So a bunch of us went out into the desert to shoot things…among which were two pumpkins.  Witness the carnage, and enjoy the music.

So last night Sarah and I get back to my place after going to the gym, and she notices a “frog” by the door…I come back out to see, and sure enough, there’s a frog-like entity on the rocks by the door. I captured the thing in one of the old breeder containers that we used when breeding mice for Xande, and transferred it to a larger colony cage we had lying around for mice. Anyway, we get some rocks, and some water and put it in the colony cage, and dump Frogger (that’s what her name is now, Frogger…unoriginal as fuck, but whatever, fuck you) in the thing. She swims around all happy and shit, fun to watch, she dances occasionally…whatever.

It got to the point where we were wondering if she was poisonous, since she has these bright ass green markings all over her (kind of like one of those toxic Amazon frogs) so we went to the internet to classify her into a species. Turns out she’s a Sonoran Green Toad. Click the link for more info.

Interesting tidbit, these things are in fact, TOXIC. They do secrete a toxin when handled, and these are apparently the same frogs you can lick to get loaded. I’m not sure what to do with that little factoid, but I need a small Cambodian child for drug trials.

At least it used to be called that…I think it’s google accounts for domains now or something like that…anyway…

I just set it up to handle ethergeek.com’s mail after having so much trouble with my host’s email (too much intermittent “-ERR Maildir invalid (no ‘cur’ directory)” errors) so I finally just said fuck them and set up Google mail for domains.

Anyway, setup was a little tricky, they asked me a few questions, then made me upload a file to my server to verify that I owned the domain, then made me wait 24 hours while they “verified my MX record” (I don’t know why that takes more than a few hours, the TTL on those records is not *that* long), but finally it works. To be honest, the logging into my account should be easier; I should be able to just go to www.gmail.com and enter my username at ethergeek.com and my password, and the system should just know to take me to my mailbox, but instead I have to log in via a different google site with a long annoying name or add a CNAME record (my cPanel host may have a problem doing this, as most hosts that use cPanel have nobody on staff that understands how to manually configure bind) that will point something like mail.ethergeek.com somewhere. I may abuse a redirect to get this to work ^_^.

As for the general experience, it’s just like using gmail, I can set up catch-all addresses for my domain, and they gave me up to 100 accounts with 2 GB of storage apiece. And of course I get the gmail spam filter (thank GOD, since those assholes over at freewareppc posted my email address *in the clear* for months so every spam harvester in the world has it now) to clean up my inbox.

It also comes with other services, like calendar, docs and spreadsheets, talk (which I’m gonna play with later), and google webs…fun toys I haven’t gotten to try out yet, OH…and a /ig for domain accounts.

Best of all, it’s free. Can’t beat that. All in all it kicks the shit out of the basic as fuck mail support you get with cPanel hosting.

…or whatever it’s called. It’s a Firefox extension that keeps your bookmarks, passwords, cookies, history, and session information synchronized between multiple computers. It even encrypts the data, so that (according to google) even they can’t read it. I’d want this independently verified before I stored my passwords or cookies on there, but for now, the bookmarks sync feature is awesome. If you’re using something like Chipmark (like I was) this will blow your mind. Since it’s not a live storage system, when it can’t reach google, your browser still works.

Anyway, check it out. A google search will yield the firefox extension.

So the last few days have been rain-like-hell-days, so I took some pics of the “river” bedind my office. Click the thumbnails for larger versions.

These were from the 27th:

This one was from today when I got to work this morning: