It was HOT in Saratoga. Granted I was stupid enough to be wearing jeans, but it was still ridiculously hot. As you can see, any shade was appreciated by the local ducklings. It’s weird, New York has similar summers to Sydney, but it snows in winter, whereas Sydney rarely gets below 5 degrees Celsius.

There’s something about ducklings, they’re just nauseatingly cute. So these ones are from my America trip, in the little town of Saratoga in upstate New York. It’s a beautiful town, with a great Indian restaurant.

This guy was sitting right outside my mother’s place in Noosa, Queensland one night. He’s so wonderfully fat, and those perfect martian invader fingerpads – daww.

It’s kinda like wild kingdom there sometimes. One time, I was sitting in the loungeroom working on my computer, and I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye. Going over to investigate there was a baby Blue-Tongue lizard all of 3″ long, which seemed to have walked almost all the way through the house. As soon as he saw me, he raced with his stubby little legs as fast as he could. That would have been a great plan, except for the polished tile floor. He basically sat there, paddling furiously and going nowhere. So I put him outside, after recovering from fits of laughter.

How adorable is that? When I was in America, a friend and I were walking through an orchard (ok we were sortof lost having wandered into the forest) and the apple trees were being irrigated with big rotary sprays – think lawn sprinklers, but huge. Anway as we’re walking down the dirt road I notice something almost underfoot. Looking down I thought “ooh lizard” until the lack of legs became apparent. That was right about when it started striking my boot. Now I know snakes can stretch and unhinge their jaws, but that was perhaps a tad over-ambitious.

UPDATE: according to Dr Pete Ducey of the State University of New York at Cortland, it’s a northern water snake, Nerodia sipedon.

Those big black profile stripes behind the eyes aren’t just great camouflage, EWDs communicate or make territorial displays by holding their heads up and bobbing them up and down rapidly. It’s hilarious to watch.

I was about 3 metres (10 feet) away from this guy when shooting this. You know, there’s a reason wildlife photographers use those big fuckoff EOS soulstealing lenses. They do like to watch you when you approach them, keeping an eye pointed in your direction. There’s a reason these are all profile shots.

Eastern Water Dragons are one of the more kick-ass reptiles in the Sydney area. Growing up to almost a metre long, and with mouths full of needle sharp teeth, they’re everything a predatory lizard should be. You find them in the middle of suburbia, really anywhere that has water and some bushland will be filled with them.

Geckos who can hang upside down on surfaces. It’s rally amazing how they do this, microscopic hairs that exploit molecular attraction, sort of like atomic velcro.

One of the funny things about Queensland is the suburban wildlife. At noosa for example, you have scrub turkeys (imagine a normal turkey, basically a wild version) wandering around the main street in the mornings. The other thing is geckos. Little, tiny, semi-translucent geckos.

Well, here we are with the new version of golgotha.com.au. All database driven, and running in wordpress. This was done as a proof of concept – that I could use a readily available free platform like WP to provide the back end engine and all the post-design editing functions.

While I’m not going all out to do web design as a profession now, on occasion if an interesting project comes along, I’d like to be able to concentrate on the design, and base it on an engine that allows the client to manage the content themselves once my work is done (so I’m not doing 1 paragraph edits for ever afterwards).

It’s been an interesting journey getting this working – interesting in the Chinese sense. The biggest obstacle has been due to a rather nasty rendering bug in Apple’s WebKit rendering engine, which is the basis of the Safari, OmniWeb and iCab browsers. But, eventually I found a workaround, and now all is working well. If you do encounter any problems, please contact me and let me know.