morning! And if that wasn't bad enough, just as I'm grabbing some lunch, my pager starts to go off. So I wolf down my lunch, go pick up this rush and its going to a place that's closed for lunch. Bah! It doesn't really matter to me, I'm just the courier, but it is kind of irritating. Then it snowed. I've had enough snow for this year, thank you very much. And I really couldn't give a damn if the farmers really need it. Ain't no farmers in the concrete jungle, baby.

I transfered most of my spiders to new cages last week. Well not new cages but I did replace the substrate and added clay pots and water dishes. My Haplopelma lividum's enclosure was filled up more than halfway with potting soil to encourage burrowing. And sure enough, she's begun to dig a burrow, straight down so far, but she's almost hit the bottom so she might branch off soon. Its funny how she freezes as soon as I turn on the light to check her out. Very shy spider.

My Aphonopelma seemanni was already pretty chubby before I fed her a pinky last night. Now she's definately on the heavy side. I like how she's crossing her spinnerets, like she has to take a leak or something.

And here she is before eating the pinky.

While she was consuming the pinky, I noticed its tail had fallen off near the spot where she had first caught him. Not wanting to disturb her meal, I figured I would retrieve it later. [to prevent it from rotting and spreading mold or disease] Looking in later, she was over the spot where the tail was, so I would have to try again later. Then she moved away, and guess what? The tail was gone! The greedy little bastard had gone back and consumed the tail!

Here is my juvenile [?] Brachypelma emilia.

And just for camparison, here's my adult emilia. Much duller colours, yes? [and a fatter belly!]

Here's the X2 trailer. Looks good.

It's -22°C right now, -32°C with the wind chill and the high for today is forecast at -19°C. Man, I hate my job on days like today.

[I don't know what's the matter with my weather script, it doesn't seem to be working. Here's the forecast for Calgary.]

Yikes, now I have to post something, anything, to try to bump Tyson's ugly mug off my page. He does look like he could eat somebody's children, doesn't he?

Anyway, I just finished watching Akira Kurosawa's Ran. Awesome flick. I think it was based on Shakespeare's Norman Lear or something. The best part was when Kurogane lops off Lady Kaede's melon. Whoa, I haven't seen that much spray since Braindead [Dead Alive]! All kidding aside, it was a really good movie, check it out. [sorry about the spoiler!]

Reality bites? Tyson may get own TV show.

This bridge is so cool, they should get the people who designed this to design replacements for the WTC towers. It rotates to let boats get past.

I got my disc brake today! Hurray! This thing's huge. I had no idea it was going to be so big. Oh well, the disc should last longer due to the larger surface area. I can't wait, no more rim wear! I usually ride my rims till the sidewall gets so thin that it blows out, usually quite explosively. Although my last rim got all warped and no matter how many times I tightened the spokes, it would go back out of true again. Anyways, my new rim should last much, much longer than usual with this new brake. I just hope my forks last. I can see a lot of corrosion on the bottom sleeves. My last set of forks were so corroded, the inner rod poked right through the outer sleeve. Not good. I wish they would put some kind of anti-corrosion coating on them to prevent this. But if they did that, they couldn't sell us new forks every two years! Yeah, what was I thinking.

Here is my Cobalt blue sub-adult. The blue colour in its legs shows up much better in pictures than in viewing with the naked eye. Guess the flash helps a lot. She's stopped eating lately so I'm hoping she's about to molt. She killed the last cricket I threw in there, but she didn't eat it. I need to change the substrate in all these cages, but it's too cold out today to go to the store. The substrate they have now has tree bark in it, probably cedar. Tarantulas hate cedar.

You can see her little claws at the end of her legs in the pic below.

Here's my Mexican redleg sub-adult. You can see its abdomen has turned black, signifying a molt is in the offing. Hopefully I'll be around to take pictures. [and not delete them. Doh!]

