Well pseudo scientific anyway. I leaned a ruler up against a cup of iced tea while Frankie was sitting in the laboratory (aka: on the coffee table). But it does bring some scale into the picture. I’m not sure he’s the “Worlds Tallest Cat” but he is the Yao Ming of cats.

Back in my petsmart days when I was crazy about pets I thought a lot about exotic animals. I went as far as buying a semi-exotic one… the dreaded Chinchilla. What I learned from that chinchilla is that there’s a reason that most people don’t own them. They’re cute and fluffy and make great pets for other people, but they’re pains in the ass. They chew up anything within 2 feet of the cage and can somehow escape when one bar of their cage is welded a sixteenth of an inch off. But they’re fluffy, so that’s supposed to make up for it all.

I still love guinea pigs and will recommend them to any family looking to get a pet for the kids. They’re like the fish of rodents. If you get a big enough cage and lots of food they’re really easy to take care of. When I had them I was looking for the next cool pet and I found out that in South America there are guinea pig like rodents that can be 3 feet tall and weigh over 100 lbs. It seems to me that you would pretty much have to turn your house into a giant cage to keep them as pets. On top of that I’d never seen them outside of a zoo. Until now!

I just found an article about a couple that keeps one in Texas. They even have a blog dedicated to it and plenty of great pictures. They seem like pretty awesome people and the pet “Caplin Rous” seems well behaved and freindly. If I ever get a house with a fenced in yard I’ll have to have this discussion with Laurel and keeping the worlds largest rodent as a pet.

article – Life with a 100lb rodent
Capybara Madness

The Metro crash yesterday was really bad, but I don’t know any other way to help than to make some art.

I like the bottom one best, but they all have something going for them.

I’m sure we’re going to see some flood of “Never Forget” type posts and stickers and patches and graphics because of the Metro rail crash yesterday. But I would just like to be honest, there are thousands of people who are going to try really hard to forget that it ever happened.

They’re called “People who ride the Metro every day”.

The victims family and friends will never forget them, but me, a total stranger… will just hope that it never happens to me. I feel for them, but I can’t be thinking about crashing into a parked train at 50mph when I take the Metro twice a day 5 days a week… and I’m sleeping most of the time.

Sorry about all the death.

Mark

My photo of the Artomatic Logo that I mowed into the lawn made the front page of blog.artomatic.org , awesome. I’m glad people appreciate it.

link

later!

I made a blog for Wade the other day (that I’m pretty sure he’ll never use) and I needed a website for Laurel’s movie so I made another one for her. This got me thinking about the reasons I have so many domains…

Cue flashback.

It all originally started way back in 2002 with MarkSchumaker.com which after about 2 years I forgot to reapply for and it was snatched by a domain squatter. (Fuck you Kenyatech) So I needed a new domain, another Schumaker (Kevin Schumacher, no relation) already owned Schubox.com so because I couldn’t come up with anything better I thought theSchubox.com seemed reasonable. In hindsight I probably shouldn’t have registered a name so similar to someone who kind of does the exact same thing as I do… probably confusing… So after about a year the domain squatter realized that he should have taken my offer of $35 for the domain and gave it up. So I promptly bought it back, because any respectable nerd should own his own name. A few months later I wanted to switch hosts to one that offered more services. Dreamhost.com was having a $9.99 sale for one year of hosting and a free domain. Not wanting to waste the chance to own another piece of the web, I decided to register Swalrus.org. So now I have 3 domains… I decide that MarkSchumaker.com will be my professional site, TheSchubox.com will be my art portfolio, and Swalrus.org will be anything else. Which all made sense for about 3 months until I realized that I was putting the same keywords in all three sites and therefore they would all come up if you searched for my name on google.

So it’s not a prefect system.

Now that I’m looking at it swalrus.org is kind of useless, I could have all these domains under theschubox, but I guess it’ll be nice to have a seperate domain if the network idea ever takes off. Basically I’m paying $10 extra per year to be able to tell people that I own Swalrus.org! On the plus side it is such a weird word that I’m now the top result on Google for it. This all worked for hulu, google, boingboing, most other web2.0 sites so I guess I’m in good company.

So now, because of all this… I’ve found the old original version of the Swalrus Conservation site and put it back under the top level domain. I think it makes more sense to have to top domain point to all the sub domains… and it’s still funny. Now it will act as a distribution point for the Swalrus Network.

Which as of now officially contains…

Thoughts.swalrus.org – This blog
Mark5four0.swalrus.org – My art dump
WadeChi.swalrus.org – Wade Chi Photography
USAFuels.swalrus.org – Laurel’s Documentary
TheTable.swalrus.org – Site for the Beerpong Table
CRS.swalrus.org – The Charlitron

If I ever get more people to join up I’ll probably remove the last two because they kind of suck.