I went to my new house today to meet an exterminator who was going to take care of some ants that have taken up residence under the house. 

While I was walking around the house, I noticed a spider in a bush on one side of the house.  I asked the exterminator, whom I suppose is an expert in these things, if he could identify it and he said that he didn’t know the real name of it, but locally they call them banana spiders.  He added that it would grow about three or four times bigger and indicated that it would be about as big as his hand.  He said that it was relatively harmless to humans, and they are good to have around to catch mosquitoes.

The picture I have here was taken with my cell phone and it is not very clear at all.  Apparently, this one is a baby.  It is only about an inch and a half across.  If this one survives and is still around when we move in, I’ll try to get a better picture.  In the meantime, if you are interested, here is a very good picture of a banana spider that I found and a little bit of information about them.

Link: photo
Link: information

We closed the deal on our house today.  As of 1:30pm EDT we are home owners in Raleigh, NC.

We move in on July 10th.

.

Deb and I went walking in Prospect Park again this morning and purposely walked by the spot where we encountered a gaggle of geese and an irate swan.  This morning there were a few geese, but we were able to see the entire swan family.

The cygnets are downright adorable.  Everybody seemed to be in a much better mood this morning and it made for a peaceful encounter.

Following are some pictures and a video.

Link: photo set on Flickr

While Deb and I were walking in Prospect park this morning, we came upon a gaggle of geese that themselves stumbled upon an irate swan defending his nest.

The geese seemed to be on the move.  There were mostly goslings in the group with a few adults.  My guess is that they had gone for a walk to forage and were heading back to the lake.  Unfortunately, they tried to enter the lake a few feet from where a pair of nesting swans were protecting their nest.  Some of the other passers by said that they had seen cygnets in the nest earlier, but when we were there one swan was completely covering the nest and the other was on the shore posturing. 

The geese seemed determined to get back to the lake until the swan had enough and started charging.  What followed was almost comical.  The goslings scattered while the adults lagged behind to distract the swan.  Some of the goslings walked right up to me and seemed determined to follow me to safety.  I didn’t know where to lead them, but I was able to get a few good up close pictures with my cell phone.

I also got some video of the swan charging around.  In the very back of the video there is a white spot.  It can’t be seen clearly, but that is the other swan sitting on the nest.

The Gaggle vs The Swan

Link: Photo set on Flickr

I had the pleasure of seeing The Decemberists at Radio City last night and I was blown away.

I should start by saying that on more than one occasion someone has mentioned The Decemberists to me.  Actually not just someone, but people I know and respect.  I can’t remember exactly who it was, but I know I’ve had this low level awareness that a band called The Decemberists was out there and that I wanted to see them or at least download some songs and give them a listen. So when my friend Brian asked me if I wanted to go, I jumped at the chance.

Now, again I feel the need to be fair.  I haven’t seen Brian in about 15 years.  Brian and I were very close in college.  We’d been to each other’s houses and the other’s parents.  At one point I drove 4 hours to D.C. just to have dinner with him.  We lived together for a while after graduation.  Brian married another one of my close friends.  It’s hard to believe, but somehow we lost touch and time passed.  It happens.  Luckily, Facebook got us back in touch.  So, after 15 years, Brian could have asked me if I wanted to go watch paint dry or grass grow and I would have said yes.  The fact that I would get to see this band of which I was vaguely aware was just a bonus.

More...

One of the great things about BlogEngine.Net is how easy it is to create widgets or plug-ins for it.

I’ve created a widget that displays the stats for a user at Run.GPS.

There are two files that go into a widget: the edit.ascx and the widget.ascx.  Both files go in a folder named for the widget.  That folder goes in the widgets folder off of the web project root.

The edit.ascx holds the code that is used to edit the settings for the widget.  The widget.ascx holds the code for the widget itself.

Run.GPS allows users to build a badge that can be embedded in a web page or blog.  The badge is configured with a series of dropdowns which change a box with HTML code at the bottom of the page.  The code is surrounded in an iframe tag. The HTML can be copied and pasted into any web page to embed the badge.

For the widget to work, it should have the same settings and generate the same HTML code in an iframe tag.  A quick survey of the various settings shows that the dropdowns directly change most of the values in the HTML code.  For example, changing the “Units” dropdown to “Metric” changes to code to include “&units=Metric” and changing the “Map Type” dropdown to “NORMAL” changes the code to include “&mapType=NORMAL”.

The only tricky part about converting the settings to HTML code is with the width and height attributes in the HTML code.  For each badge type, there are a different set of dimensions.  Rather than spend too much time on this, I just hard coded the dimensions.