“This is rock and roll.” Watch the whole thing.

You pooping people are sick. But probably not as bad as those of you who manage to find Dardy‘s site. ;)

Top 20 of 5589 Total Search Strings # Hits Search String 1 396 3.27% pooping 2 371 3.06% great white sharks 3 312 2.58% infrared photography 4 229 1.89% bengal cats 5 204 1.68% crotch 6 174 1.44% bengal cat 7 139 1.15% infrared digital photography 8 125 1.03% digital infrared photography 9 77 0.64% advanced guestbook 2.2 10 71 0.59% eric cheng 11 70 0.58% digital infrared 12 58 0.48% echeng 13 52 0.43% infrared digital 14 50 0.41% infrared 15 48 0.40% crtcclient 16 46 0.38% powered by guestbook 2.2 17 45 0.37% skyline r34 18 41 0.34% fingers 19 38 0.31% near infrared 20 35 0.29% great white

Top 20 of 5191 Total Search Strings # Hits Search String 1 737 6.17% great white sharks 2 284 2.38% pooping 3 252 2.11% bengal cat 4 248 2.08% bengal cats 5 233 1.95% infrared photography 6 202 1.69% crotch 7 135 1.13% digital infrared 8 132 1.10% digital infrared photography 9 86 0.72% crtcclient 10 84 0.70% eric cheng 11 82 0.69% infrared digital photography 12 81 0.68% powered by guestbook 2.2 13 80 0.67% advanced guestbook 2.2 14 71 0.59% kyocera 7135 15 66 0.55% echeng 16 50 0.42% infrared digital 17 48 0.40% infrared digital camera 18 35 0.29% infrared 19 34 0.28% vienna teng 20 32 0.27% near infrared

I’ve finally posted a review of the Uepi Island Resort, an island resort I stayed at for several days after diving off of the Bilikiki. One line summary: great diving, but make sure you and the resort are a match before you book a trip. [see report]
 

Susan and Chip Scarlett @ Piperade in San Francisco
After an extended back-and-forth about restaurants open on Monday evenings (thank you, Shalini!), I had dinner with Susan and Chip Scarlett at Piperade, which is the first Basque restaurant I’ve been to. The food was very good, and the ambiance was perfect for conversation. Also, the hostess was extremely attractive and had a nice smile. :)

I first met Chip after a seminar I gave at the Boston Sea Rovers Clinic last year, and even though our chat was brief, I remember it being very thought-provoking. Chip has taken some fantastic underwater photographs, and he and Susan can often be found in the company of household names in the underwater media industry.

We chatted non-stop for nearly three hours, and (as usual) I left their presence with juicy new ideas to chew on (about my future and other things).

After dinner, I stopped by to see my surrogate family. It was Geoff’s birthday, and I had gifts to present. Oh, and I had to do my official duty as I.T. guy for my circle of friends and set up their wireless network. :)

Great White Shark, Guadalupe Island

It’s taking me forever to get a proper travel journal up for the Guadalupe trip, but I managed to get the photos themselves up. Check them out. ;) [Underwater Images] [Topside Images]

UPDATE Travel journal is done! [check it out]

The building across from me is being demolished and will be re-born as a huge loft building.

I thought it might be neat to capture the construction using time-lapse, but it turns out that I don’t have the right gear to do it. I am currently using a Sony PDX10 to take 1/2 second of video every 5 minutes (it won’t do just a few frames at a time, which is what I really wanted).

The right way to do it is to set up a high-resolution digital camera tethered to a computer, shooting a photo every N minutes. A hi-res movie can be built with the captured frames later. But I don’t have a compatible camera that can operate silently (I can’t have a shutter release going every few minutes, so a consumer cam with a wide-angle adapter is ideal), nor do I have an extra machine that I can plunk down by the window for a year.

Anyone want to donate a compatible camera for a few months? I can get ahold of an extra machine. ;)

UPDATE: I think I’m going to get two USB active extenders and connect a webcam to my server, which is about 30′ away from the camera location. I can use my webcam for the moment, and switch to a “real” camera in the future, if the project materializes.

