I’m going to be out for awhile, so there may or may not be updates for the next month. But if you need to reach me before June 22, I might be accessible through e-mail.

Or, you can write me snail mail at the coolest address EVER:

Eric Cheng
Sharklab
Bimini Bahamas

Be sure to include international postage. No unidentifiable white powder, please. :) (Update: I hear that mail sent to that address “may” get here eventually, so it’s probably not a good idea to try. Too bad! :)

Also, I apologize if you have written me e-mail and I have not responded. My inbox is up to 221 messages now, and I’m sure it will be unmanageably worse when I return. Sometimes I wish I could just turn it off (except for the nice, long “real letters in the form of e-mail” that I’ve been receiving from a few of you. :).

I’ve just been informed that there will be a little spread of my work in the July issue of PDN Magazine (it’s unclear whether it will also appear on the web site). Things happen so fast sometimes! Thanks to photographer David Katz, who told me that he was going to “talk to some editors” about me. :)

I’m also looking forward to future issues of Dive Magazine, one of which will feature a photo of mine (with a short interview).

For you Mac people:

Adam Tow and Alex King, two friends of mine (I think they met through me, but I can’t remember :), have announced a new product called Read it to Meâ„¢! Read it to Me creates a playlist of MP3 files in iTunes from your unread items in NetNewsWire using Apple’s Text-to-Speech that you can sync to your iPod.

[Adam's announcement] [Alex's announcement]

Tender chicken breast scallopini glazed in a lemon herb butter sauce with accents of herbs, sherry and roasted garlic. Accompanied by Parmesan cheese rice with hand-picked broccoli and red bell peppers.

A selection from a fancy menu?

nope.

It’s what is written on a Lean Cuisine® Cafe Classics meal with 7g fat and 270 calories. They’re lucky I don’t run marketing for them because I would have just written on the packaging:

Last resort food.

I hate this time of day. It’s too bright for lights to be effective inside, and yet it’s too dark to work without them.

Why do I have 25 coffee mugs? I don’t even drink coffee, except socially (heh). I only have 8 “normal” cups now because my mother and friends have broken a few of them in the last year or so (I insist on buying glasses with thin walls, for some reason. I think I may have to switch to plastic. :). I’d much rather have 25 normal cups and 8 coffee mugs. Anyone want to trade? :)

Actually, I think I will have to keep 10 mugs. Among the keepers: 3 Epiphany mugs, 4 E.piphany mugs (various phases of the company. note the ever-important ‘.’), 1 Trilogy mug, 1 FuckedCompany.com mug, and 1 Stanford mug.

—–Original Message—–
From: cute richard [mailto:foo@bar.com]
Sent: Monday, May 26, 2003 8:38 AM
To: Eric Cheng
Subject: mail order

Dear Sir/Madam,
I want to buy your product by email,and delivered/ship over seas in Indonesia. I want to pay by credit card,please email me with your special price and thanks a lot.

This is my email order :

1.Nikon D1X with Standart Lenses
-Quantity : 1
Please email me soon,ok and thanks a lot.

—–Public Reply—–
From: Eric Cheng
Sent: never
To: cute richard
Subject: re: mail order

For some reason, I get online orders for camera equipment and/or underwater housings every month or so. Nowhere on echeng.com or on wetpixel.com do I claim that I sell anything!

Please stop “placing” hardware orders through me.

Now, if you want a print of a photo you see on my site, that’s something altogether different. :)

Ahhh… Mac people. Gotta love them for their beautiful hardware.

The Griffin iTrip is going to make my gen 1(.5) iPod a few times more useful. I hate cassette adapters for car use. And besides, my car’s cassette player is busted. :)

Sorry for the crappy product photo. Mac people use white backgrounds with their white products. Masking is very hard when they do that. :)

Wendy’s birthday celebration was tonight, featuring dessert and champagne at their Oakland pad. Lilli brought fabulous homemade cheesecakes, Char whipped up chocolate fondue, and Rebecca baked an amazing chocolate cake.

And so we ate; the desserts were really good. My exceeding high alcohol tolerance led me to a nice buzz after only a few drops of champagne. We watched the BBC Blue Planet DVDs while socializing, and they were really the perfect thing to have in the background. So many bizarre things going on in the marine world. :) A nice mix of people attended: Berkeley geography grad students, a sprinkling of Stanford and Harvard folk from Wendy’s past, and a few others. It was good to finally met Sarah Thomas (even though we didn’t get to talk much), who was Wendy’s sophomore year roommate at Harvard.

Unfortunately, my flash ran out of batteries during the evening… and I was stupid and left my camera set to a flash white-balance. Grrrrr. Many of the photos are obscenely red. Apologies in advance. :) [see some photos]

Microsoft has a concise article about sharpening images captured by digital cameras (the ones that use CMOS or CCD, anyway) on their XP Home Digital Photography site. I agree with the content and use similar workflow myself. They also plug MyPublisher.com, the third party service that Apple uses to print their iPhoto books (from what I’ve heard). More articles are also available.. Most seem rudimentary, but useful and accurate.

I’m a pretty visual person, and I’ve certainly given this site far too many photos that include me and the people around me in them. What I’d really like is to see photos of the readership here! I was grateful for the comments you all left after the last solicitation. This is the logical next step, right?

