Lightning storm around the M/V Steve Irwin, originally uploaded by echeng.

A fierce lightning storm suddenly materializes and blows by the M/V
Steve Irwin. Lightning strikes are coming down every 2-3 seconds.

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I gave Google Sync’s new contact sync feature a try a week ago, which was a big mistake. I’ve been using their calendar sync from Blackberry to Google for a months now without incident (I use Busy Sync to sync iCal with Google so local changes propagate to the Blackberry through two syncs), but the contact sync feature did terrible things. Be sure to back up if you are going to give it a try!

I’m on Mac OS X 10.5.5, and am using Address Book and Mobile Me. Here’s what happened:

1. Dupes. All entries that were flagged as companies were duplicated as normal entries.
2. Random duplicate entries
3. Multiple “no name” entries
4. Weirdly named, new entries
5. A different number of contacts each time I checked (it was creating new ones with each sync)
6. Second computer reports dozens of entries modified even when I make no changes
7. Lost email addresses for dozens of contacts

FAIL.

Daryl Hannah, Eric Cheng and Captain Paul Watson

December 3, 2008 Daryl Hannah, Eric Cheng, and Captain Paul Watson at a press event in Brisbane.

PHOTO: JONNY VASIC 081203_SSCS_EC_0175465

Daryl Hannah in front of the Steve Irwin

Daryl is joining part of Sea Shepherd’s 2008-2009 campaign to stop whaling in Antarctica.

Hey guys! I’m in Brisbane now, and my assistant’s Canon 1D/1Ds Mk II charger has burned out. We are leaving port on Wednesday. Does anyone have a used charger to sell us? We’d love to order one, but we’re afraid that we don’t have time for a delivery.

Or, we can go into town and buy one from a camera store (have recommendations for who to call?).

Please let me know via email if you can help! Thank you. :)

I’ll get your message if you send one on Tuesday (in Australia) at: http://echeng.com/contact/

For some reason, the ViewLevel plugin for Wordpress has started showing lock icons on all posts after I upgraded to WP 2.6.5 from 2.6.1, so I’ve removed the icon altogether from post titles. Hope to fix this when I return.

Until then, please be sure you are logged in to read the latest updates (if you have an account, that is). :)

I’ve seen three disks fail here on the ship in the past two days; it’s terrifying to think about computer failure during such a long time out at sea.

About 15 minutes ago, I had a drive failure scare. My Mac froze suddenly while I was working in Aperture, and I had to force a hard reboot. When it started up again, I got the dreaded flashing question mark folder, and no amount of restarting the machine allowed for a successful boot. Luckily, I travel with DiskWarrior 4 on a USB stick[^1], and it managed to rebuild the volume successfully. I was so relieved.

[^1] I don’t have an optical drive in my notebook anymore, so I transferred my copy of DiskWarrior onto a USB flash drive.

What if I hadn’t had a copy of DiskWarrior handy? I might have been seriously screwed.

In my computer bag, I travel with the following things:

1. DiskWarrior on USB flash drive
2. Mac OS 10.5 Leopard installer on USB flash drive
3. Full, bootable backup on external drive (encrypted)
4. Useful software installers on an external drive
5. Numerous external drives
6. Numerous USB flash drives

If you are a frequent traveler and don’t travel with DiskWarrior, an operating system installer disc, and an external drive to which you backup frequently, you are asking for trouble!

Antarctica mind map packing list, originally uploaded by echeng.

I spent hours yesterday packing up for my upcoming trip to Antarctica, and have managed to cram just about everything into two 50lb bags (the new international standard for us North Americans), plus a heavy camera backpack (the Gura Gear Kiboko bag) and a ThinkTank Urban Disguise 60 as carry-ons. I used a mind-map to plan for the trip, and then converted it to an OPML outline document, which I printed out for reference during packing.

Because I will be going directly to Indonesia after Antarctica, creating a packing list proved to be a little tricky. Instead of trying to lug a third 50lb bag with me to the Southern Ocean before ending up in Indo, I sent my underwater camera to Hawaii (with a friend) to be delivered to another friend, who will meet me in Manado with the bag in a few months.

I’m also testing out journal posting via Flickr e-mail, which will allow me to post a single image plus commentary when I am on the road. I’m sending this from my satellite phone email system (although I’m connected through traditional internet at the moment). The real (and ridiculously slow) test will have to happen tomorrow…

A year ago, I wrote an entry wherein I recommended the Fuji FinePix F30 or F31d as my compact digital camera of choice. I later updated that entry to include a plug for the FinePix J10 — a $115 point & shoot camera.

