I awoke in darkness again, only this time it was noon by the time I crawled out of bed. The only thing good about this schedule is that I won’t have to adjust to PDT when I return to San Francisco. :) After hanging out with Adam Nash in the gym for awhile, I drove to Baltimore to visit Jenny, who just started rotations as a medical student at Johns Hopkins. She took me on a short tour of the hospital, and we spent the rest of the late afternoon wandering around the inner harbor. It’s strange: I’ve not spent much time in this area of the East Coast, but you can really see why so many people view racial issues as being black or white. Ethnic diversity is very polarized here. (read more »)

Schrep‘s getting married on Sunday! I left my house at 5pm yesterday to catch a red-eye to Washington Dulles from Oakland. It was brutal. :( At 8am this morning, I rolled bleary-eyed into our hotel in my fancy rented Camry, and shortly after, succumbed to fatigue and passed out on the bed for three hours. I was jolted awake at some point in the day by a phone call from Carolyn. It’s funny how hotel rooms can be like casinos, completely masking the time of day with their opaque curtains.

We spent the day being tourists, which was a lot of fun. There is SO much to see here, and I definitely need to come back here sometime to be able to take it all in properly. (read more »)

Unfortunately, the actions of a few little brats have necessitated the removal of commenting support on this section of my site. Sorry, guys. :( I rather enjoyed the limited community around here. The existence of people so cowardly that they enjoy anonymous attacks — bearing no accountability for their own actions — saddens me, but at least I have the satisfaction of knowing that they will remain respected only by their own ilk, and will almost certainly be unable to get anywhere in life without changing their ways. What comes around, goes around.

I’m selling off the filters I used to do my initial digital infrared experiments, because I no longer have any of the cameras that I was using them. Anyway, one of the filters happens to fit on the front of one lens I have, so I slapped it on to see how the Canon D60 fares in that spectrum. The answer? Not so well. I exposed at f4.5, ISO100 for 218 seconds with a #87 filter (see a wavelength/transmission table for the #87 filter). 218 seconds! When I used to shoot with the Coolpix 950, I was getting shutter speeds of 1/15 and 1/30 sec, at ISO400. I may pick up a #89B filter to play some more. :) (read more »)

You HAVE to read this article about a diver/photographer named Scott Cassell, who goes looking for giant squid. It’s amazing. An excerpt:

For most people, the word “squid” probably conjures images of deep-fried appetizers, not flesh-eating carnivores. But the truth is, Humboldt squid have approximately 1,200 sucker discs, each one lined with 20 to 26 needle-sharp teeth. This allows the Humboldt to attack its prey with more than 24,000 teeth at once. And nestled in its bed of eight muscular arms and two feeding tentacles is a disproportionately large, knife-edged beak similar to a parrot’s. But the Humboldt is much larger than a parrot: they have been found as large as 14 feet in length and weighing more than 700 pounds.

In addition to the Humboldt’s enormity and impressive array of weapons, this magnificent mollusk possesses a legendary ferocity. The local Mexican fishermen call it Rojo Diablo, or Red Demon. When I arrived in Mexico for the dive, several fishermen told tales of how people had experienced violent deaths after falling in the water with these red demons: “…they would be pulled down and devoured in moments.”

Emile just wrote me to let me know that E.piphany is using an OLD quote from me on their careers page. What they don’t mention is that the company was tiny then, and that the fish tank leaked one day, resulting in its expedited removal from the office. I guess a few people still have tanks in their cubes/offices, including Roger. Having a fish tank at work was a pain in the ass. It tied me to the office so effectively that I’d sometimes go in to work just to make sure it was running properly.

[BSD Unix] — and its Darwin offspring — extensively use what are called “daemons” (which is how Pagans write “demon” — they are notoriously poor spellers: magick, vampyre, etc.) which is a program that hides in the background, doing things without the user’s notice. If you are using a new Macintosh running OS X then you probably have these “daemons” on your computer, hardly something a good Christian would want! This clearly illustrates that not only is Macintosh based on Darwinism, but Darwinism is based on Satanism….

According to one of our readers, the new MacOS X contains another Satanic holdover from the “BSD Unix” OS mentioned above; to open up certain locked files one has to run a program much like the DOS prompt in Microsoft Windows and type in a secret code: “chmod 666″. What other horrors lurk in this thing?

Speaking of things that good Christians shouldn’t do, I was forwarded a link of a female golfer and her trophy. It’s funny, too. :)

It’s been a hectic few days. I’ve been off interviewing with various companies, and have started a fast-paced project that will keep me pretty busy for the next week until I leave for Schrep‘s wedding next weekend. Judy Fong and Jamie Knox were in town (independently), and it was nice to have a chance to hang out with them. Jamie will be relocating to the Bay Area at the end of this calendar year, which is very cool. (read more »)

I just returned from the third COBA meeting, where I got to blather about underwater digital photography with Canon SLRs for awhile. People seemed to like the presentation, and Pictopia’s lightjet prints of some of the photos I shot were stunning — much, much better than my inkjet’s output (duh!). I think I’m going to clean them up a bit and make prints available for sale.

I also finally met DaveP, who posts comments here every once in awhile. I was eating at Gombei with Amabelle, Bill and Dave, and a guy walked up and said, “Hey, Eric. I don’t want to freak you out or anything…” (or something like that). Anyway, so it was nice to meet him. :)

Latest update on organized action against A&F:

A protest rally will take place tomorrow (Thursday) at 5pm, in front of the A&F store in San Francisco., Powell & Market Streets.

This is being organized along with students from Berkeley and Stanford. This is a full-fledged protest with bullhorns, signs, etc. If you can meet ahead of time, show up at the Chinatown Community Development Center at 1525 Grant Street earlier in the day to help make signs. For info, call (415) 984-1477

Updates:

- SF Chronicle Front Page: ABERCROMBIE & GLITCH – Asian Americans rip retailer for stereotypes on T-shirts

- SF Gate: Abercrombie & Fitch pulls Asian caricature T-shirts – “We’re very, very, very sorry,” Carney said. “It’s never been our intention to offend anyone.”

- Reuters Business: Abercrombie pulls T-shirts after Asian-American protest – “These graphic T-shirts were designed with the sole purpose of adding humor and levity to our fashion line. Since some customers have been offended by their content, we are pulling these shirts from our stores.”

I went out with Amabelle last night to see Rostropovich play Dvorak’s Cello Concerto (with the San Francisco Symphony). He turned 75 last year, and is definitely showing signs of age, but it was great to finally see him live. I splurged on tickets and ended up sitting in the fourth row, center, which was fantastic; usually, I’m sitting up in the nose-bleed seats to save money. Even though he missed a lot of notes and played out of tune, a lifetime of musical experience shone through.

After he finished playing his encore (the Sarabande from the d minor Bach Suite), he proceeded to kiss about ten orchestra members — each three times. It was very cute. :) (read more »)

Hi guys – for those of you who are trying to get to wetpixel.com, the hosting service is undergoing a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, so the site will be down until the attack subsides.

I’m off to Vegas tonight for a friend‘s bachelor’s party, and I’m (gasp) not going to bring a camera! You cannot imagine the restraint necessary for me to not carry a camera when getting on an airplane. :)

All of my Kona/Maui trip’s photos have been posted, so if you’re bored, you can go check them out. :)