I have no TV signal right now, but I will once I get home from Indonesia in January. So the question is: which Tivo should I get? I currently own a DirecTivo box, which I absolutely love, but I can’t have DirecTV here in the new pad. It’s been upgraded to 160GB. Anyone wanna buy it? ;)

I keep reading that Series 2 Tivos have crappy image quality. As it is I’m going to be upset because there is no way a standard Tivo can compete in image quality with a DirecTivo box. But if it’s even worse than my old Series 1 was, it might not be watchable on a high quality display. Anyone have direct comparison anecdotes to share?

Another argument for sticking to Series 1 is that they are so easy to hack. Hacking is cool.

Aaron posted some useful information on how to get rid of comment and referral spam. I’m not using WordPress, so I am unable to use the AuthImage plugin, but I made my own filter that basically just checks words and counts hrefs, rejecting comments that have too many of them. I also have a word filter for my referral list script, but it looks like the .htaccess method is better.

So I went out on a day boat to the Farallon Islands today, and it was pretty cool, despite us nearly being skunked. We did see one shark hit one of the cookies (decoys) attached to the boat, but that was about it. What I was mostly amazed with were 1) the beauty of the island and 2) the make-up of the group that went out. The average age was much lower than it is on the normal trips I’m on (most people were about my age, I’d guess), and there were gasp three young women on board! I chatted with one of them for a long time about photography — turns out that she is a photojournalist in the Middle East and was embedded with a division in Iraq for awhile. So it goes without saying that she is well-travelled, adventurous and independent, and that was totally fascinating and cool. And, she loves to dive and has dived many of the same waters I have.

None of this change the fact that every trip I’m on next year will be composed mostly of old(er) white men with an occasional female companion. I don’t have a problem being friends with older white men, but they just aren’t dateable.

Being alone at home on the computer on a Friday night makes one think of these things.

But at least I had Ali G to keep me company. When I run out of episodes to watch, I’ll really be in bad shape. ;)

A luthier’s wood shavings

Andy Carruthers is awesome. I dragged my cello out to Santa Rosa last week to have him work on it, and now it sounds and plays better than it ever has in the past! (read more »)

I like things that make me laugh out loud. He’s brilliant.

Peter pointed me to some optimized Mozilla and Thunderbird builds for various processors. I’m using an optimized FireFox build now, and it is indeed noticeably faster, especially in load times and Adobe Acrobat integration. Check it out.

This has got to stop! People are coupling up all around me: five of my friends have gotten engaged recently — three of them in the last few weeks — which means that next summer, there will likely be five weddings to attend. Last year, I think I made four of six weddings, which was pretty damn miraculous given my travel schedule. But next year I think I’m going to be gone for most of the summer, so I may end up missing weddings of very good friends. So sad.

Speaking of sad, I went shopping for groceries alone tonight. I hate doing late-night solo grocery shopping, but I hit critical mass yesterday in things I need (e.g. bandaids and antibiotic cream, soap, toothpaste (both running low), food, etc.).

Off to the Farallons tomorrow for more white sharking, but it’s only a day trip. I’m also getting some more magazine stuff, which is always exciting.

Finally, a NAS box that looks interesting for home use! The Niveus A/V Storage Server says that it offers 1TB of RAID 5 storage, which is confusing because it also says that it only has 1TB worth of drives, suggesting that only 750GB of it is accessible. It also doesn’t mention whether it supports gigabit ethernet. AND, it’s $3K.

Still, it’s fanless, pretty, and looks easy to use. I would just be worried about what to do in the event of hardware (or software) failure. With my own box it would be easy to rip the thing apart and fix it, but an integrated unit like this would probably require outside service (?).

UPDATE

Message: Hello, guys. I have a couple of questions about your new 1TB
storage server.

1) does it support gigabit ethernet? (not on web page)

No, only T10/100. However our products are always upgradeable. A Gigabit
upgrade is planned for Q12005.

2) it states 1TB of storage, but then says that it uses RAID 5. How
much accessible storage is there? 750GB?

