When it pours, it rains. Fastmail, my e-mail provider, is having problems, and my e-mail at this domain will be down for the rest of the day. If you need to contact me, please use my Wetpixel e-mail address or contact form.

UPDATE 9/1/06, 5PM – My mail seems to be working again. I’m going to cancel my fastmail.fm service as soon as my account there is back online.

Great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) and divers in cages, Guadalupe, Mexico

I did something stupid, though, and it was only after the fact that it really sunk in. (read more »)

Great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) at Isla Guadalupe, Mexico

The Wetpixel forums were hacked while I was gone, and I spent 4 hours getting them back online tonight. What a way to spend my one night back with my family in San Diego… :(

Continue reading for a 50MB slideshow I made for the partipants on the trip. If you don’t want to view this entire post, you can also see a smaller version (smaller, faster). (read more »)

Per Alex King, I have decided to use Subversion to track changes to my websites (echeng.com and wetpixel.com) over time. I used the SVN 1-Click setup to install an SVN repository and client on my Windows server, and just installed TortoiseSVN on my client machines.

I finally decided to do this because I wrote over an important file yesterday and had to go back into my server backups to retrieve it.

I’ve kept this quiet for awhile, but I might as well share with the users who have access here. :) In March, I got a new car. I’m still afraid of it, but I’m starting to learn how to drive it properly (without killing myself, I mean). (read more »)

turtle @ smithsonian

A friend wrote to me a few days ago informing me that my screaming turtle image is still on display at the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum. Apparently, it’s …. in natural hist museum downstairs just around the corner from coffee bar, near escalator up to first floor….

I’d love to get a photo of the print in its new location. Can one of you Washington D.C. folk help me out? :)

gabe’s cool eyes

It’s been a week full of seeing people I don’t get to see very often. A few days ago, Gabe Trop, Heidi Kim and I met up for brunch in San Francisco. Gabe and I became friends through a strong bond as fellow Stanford cellists, and whenever his name comes up, I think of what he wrote on the inside cover of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, a birthday gift he gave to me one year:

To Eric Celloes Rule [sic] From Gabe

Heidi has finished her transition from violinist to lawyer, and will soon be starting work in San Francisco. (read more »)

After five years of no contact, I hung out with Jinwha Choi again here in the Bay Area. The last time I saw her, she had just graduated from college and taken off for Hawai’i. She leaves again tomorrow, which is sad. I really enjoyed her company this week, and we had some really good chocolate.

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross posted a link to what must be one of the most bizarre Mozart cadenzas ever performed. (read more »)

Help! I’m trapped in a Fremont strip mall with the Fremont tech-industry lunch-time crowd all around me! I’m having some work done on my car, and I have to wander around here until 5pm.

43 minutes down, 4 hrs 17 minutes remaining.

Apple announced the new Mac Pro at WWDC today, and it looks sexy.* Despite all my bitching about Macs, I actually really want to go back to one. I was a diehard Mac person for five years, and even worked at Apple for a summer back in 1997 (a.k.a. The All-Time Low). There is always something that holds me back, though. Right now, it’s very simple:

1) No Photoshop Universal. LAME. 2) No dial-up via Blackberry and poor Blackberry support in general. 3) Nothing even close to Nelson Email Organizer Pro for e-mail.

1 is a must for what I do now. People who argue that it’s fast enough aren’t as impatient as I am.

2 is only necessary on a notebook.

3 I might be able to live without, but NEO Pro saves me so much time in my daily correspondence duties that I can’t imagine doing e-mail without it.

And so, I continue to wait.

* Now you see why I am still single…

thelonious lovin’

Photo catchup! Images include: movie night at the loft, Cindy Yu Emura shopping, Lynn Park at the Palace of Fine Arts and at hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese food, a print I made for a friend, a one-day overlap with Vienna Teng, Adam Tow at work, Superman Returns 3D at the Metreon, lobster rolls with Heidi Hau, and a drink with Jeremy Henrickson.

Now I feel complete.

9 days ago, WordPress announced the immediate availability of version 2.0.4. There have been many security updates rolled up into the latest release, so you should definitely upgrade you’re a WordPress user. My server gets compromised every time I fail to install the security updates announced by the many scripts I use on both echeng.com and wetpixel.com.

joechang is back

During my 3.5 days between South Africa and Tonga, I saw quite a few of my friends including Joe and Rachel Chang, who have recently relocated back to San Francisco after years in Manhattan. Joe, Rachel, Cindy Mong, Dave Patchen, and I had a nice brunch at Slow Club in Portrero Hill. I’m bummed because Dave was part of a show at Gump’s (who regularly stock his wonderful glass work), and I missed it while in Tonga. I never get to go to my friends’ shows/concerts these days. Lame.

That evening (July 16), I went out for dinner at La Taza de Cafe with my only friends in Oakland, Greg and Annabelle Tsutaoka (my neighbors). It was here that we hatched the plan to provide an official disambiguation page for our respective visages to prevent further confusion in our building. I hope it works!

Monica, Wuy, and Ophelia have moved into a house in Glenn Park, so now I can more easily go hang out with the Sather/Kim family all under one roof. A few days ago, Monica made vegan enchiladas while we watched It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (I had never heard of the show). It was funny, and after so much travel, hanging out with friends to watch television is really my idea of a proper vacation.

Lilly Shiffman

Speaking of Stanford, I finally made it down there to see Barry and Robin’s new baby, Lilly. She was tiny and cute, and the first thing Barry did was plop her littleness into my hands.

Unfortunately, I probably won’t see any of them again for some time. Barry is leaving the quartet and moving to Banff to direct the music program at the Banff Centre. I wish him the best of luck up there! I’m definitely going to visit sometime.

There are babies shooting out all around me. Three of my friends are having babies due this November. They all seem to be progressing through a “typical” life progression, while I continue to bob around in strange waters far away…

Before leaving for South Africa a couple of months ago, I drove down to Stanford to hang out with my cousin, Charlotte. She was an RCC in Roble last year, and I spent much of the evening in her room playing XBOX 360, which was fun. It was really strange to be in a dorm room, though. I’m glad that I can still masquerade as a student. It would have been awkward if I looked like some dirty old man hanging out in the dorms.

Char still has the Marin bike that I used while I was in school there, and considering the amount of bike theft on campus, it’s amazing that the thing has lasted so long!

The next day, I was at Stanford again, this time with Lynn. I can’t remember why I went there again, but we spent some time roaming around around the Art Museum and Rodin Sculpture Garden.

I’ve updated an old post about London with a few photos. The photos aren’t very interesting, but they’re there anyway…

hi! i see you. (photo: wen)

You know those big bio photos that rotate on the front page? Here they are. Now, in return, please tell me a story. :)