antarctic mutants: dale stokes, peter brueggeman, and isopods

I had a nice visit to San Diego over the weekend for some meetings, and to see my Dad and sister. After geeking out with John Ellerbrock at Gates Housings, I spent Friday night over at filmmakers Michele and Howard Hall’s place, where Michele cooked up a delicious dinner and we chatted about All Things Underwater until late in the evening. I also helped them with their horrible spam problem by setting up a contact form similar to the one I use on my page. Technical support in exchange for dinner? I think it was a good trade! (read more »)

reflection in a mirror, de Young

Aaron, Natalie and I finally made it to the de Young Museum in San Francisco, and I have to say… I wasn’t that impressed. The museum’s architecture is “interesting” in the same way that a guy might say a woman has “a great personality” (which I would never say, of course… :), and the exhibits lacked any sense of cohesiveness.

But at least I got to see Aaron and Natalie, who have both been really busy in their respective medical professions. (read more »)

mom, dad, and jackjack at sfo international

Yeah, so it’s probably going to be some time before I have a kid of my own. Until then, I’m happy to hang out with baby jackjack.

I spent much of the evening on new year’s eve at SFO international with Geoff and Livia, who flew out that evening with Jack to Cartagena, Colombia, where the St. Lawrence String Quartet is performing. We had dinner at Ebisu, and then I went home to hang out in the dark during a power outage in Oakland. Yep. Exciting. (read more »)

His Steveness just announced the Apple iPhone at the MacWorld keynote speech today (Engadget has a good highlights page)! Mac fanboys are going to go nuts about this thing because it runs OS X, as a touch-screen interface, orientation sensor, proximity sensor, yadda yadda yadda.

I have to admit that it looks pretty sexy, but I’m sticking with my Blackberry. My mobile device has to do e-mail effectively, and a touchscreen device isn’t going to cut it when composing an e-mail to someone.

Now, if you took away the phone capabilities of the device and added a few dozen GB of storage, that device would be fantastic. I use an iPod video to stay entertained while traveling (music, tv shows, movies, slideshows for the person sitting next to me…), and one with a big screen like that would be fantastic for multimedia goodness!

I’ve updated this with a couple funny clips: one from the Colbert Report, and one from Conan. (read more »)

WordPress 2.0.6 was just released, and you should upgrade because it has security fixes.

It took me about 5 minutes to do the upgrade, and in that five minutes I received 4 spam comments because I disabled Akismet and WordVerify for the upgrade. Without those two plugins, I would be be absolutely LOST in comment spam. Before WordVerify existed, I had hacked in my own code which did the same thing, but without all the plug-in goodness.

UPDATE Be sure to also fix the rss issue.

UPDATE 2.0.7 came out. It’s a security fix.

After using the Mac for a few months now, I have two tips that will speed up the performance of your shiny new machine. (read more »)

There’s nothing to say, really. Everyone else has already said it.

Oh, Cingular, how you waste my time. SMS hasn’t been working for me for a few weeks now. Apologies if you have sent me one and it has gone unanswered…

UPDATE Apparently SMS service was removed from my account, but should be back now. If you count success as screwing up my account every time I call in, Cingular is at 100%.

So, if Firefox crashes on your Mac OS X system and upon restart starts outputting audio to… oh, let’s say, a Plantronics USB headset instead of to your normal speakers, just unplug your headset and restart Firefox. The application will tell you that it has created new settings and will ask you if you want to use the new or original settings. Pick new, wait the 15 seconds for Firefox to do who-knows-what, plug in your headset again, and all will be well again.

What you shouldn’t do is try to find an audio output setting in Firefox or turn the volume on your mixer up and down repeatedly.

Note to Adam Nash: I am not bitching. I just couldn’t find this information on Google and therefore felt compelled to post a solution so that others won’t have to waste time should they have the same problem.

It seems that Amazon.com is carrying shark fin soup and other products through three third-party vendors Roland, Pacific Rim Gourmet, and VitaminLife. With all the controversy surrounding shark fins and the horrible practices used to harvest fins, Amazon should be ashamed to be carrying shark fin soup and should rectify the problem immediately by pulling all shark fin products from their catalog.

What you can do:

1. Leave feedback at Amazon’s product page for Roland Shark Fin Soup, Dragonfly Shark Fin Soup, and VitaminLife.
2. Participate in the discussion over at Amazon about the product and why it’s bad for them to carry it
3. Send e-mail to Roland Food at Phyllis.Goldberg@rolandfood.com, Pacific Rim Gourmet at customerservice@pacificrim-gourmet.com, VitaminLife at customerservice@vitaminlife.com, and write letters of protest to:
   
   Pacific Rim Gourmet
   75-5660 Kopiko Street, Suite C7-210
   Kailua-Kona, HI 96740
   
   VitaminLife
   15940 Redmond Way
   Redmond, WA 98052
   
   
4. Write to Amazon.com at Advantage Customer Service (advantage@amazon.com) and Investor Relations (ir@amazon.com)
5. Spread the word through your webpage, blog, etc. (code available here)
6. Boycott Amazon.com until they comply
7. Join the discussion in the Wetpixel forums

Alibaba is even worse, and is something that also needs to be tackled by the media. Sea Shepherd has called for a ban of Alibaba’s listings, as have some other organizations.

UPDATE Amazon pulled shark fin from their inventory!

I am enjoying my Macs, but I still feel like they’re always just a bit behind me. For example, here’s a video of me processing images on my Thinkpad. I was in a hotel in Orlando and had to get hundreds of images online for the Wetpixel DEMA report.

Now… I can’t imagine doing that on a Mac, even though it may be possible once I’m 100% familiar with the tools. On the Mac, I have to be more creative about how I process images, and tend to cut corners in order to get stuff done quickly. There is usually some way to do most of what I want it to do — and after I am done with the work, I still feel all warm and fuzzy from the Mac feel-good factor. But if I want to do everything, I start running into problems and extreme frustration, usually resulting in incessant online bitching.

And sometimes, I just want things to open and close quickly without fancy animation. I’m facing too many SPODs in what I do these days to make Mac life totally enjoyable.

Happy new year! I am jet-lagged and decided to chill at home after dropping off Geoff, Livia, and jackjack at the airport for their red-eye to Colombia.

Ten minutes ago, the power went out in our neighborhood, and my UPSes are now beeping like crazy! I hope power comes back on soon. Notice that even a power outage cannot keep me away from connectivity. :).