Here's my Pampas tawnyred male. He's all legs and hair. I tried picking him up but he was all nervous and jittery so I let him be. He seems to eat all the crickets I throw at him, so I'm hoping he'll be around for awhile. [males don't live nearly as long as females and all the previous males I've had have stopped eating and slowly starved themselves to death]

This tarantula came out of its molt much darker than before. It will probably fade back to its old colour over time, but it does look damn good the way it is now. Its pretty well jet black with green highlights on its carapace and the first leg segments, although you can't really see the green on its legs in these pictures. The pictures I took during its molt showed the green on its legs quite clearly, but of course, those pictures are gone. [grumble, grumble] And there's the orange stripes on its knees. Here's a couple before and after pictures.

Here's the old skin from my spider that just molted.

After taking a shitload of pictures of my tarantula molting last night, I went to check them out this morning. I downloaded them to my computer and deleted them from the camera. Then I looked at them with this stupid, fucked-up software that came with my camera. [ZoomBrowserEX] This piece of shit software puts a bunch of fucking thumbnails on your computer every time you download pictures from your camera. Then, even after you've moved the files, it displays all these thumbnails every time you start the program. So I was deleting all these thumbnails so it wouldn't bog down every time I downloaded pictures from my camera, but not the pictures I just downloaded of course. There were some thumbnails in the main directory for pictures that I had moved a long time ago, so I chose to delete those. And what did the program do? It deleted the subdirectory with all my freshly downloaded pictures of my T molting! Motherfucker! So, to make a long story short, I spent the whole fucking day today trying to recover these files either from my hard drive or camera. No luck, they're gone for good. I am so pissed off. I spent all last night taking those pictures and all today on trying to recover them for nothing. Fuck! I wish comapnies wouldn't include such fucked-up, shitty programs with their hardware, they just fuck things up. I guess that's why we get them for free.

It's 9:40pm, over 4 hours since I got home and saw her flipped over, and she just started moving her legs around. Hopefully she'll start to pull out soon.

Well, it's 11:00pm and she's pretty well finished her molt. I took like a ton of pictures, but I'm too tired to post them right now. I'll put them up in the morning. Goodnight.

She's still on her back, no movement. I got home at about 5:30pm and its now almost 7:30pm, so she's been at it for at least 2 hours. She should start doing her stretching exercises pretty soon. Get on with it already, dammit!

This is my Lasiodora subcanens¹ on its back, about to shed its skin [molt]. I hope it goes ok, its abdomen looks like it's twisted to one side a bit. Oh well, nothing I can do but watch and keep my fingers crossed.

I'll try to do updates live, with fresh pictures as she goes through her molt.

¹ I think it's a Lasiodora subcanens, this picture was the closest to the way it looks.

Here's my Chilean Rose tarantula. Common and cheap, but not bad looking and easy to take care of. She was my first tarantula, I think I bought her about 7 years ago but it could be longer. She was already an adult when I bought her so she could be quite old. She won't eat pinkies but she'll eat crickets till her belly's huge. And then she'll stop eating, I think she fasted once for a couple years. Yes, she went for a couple years without any food, I guess if they have a full belly and water, they can last for a very long time between meals. Then she molted and now she's back to eating like a pig again.

The late people paid their bill. Cool. I thought I might have bounced a cheque, but then I checked my account and the money is there. Yea. My credit card got charged for my new disc brake so I should be getting that soon. Woohoo. The weather was good [warm & sunny], it was busy at work but not crazy and I don't think anybody pissed me off. Holy shit, I think I actually had a good day. Weird. I have an uneasy feeling I'm going to pay for this unexpected good fortune...

Hey, dude, you're getting a cell!

It snowed some more today. Shit. I guess I wont be riding my mountain bike with its new parts on Monday. I started putting it together today, but the rear derailler pulleys were in pretty rough shape so I ran to MEC to pick up some new ones, among other things. They only had pulleys for 7 speed chains and I'm putting together a 9 speed drivetrain. [9 speed chains are thinner than 7 speed chains] So I ride over to the bike shop one block over to get some there. The guy there doesn't even ask me what speed the drivetrain is and he comes out with the same pulleys as the ones at MEC. Not only that, but they want $6.00 each, whereas MEC was only asking $2.00 a pair. Yikes! So I went back to MEC and bought a pair from there. Hopefully they'll work ok until I can get some proper ones.