So why, then, did I recently acquire a Canon G10? (read more »)

“Needle in a Haystack,” the first episode of season 1 of Whale Wars, is available as a free download on iTunes.

I’m a huge proponent of SpinVox, a service that converts voicemails to text. Messages are delivered via SMS and/or e-mail.

Currently, I’ve got two mobile numbers and one landline. All three forward busy and unanswered calls to my voicemail number at SpinVox, which means that I can “listen” to my voicemails wherever I am, without making a call. When I’m in areas without GPRS, I set SpinVox to use SMS to deliver messages, but normally, I receive them only as email. My Blackberry’s incoming mail filter marks messages from SpinVox as being “Level 1″ in priority, which highlights those messages in red and tells the phone to notify me by vibrating and beeping.

When I’m in the country, I still call in to listen to more interesting voicemails. After all, it is still nice to hear someone’s voice on the other end. SpinVox makes message retrieval easy by providing a short code for each message — you just call up, type in the code, and your message is read back to you. It also functions in the traditional manner, with queued messages played back in reverse chronological order.

SpinVox also offers a whole bunch of services similar to those that Jott provides, but I haven’t tried any of them out. It’s priced a bit high, but so is making voicemail calls from out of the country.

I think that if I only traveled to areas with good data infrastructure, I’d stick with GrandCentral, which features voicemail played through a web interface. But for me, text is better than audio.

For years now, I’ve had a tough decision to make each night I sleep on boats: do I put earplugs in and risk not waking up in the morning, or do I forgo them and risk a sleepless night? I’m totally fine sleeping to the sound of a generator running, but the occasional lapping of a wave against the hull combined with the rumbling symphony of middle-aged men snoring? That is just a nightmare.

Tonight, I discovered that vibrating watches exist. Surprisingly, I couldn’t find any exhaustive vibrating watch guides out there, but I did some research and settled on Casio Pathfinder hunting and fishing watches. They are cheap (around $30 street), and people seem to really like them. They don’t look bad, either — pretty much the sort of watch I’d wear out on expedition. Might as well give one a try…

Livia Sohn warms up

Livia Sohn came over today to run through Britten Violin Concerto (with Dmitry Cogan on the piano), and we invited a few people to listen. (read more »)

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Gura Gear, logo detail

Andy Biggs shipped me a Gura Gear Kiboko bag to take with me to Antarctica and Indonesia, and it arrived today! When I took it out, my first thought was — this is a solid bag. In fact, I even unzipped the two pockets to look for shipping padding, but it was just the structure of the bag that I was feeling. (read more »)

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Yap stamp detail

I have been stressed out for the past few weeks because I shipped my Seacam underwater housing (with ports, arms, strobes, chargers, and more) back from Yap, Micronesia rather than haul it home via Dave and Kim’s wedding in New York . After a month and a half, it had still not arrived. I insured the package, but my receipt from the Yap post office simply said, “Stamps: $140,” and this did not inspire confidence in the package’s traceability. (read more »)

(From Sea Shepherd website) At long last, the Sea Shepherd 2007/2008 campaign to defend whales at the bottom of the world will hit the air waves tonight on Animal Planet across all the fifty U.S. States at 9:00P.M. It will air in Canada on Sunday, November 9th at 8:00 P.M. (read more »)

Adam Lau has a small set of election evening photos from San Francisco. Check them out, and pay homage to the 16-35 lens that was sacrificed at the end of the evening (poor guy).

I was hanging out with a friend the other day (one I don’t know very well), and she asked, “so what were you doing when you were living in New York?”

I answered, succinctly, “I was writing options trading software.”

She replied, “Oh. That doesn’t interest me at all.”

Silence.

You can imagine that I wasn’t as excited for additional dialog.

Since I don’t have TV, I streamed election coverage on MSNBC after having dinner in the Castro during the actual announcement of Obama’s win — the streets went wild!. Animal Planet is doing a bit advertising push for Whale Wars; MSNBC played the trailer 4-5 times during the course of my 30 minutes of watching speeches.

I’ve been getting emails from acquaintances who live abroad, and there seems to be near universal joy outside of the U.S.; likewise, all of my close friends are ecstatic at the prospect of change. The only downer is that more than 50% of voting Californians seem to be bigots. It will be really disappointing if Prop. 8 passes. I thought we lived in a little oasis here, but it appears that the oasis only encompasses the coast.

When we were walking to the car after dinner, a homeless man shuffled by with a shopping cart, muttering, “I don’t care about any of this shit. I don’t care.” Yeah, I suppose the ramifications of an Obama victory might not matter so much compared to finding food and a place to sleep.