Like many people, I sort of hate Flash unless it’s used only for small, subtle parts of a website so the entire site still functions as you’d expect it to. But as of the last two journal entries, I’ve gone to the dark side and am using Flash for image galleries, mostly because I actually like looking through Flash-based image galleries. I like that the images fade into each other, thumbnails slide into place as you navigate, and that it pre-loads the entire gallery in the background. (read more »)

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our exhibition

UPDATE 11/03/05 I’ve added additional photos to the gallery.

Last weekend was our ArtSpan open “studio” at Mandy and Elliot’s place in the mission. Rather than opening up any sort of real studio to the public, we decided on a joint show of my marine photography and jewelry from RedStart Design and Elysa Fenenbock. We were the only studio in their building that participated in Open Studios; — unfortunate, becase in the past the old Sears warehouse had their very own Open Studios. (read more »)

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the old man

I’ve been seeing a lot of Emile lately, and it’s been good. Along with a small group of friends, we celebrated his 31st birthday party at Levende, followed by desserts at Delfina (where Caroline now cooks, on the weekends). I remember the days when we had to dig deep to find out when Emile’s birthday was. We organized a little surprise party and cake at work, which evoked something between sincere thanks and open hostility from him — or perhaps, a bit of both. :)

Happy Birthday, Emile!

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Both Adam and I use iView MediaPro to catalog and annotate our images. I’m pretty happy with iView’s annotation interface, but its “Sync Annotations” feature, which allows you to sync IPTC information back into the source file, doesn’t write IPTC in a way that will read properly in all applications. Most of the applications and online services I use seem to handle it properly (Photoshop, Breezebrowser, Smugmug, Flickr (which took some bug-fixing)), but I’ve not been able to get IPTC caption import to work with Porta (a slick, HTML/SimpleViewer online gallery generator) (see update, below). I really like Porta, so I’ve written to Porta’s author, hoping that he’ll look into iView compatibility.

UPDATE Google’s Picasa pulls out IPTC properly, and works with SimpleViewer as well!

UPDATE Mikkel Stegmann, Porta’s author, fixed the Porta/IPTC issue 1 hour, 35 minutes after I sent him an e-mail. That’s just awesome.

Hey, guys. My server is not doing so well, and I may be hard to reach via e-mail for the next few days. Please use my wetpixel e-mail address. :)

UPDATE 11:47PM, Oct 25: Looks like we’re back. The only thing worse than having your website go down is having everyone you happen to host go down with you.

Two more drive failures. I sent a newly swapped (refurbished, probabably) WD drive (I know! they suck.) to Peter, and the thing was DOA. And today, a drive in my printing/scanning machine just failed inexplicably. It’s just… gone. I don’t even use that drive, really. It just sits there, receiving backups every week or so — and still, it failed.

Remember to back up your data, folks. :)

UPDATE I opened up my machine. Take one guess at the brand of the failed drive. Western Digital is useless.

I love it. (read more »)

I spent the day making large prints of my images, and I have to say that it is really rewarding to see them blown up. It’s easy to forget that even today’s entry-level digital SLRs capture enough detail to make poster-sized prints, and looking at them on a monitor just isn’t the same — that is, unless you happen to be the lucky owner of a 30″ Cinema Display (which I am not). ;)

Having said that, inkjets and color are a pain in the ass. My system is color-calibrated very well (as much as it can be, without having my own RIP and printer profiler) and even I have problems getting blues to behave. grrr….

engaged! (+ family & host)

After the baby birthday party, I continued down the Peninsula to attend Monica and Wuy’s engagement party, which was hosted by Monica’s good friend, Ashley. It’s truly a small world: one of Wuy’s old roommates (Josie) is good family friends with Rae, and another person there (Pam) went to school with my ex-’s sister.

Upon meeting me Pam proclaimed, “Oh! You’re the guy with the website.” Hmmm. The “guy with the website.” I’m not sure how I feel about that…

I had a great time with Monica, Wuy, Elliot, Mandy, and their friends. After the party, Elliot and Mandy drove Monica and Wuy back up to San Francisco to meet up with friends to witness the rebirth of the de Young museum, which stayed open for the entire weekend in celebration. I didn’t go because the Bay Bridge closure would have left me stranded in San Francisco overnight. Boo.

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nash family

On Saturday afternoon, I went to a nice little park in Silicon Valley suburbia to attend the 1st birthday party of little Jacob Nash. I hadn’t seen some of the guys in that group for some time (John Lilly, Mike Schroepfer, Nick Kucharewski, and Mike Hanson), and during that time, there was a BABY EXPLOSION! I don’t think there was a single adult there who wasn’t married, pregnant, or the recipient of a newly hatched baby — and many of the babies there had been born in the last year. Apparently, I’m very much behind. :)

Since I saw them last, Schrep and Lilly have both joined Mozilla, which I think is very cool.

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I love Thinkpads, and swear by them. However, I’ve had a history of problems with them that I believe can only be hardware-related. My brand-new Thinkpad/Lenovo T42 has been having sporadic BSOD and freezing issues similar to what this guy is reporting. He reports that “it would freeze at random moments, shut down spontaneously and then fail to start up again, and sometimes not come on at all.” Although my current T42 only has BSOD and random freezing problems, my old T41p had the EXACT problem the guy at TechnoTaste reported. When I sent it in for repair, I was told that they couldn’t find anything wrong with my system. But I’m SURE that it’s a hardware issue; having a machine refuse to even show the BIOS start screens is really bad. And given that I had the same problems with a brand-new installation of Windows XP SP2, I’m sure that it’s not a software issue.

But what can I do? If I send it in and they can’t reproduce the problem, I’m pretty much screwed. The only reason I have a T42 is because my T41p died 3 days before I had to leave for a photo trip. I still love the machine, but it’s starting to get frustrating. If I can’t keep it stable, I’m going to have to dump IBM.

UPDATE A link to someone else with the mysterious problem. This is not isolated to my machine. It’s interesting that the person said that it was location-dependant, because I was so stumped that I started to think the same thing (when I’m on boats on the ocean, symptoms show up much more frequently). At least my T42 is only BDOD’ing, and not having the strange problem of not starting up again.

UPDATE 12/30/05 Problem solved.

karaoke @ silver cloud

I gotta tell you: going out for karaoke with 3 tenors is a blast. Those guys can really sing. Paul opened with Roxanne (with Lucas singing backup). Afterwards, he was mobbed by Marina shawl girls, and the bouncer (who was quite a formidable karaoke guy as well) came over to say, “I’ve been working the door for five years, and I’ve never heard anything like that!” (read more »)

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Photos are self-explanatory. (read more »)

screaming turtle

My screaming turtle photograph has won the “Animal Antics” category of this year’s Nature’s Best photography contest. A large print will be included in an exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum later on this year. Also, one of my great hammerhead shark photographs received a highly honored award in the Oceans category. It’s a great honor to be included as a winner in such a prestigious contest! (read more »)

A friend asked me to post an e-mail address for spambots to find. So here it is! Find me: animotioninc@gmail.com.

I’m cranking through images for the upcoming show (which I’ll announce, soon). Turns out that my computer finally starts to get slow when I attempt to edit photos that are 36″x24″ @ 300ppi. ;)

It’s amazing that I can be sitting here on a boat in the Galapagos… surfing the internet on a wireless connection. We’re picking it up from somewhere on San Cristobal, and I’m not complaining. We did a checkout dive today and played with a curious sea lion, and will be heading up to Seymour tomorrow for a day before motoring to Darwin and Wolf.

See you all in a week or so!