bronze whaler sharks in a small bait ball

I have sporadic e-mail access, so write me life updates (no large attachments, please!). Yesterday, I took my Blackberry up in a microlight (hang glider with an engine) to download all my mail. :)

UPDATE A bunch of photos uploaded to the Wetpixel thread.

Giles Shaxted and I just returned to our hotel from dinner at Spiga d’Oro on Florida Rd. (in Durban, South Africa). The food was excellent, and we sat out on the sidewalk in perfect weather. I enjoy outdoor seating, but the sidewalk seating on Florida Rd. is weird; most outdoor seating I’ve seen involves some sort of view, often as simple as a few more restaurants on the other side of the street. Florida Rd. is one-sided, and there is nothing but parking and darkness on the other side. An “official” parking marshall guy was running around the street waving frantically and generally getting in the way while people were trying to park, and a local vagrant sat himself down in a chair at the end of the row of tables and tried to sell trinkets while being minorly belligerent.

I’m not sure how big Durban is, but on that 3-block stretch of restaurants it seemed that everyone somehow knew each other. There was a group of drunken kids slurring, male hugging/slapping/bonding (a side effect of the World Cup and alcohol, no doubt), and making a lot of noise — something I wasn’t ready for after 30 hours of travelling.

We leave tomorrow for the north coast, where the sardines run.

It truly is a small world. As I was boarding my flight to London, I heard someone yell out, “Eric! Eric Cheng!”. Charlene Chen emerged out of the crowd waiting to board and waved at me. Charlene is on her way to Croatia via London, and after being shuffled around on the flight (to accomodate families travelling together), we somehow ended up sitting next to one another for the duration of the flight. (read more »)

A recent forum thread has identified yet another SQL injection vulnerability in Exhibit Engine 1.5 RC4. If you’re running EE, you should check to see if your install is vulnerable! My site has been compromised by EE vulnerabilities in the past.

Thanks to Matt Segal for his e-mail about this.

I was just given the opportunity to photograph Kelly Hu at a pool session, and I can’t make it. :(

Eric was a busy boy while away in the Bahamas.

oceanic white-tips	bahamas 2006	rajah ampat 2004
bonaire 2005	grenada 2005	kona 2005
	bluefin tuna pens

How auspicious that my night-blooming cereus (which was started by a cutting from huge plants we have at home in San Diego) decided to bloom on the ONE EVENING I’m home this month. I arrived home last night from the Bahamas and leave tomorrow afternoon for South Africa.

The fragrance is intoxicatingly lovely. I wish I could bottle it up and share it with all of my friends. I also wish I was done with everything on my TO DO list so I could go to sleep. (read more »)

I have to brag about one of my friends: Cindy came over last night with a home-cooked meal (so nice! she’s great with the food), and informed me that she had just won $20K at PokerRoom.com, beating out 252 other people (in 7 hours) for a 1st place win in one of the weekly poker tournaments (she told me what the contest was called, but I promptly forgot!). That is SO awesome. Congratulations, Cindy. :)

We scored [the travel journal]. It was exploratory, and awesome. I’m going back next July. Wanna go? ;)

Bahamas Oceanic White-Tip Shark Expedition

If you want to leave a comment, please do so in the actual travel journal itself.

Here’s how I knew I wasn’t in California today:

1) There was a “Big Buck Hunter” arcade game in the sports bar. 2) It was right next to a game where you could win Budweiser racing gloves and “Old Maid” cards. 3) Someone behind me just used the word, “bamboozled,” and he was being serious.

There are also two french children yelling and screaming, not far from me. Along with cell phone pacer guy, they’re driving me insane. The kids’ parents keep shusshing them, but it’s obvious to all of us that it isn’t working. They should change tactics.

My friends’ new babies and kids make me want to have kids, myself. But travel makes me hate them, so I guess that evens things out. :)

Chee-Yun was in town last week to play at Herbst Theater. I was out near Union Square with Lynn (on a shopping spree for cargo pants and shorts to replace my ripped ones), and stopped by the Hilton to see her over a cup of chai/coffee. Photos: (read more »)

Before leaving California, I powered down all of my machines at home because I won’t have internet access while in the Bahamas. And, of course, on my way out I received an image request which requires access to the hi-res files sitting on those powered-down machines.

Out of desperation, I called my lovely neighbor and had her go into my unit, crawl under the stage, and turn on my servers. I’m in the process of downloading them now. :)

I owe her big-time. Thanks, Annabelle!!

7:49am – my eyes snap open. I have a 7:45am shuttle to SFO. Shit.

7:52am – shuttle arrives

7:5?am – board the shuttle with 200 lbs of luggage.

8:08am – we’re already through the Bay Bridge detour through San Francisco. This guy is flyin’.

Flight is not until 11. Gonna have a long wait at the airport. Adrenaline is cool.

About four years ago, I took a cutting of one of the enormous night-blooming cereus plants my parents have growing at our home in San Diego. After moving to Oakland last year, I finally had my first bloom! A single bud blossomed into a miniature version of what I am used to seeing in San Diego. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in town when it happened, but Vienna dried it out for me so I could at least see it upon my return to land.

My little plants have grown as much in the last year in Oakland as they did during three years of life San Francisco, and even in the relative warmth of Oakland they basically stop growing during all of winter and early spring. Last week, I noticed four small buds growing on my plant (excited!). It’s too bad I’m going to miss it when they bloom. :(

After finding a fly head (just the head) on my stage, I’m realizing that my old tennis racket is perfect for killing those slow-moving, zig-zaggy flies that usually hang out near garbage (the kind that “make you feel dizzy,” Vienna says).

I found the other 80% of the fly a few feet away from the head.

Jim posted an entry about a cool java applet that maps out an HTML DOM as a graph (that’s the Document Object Model for you non-computer folk). It’s lots of geeky fun, and you should give it a try. As of right now, there are 741 website graphs on flickr plus 13 + 15 from people who used the wrong flickr keyword :). (read more »)

During the install of my new Thinkpad, I had to get my Blackberry 8700c (Cingular) to work as a modem again. I followed the directions available on BlackberryForums and on Cingular’s website, but was unable to get it to work as they specified:

[HOWTO: Use BlackBerry As Modem] [Cingular: Configuring a modem in Microsoft Windows for tethering a RIM BlackBerry] [Cingular: Creating a Dial-Up Networking Connection for Windows XP via USB Cable]

The change I made was to set the extra initialization string to:

+cgdcont=1,”IP”,”WAP.CINGULAR”

… instead of the one they specified. And now, it works. :)