Unfortunately, I cannot accept image uploads, so you’ll have to post (as a comment) a link to a photo already hosted somewhere. Or, you can send me one and I’ll post them for ya. :)

I’ll add a separate locked entry for you “members” who don’t want to have your mug linked publicly. :)

Tech note: you can use anchor tags in my comments section. For example, to link an image found at http://foo.com/image.jpg, you can write something like this:

     Here is <a href="http://foo.com/image.jpg">a picture of me</a>.

Do not try to inline an image tag. It will not work, unfortunately.

Justin Kestler just sent me this news article:

“SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The California State Senate on Thursday approved a bill that would make it illegal to send unsolicited e-mail advertising and allows people to sue so-called spammers for $500 per unwanted message… The law also requires spammers to stop sending the e-mails after recipients ask them to or face a $1,000 fine…” [the story]

Why do I buy beer when it is clear that no one drinks it when they come over?

Anyone (of my real life friends, I mean. :) want 23 bottles of Corona? Geoff is out of town for the entire summer, and he’s the only one who drinks the stuff at my place.

PLEEEEEASE come take it!! :)

A response from e-mail land:

—–Original Message—–
From: Dad
Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2003 2:09 PM
To: Eric Cheng
Subject: beer

I will help you to get rid of the beer over this weekend.

Dad

I have a HP Laserjet 1200, which is a $399 printer. I’ve owned it for a year and a half. Two weeks ago, it decided to malfunction, and after going through HP Tech Support (which is excellent, by the way), we have concluded that the problem is something I cannot fix myself. Unfortunately, the machine is out of warranty, and it costs $375 to fix. Normally, they would allow me to trade it in for $75 through an upgrade to the new 1300 (the 1200 is “obsolete” already, apparently), but because the 1300 is so new, I can’t even do that.

So I have a $399 paperweight, and I have to buy a new printer. Oh, and I have a brand new $64.99 + tax toner cartridge which was purchased as part of the troubleshooting process. I opened it, which means that I can’t return it. Luckily, it seems that there is a large market on eBay for just about everything. :)

I’m going to get an extended warranty for the next printer I get.

UPDATE: So I have my new LJ1300 now, and it looks the same except that the stupid USB port isn’t hidden behind a cover that is nearly impossible to remove without feeling like you are breaking it. What did they change in this thing? It looks exactly the same. It sounds different, though, and the toner cartridge has two leads that must be wired to a chip or something. Stupid printers.

I did manage to sell my faulty LJ1200 for $50 to a nice Berkeley student. It still prints fine in 2-up mode because the area that doesn’t print becomes the top margin when two pages are printed on each sheet.

boy = me. girl = girl.

girl: bai
boy: r^2 dr
boy: hahahaha
girl: haha
boy: (3 r^2 dr) / 3
boy: ok. i’m really going now.
boy: dy = (3 r^2 dr) / 3
boy: AHHAAHAHAHA
girl: omg
girl: :)
girl: you are forgetting who you’re typing to

and you wonder where my charm comes from. um… perhaps i should go to bed.

I’m listening a recording of the Emerson Quartet play Bartók String Quartets while I work in my study, and I wonder…

   … how do they do it?

   and… why did we even attempt Bartók back in college?

   and… how does David Finckel sound so good?

man. although, i must say that i gained a level of appreciation for the quartets that i would never have attained without having played two of ‘em.

Go check out Eryn’s E3 post, where he talks about some of the exciting upcoming games announced at E3. (I can’t link directly to it because his blog is screwed up, but you can find the entry yourself — it is dated May 19, 2003).

After you read about all the cool games, click on “VIDEO-> The real reason people go to E3″. Here a direct link. :)

Multiple IM clients are a pain in the ass, which is why Trillian Pro is way cool. It works with all of the popular IM protocols, supports background images, reads RSS feeds, and tells me the weather.

<-- See? Here's what an IM window can look like. You can stick the person you’re talking to in the background for a more personalized experience. :)

Hey! You know what’s cool? Heidi Hau made finals in Dublin! Tiffany wrote me an e-mail today to tell me that. You can follow Heidi’s progress online. (She played the same program at my place not long ago). I wish her the best of luck in the upcoming final round. Heidi and Gabe used to play chamber music together. I still find it strange that I never really got to know her before, even though she was around me all the time in the music department.

Man. It’s getting late.

Back to work.

Check this out: Ben Chen gave me this issue of Shar Music, and a photo of Isaac Krauss, Keith Chapin, and Gabe Trop is on the cover! (I used to play music with all three of them.) It looks like they are playing on Stanford campus. I wonder how Shar got the rights to use this photo…? Highly bizarre. :) I wonder who the fourth in the quartet is. It’s probably Mike Okun.

Without cereal and soy milk, I might possibly starve to death. On second thought I’d probably just deplete my fat reserves, which I suppose would be a highly beneficial side-effect of starvation from lack of cereal.

SF Gate’s Bondage File rules. Check out this article: “No Salmonella In Applebee’s Lizard-Head Salad“

Cool! All you folk who have been clinging to Opera for mouse gestures can use them with Phoenix/Firebird. Other useful extensions are available as well.