“lemon snaps” in the bahamas

I’m back in Florida after the second Bahamas expedition, which was a combination sharks & dolphins trip. The travel journal is online!

Eric Cheng and Jim Watt in Kona, 2002 (the beginning, for me!)

Jim Watt, underwater photographer and good friend, passed away two days ago. We’ve had lots of adventures together over the past six years. I spent a week diving and teaching with Jim barely a month ago, and it’s hard to believe he’s gone… (read more »)

two little piggies in the bahamas

OK, so we didn’t get oceanic white-tip sharks this year, which sucked. But we did get some friendly pigs! I’m back out to the Bahamas in 2 days, and will be here in West Palm Beach hanging out, in the meantime. [full trip journal]

There is a Taiwanese-American family of 4 behind me at the airport food court. They are like we were, except that the sister is older than the brother. The little kids are playing and bobbing around, speaking perfect English to each other and making strange noises, and the parents tune them out when that happens. Parents are speaking mixed Mandarin and English to them. Daughter is named Jocelyn, but it sounds funny. JOH-SEH-LEEN. Now the mom is theatening Joshua in English because he is under the table, and he is ignoring her. It’s reminds me of when Mom said BULL-SHIT way back during the transition to American-hood, and instead of being serious, it was really funny to us kids.

I board for Dallas and West Palm Beach in 40 mins. I’m tired, but at least I was upgraded.

The Nautilus Explorer in the ice flow near Le Conte glacier

I loved diving Alaska. I was aboard the Nautilus Explorer from June 24 to July 6, and we covered a lot of ground, starting in Sitka and ending in the Queen Charlotte Islands and Ketchikan. It was my first cold-water trip, and I’m totally hooked. I guess that’s sort of like climbing Kilimanjaro for my first real camping trip. :) (some photos @ flickr)

Geoff Nuttall and Vienna Teng at Quince (all images)

The real reason for the dearth of social imagery around here is that I’m burned out. I’m away all the time shooting thousands of images of weird underwater critters, and I don’t have time to do anything with them, let alone the images I shoot of my friends. :(

Anyway, I wanted to post some now, for old times’ sake, of the dinner at Quince (all images).

I love my PQI 4GB Cool Drive U339 Pro. It is very fast, inexpensive, and lives in a tiny, compact case. (Note that other PQI models may be much slower than the “Pro” versions). The only drawback is that it mounts as two drives when connected to a computer, one being a read-only partition with useless “USB Notebook Software.” I *hate* stuff like this.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, the drive started behaving strangely when connected to my computers, and it finally died on me a few days later. I contacted PQI support, who recommended that I download and run a Windows-based repair utility. The repair utility seems to have repaired the drive, and as a bonus, it also removed the second partition with the useless software. So if you own one of these Cool Drives, you might want to run the repair utility even if yours is in perfect working condition! (I take no responsibility in what happens, though — the decision to run the program is yours alone.)

UPDATE: Another cool thing I did was install Mac OS X on a partition of my flash drive and install Disk Warrior on it. So now, if my primary drive(s) fail while I’m on the road, I can boot OS X from flash and try to repair things.