The website will be updated soon. The user chooses whether they want
RAID 0 or RAID 5. If RAID 5 is chosen, then the overall available
storage will be lower than 1TB, but true data redundancy will be
achieved.

The last few days = crazy.

On Friday night, I returned from a great white shark expedition at Guadalupe Island with Great White Adventures (after a rough 24.5 hr crossing back to San Diego!), and was invited late by Douglas Seifert to a dinner with Howard & Michelle Hall and Peter Benchley and his wife. Unfortunately, because our crossing was so rough, our vessel returned late and we passed Mr. Benchley in the hallway (leaving) as we approached the restaurant. STILL, it was a pleasure to dine with Howard and Michelle — even though I had almost nothing to say (indeed, what is there to say??); instead, I focused on muting my knee-jerk reaction, which if left unchecked might have been to gaze upon them with adoration and awe. They were very nice, and I enjoyed Howard’s sense of humor very much. (read more »)

My hooded sister in Silverlake [see more]
Catch up: Here are some photos of Geoff, Livia, and Mandy (Julie was visiting, and there are photos of her in the bunch as well). Especially cute is a photo of Livia that shows her size. :)

Hey — anyone out there use a tankless water heater? I’m replacing my big gas heater with a wall-mounted electric tankless water heater, and need to get some info from those of you out there who already have them installed. Any recommendations? :)

BTW — I’m back, but I’m not really back yet. I’m hosting, and won’t be free until after the 16th. I haven’t really been able to read and respond to e-mail, so if you want to get ahold of me, please call my mobile phone.

I am leaving on a white shark expedition in six hours! I’m excited. :)

But first, check out this cool case:

Lian-Li PC-V1100 Silent Aluminum Computer Case

I love this thing. It’s designed to have plenty of airflow while remaining quiet (rubber gaskets, high-frequency blockers over fan openings, acoustic dampening foam lining side covers, big fans that operate at low RPMs, etc.). Check out the reviews. This case rules. (read more »)

Photo Update! I’m catching up, y’all.

The day before Rob Kapilow’s arrival to the Bay Area (see previous entry), pianist Anton Kuerti performed in a fantastic recital at Stanford with the St. Lawrence String Quartet (they played Schumann Piano Quintet!). Aside from Benjamin‘s concert in Dinkelspiel some years ago, I had not seen Dink so packed for a classical show. Luckily, we were seated in a great, reserved location because our tickets were comps from the quartet. :) Just before the show started, a woman wandered over along the aisle and mumbled something I couldn’t hear (I was in the middle of a conversation). I was sitting with Heidi Hau and Warren Wu, and we apparently reacted in an unsuitable manner because she then said very loudly — and slowly, “IS THAT SEAT TAKEN?”

Uh. Despite having black hair and slanty eyes, we, like, speak English and stuff. I nearly informed Her Whiteness of that fact, but instead, I mentioned that the row was reserved (HAH!), but then the nice gentleman next to us invited her to take the seat next to him, thereby ruining my chance at satisfaction via juvenile snottiness.

I’m also using this entry to catch up on posting photos, which include: post-concert party at Lesley’s place, photos of my furnace being removed, and photos of Elliot and family at their loft. :) [see some photos]

I’ll tell yew whutt, I’ve got some more photos of Vienna Teng to show. You know, for her crazy groupies.

VT and I overlapped in the Bay Area for exactly one day, and she and Mr. Batcho happened to be over in the East Bay hanging out with a bunch of musicians at a party at Marika‘s place (which I opted out of because I had just returned from New York and was feeling really anti-social). And so, the two of ‘em came over to hang out for a bit, which was really nice, cuz Vienna had to leave for the airport at like 4am, and it was already nearly midnight. (Damn. My command of the English language is goin’ DOWNHILL).

Anyway, I love that Jim was wearing a “Boobs Not Bombs” shirt, and that Vienna was wearing “Pussy For Peace undies (although, I only got to see like a centimeter of it. ;) And as usual, VT posed in style. [see some photos]