I also picked up a new u-lock for $15.00, my old one was driving me crazy. The key would get stuck halfway through unlocking and I would have to reef on it to get it to turn. Pain in the ass. Got a couple pairs of brake pads as well, although I might not need them both as I ordered a disk brake for the front. I should get it sometime this week. I hope. Its a Avid 203mm mech disk brake. Woohoo! Should be good. I just hope it comes with the correct mounting adapter for my forks. [RockShox T2]

It was so busy today, I never got to go for lunch. Now that's busy! My feet are sore. I got some food from Wendy's on the way home. Now I need a stiff drink. Some asshole opened his truck door right in front of me today. I managed to swerve out his way and gave him a "you fucking idiot!" as I rode by. Friday always seems to bring out the low-IQ mouth-breathers, driving their Jeep Cherokees, chatting on the phone, looking one way & driving the other way, opening their fucking doors right in front of you. And earlier in the day, some dick decided to make an unsignaled left turn in the middle of the intersection from the far lane, nearly running over the bike commuter riding in front of me. Fridays are the worst.

And then there's the people who haven't paid their bill for a long time. [3 months] Now I'm a patient guy, but this is getting ridiculous. I was going to cut them off on Monday, but I know they do a cheque run in the middle of the month so I might just wait till then. This is really pissing me off, I'm a one-man operation so if people don't pay their bills, it can really throw out my financial planning. And its just plain ignorant. I try to be patient and cut people some slack, but obviously, some people take this as an invitation to be dicks. Well its not. And I've just about reached the end of my rope in this matter.

Anyway, its the weekend, time to relax. And work on my bike and shit. Oh yeah, and drink. A lot.

It snowed a lot last night. When I arrived downtown, I hit an ice patch and suddenly there was no bike under me. The pavement reached up and smacked me in the knee. Now I have an owie.

And my bike was running like the POS that it is. The drivetrain is totally shot. So when I put the least bit of torque to the pedals, the chain skips badly, when it doesn't fly right off the chainring. Fucker. I have the parts to replace the drivetrain, but I don't want to do it till the weekend. Yes, I am lazy. So I will probably use my road bike tomorrow. Too bad the brakes squeal like banshees.

And if all that wasn't bad enough, my Blackberry stopped working for the last few hours of the day. Luckily, it was slow at the end of the day so I didn't really miss anything.

It was really muddy today, too. I got totally coated in this corrosive mud/salt concoction. Its eating the skin off my ass. Ow.

This Friday, 20/20 is airing a special two hour show on Michael Jackson.

Apparently he speaks of sharing his bed with children during sleep-overs, insisting its perfectly natural and wonderful and shit. And how, when his son [daughter?] was born, he grabbed the baby, placenta and all, and raced home with him/her. Yes, Mikey, we're laughing at you, not with you.

Watching Joe Millionaire tonight, Joe said "Me and Sarah have really found a bond between us". Funny, I wonder if he chose those words on his own, or if he was coached by the producers who most likely know of her past and thought it would make a good 'in joke'.

Found an interesting account of being bit by a Poecilitheria species and its after effects. [via SpiderTalk Forum] Does not sound particularily pleasant. I had a Poecilitheria ornata once, but would never think of actually handling it.

I made a button for my MT New Entry screen to insert special characters via a pop-up window. Let's see if it works, shall we?

¢ £ © ® « » ² ³ ° · < > ~ ∴ ¶ † ¹

Yep it works! Woohoo! I thought the angle brackets might not work as advertised, but it seems fine. Now I just need to add more chars.

I am just so depressed. CNN.com - Columbia shuttle breaks up over Texas - Feb. 1, 2003