A few weeks ago, I copied files from my MacBook Pro to my Mac Pro over a gigabit network and reached a record 50MB/s. But upon my return from Africa last week, the network suddenly became sluggish; copying files over the same network is suddenly capped at around 800KB/s.

The slow network seems only to show itself when copying to or from the Mac Pro. I’ve verified it by testing transfer speeds from the Mac Pro to multiple machines, and to a NAS box (also on the gigabit network). Copying files from the MacBook Pro to the same NAS box yields normal (fast) transfer speeds, so it seems that is must be a Mac Pro issue.

Does anyone have suggestions for how to diagnose the problem?

Apple’s ATI Radeon X1900 XT firmware update (issued today) seems to have fixed the sparkling/dancing artifact problem with 30″ monitors. After installing the update, I can’t reproduce the sparkles anymore. Can others verify?

UPDATE Just kidding — I was wrong. The “dancing” sparkles in gray areas are gone, but I just saw some sparkles when paging through images in the Viewer.

I’m on the phone right now with a QuickBooks support guy at my bank, trying to enable access to our Wetpixel account via QuickBooks. He just asked, “Wetpixel LLC…. you aren’t by any chance associated with Wetpixel Quarterly, are you?”

I was totally floored that he had heard of the magazine! He said he found it while googling around for underwater stuff. Awesome.

This is terrible. Bear naturalist and friend Brad Josephs sent out an emotional e-mail a couple of weeks ago detailing his experiences documenting bear hunting in the Katmai preserve in Alaska, which is adjacent to Mcneil River and Katmai National Park. We had all just been out there two months before, observing and photographing the same population of bears at close distances.

Below is a link to a video Brad has posted, which shows part of what he witnessed. There didn’t seem to be any “hunt” in what these guys were doing (as is obvious in the video). These grizzly bears have been habituated (in a peaceful way) to human spectators, and getting close to them is easy. Regardless of one’s stance on hunting, walking up to an animal and shooting it for sport is cowardly. (read more »)

I played a lot with infrared time-lapse during the trip to Tanzania. Here’s a sample video of dramatic clouds (in near-infrared) rolling in over the plains of the Serengeti. (read more »)

Below is a video clip I took a few days ago of an elephant farting in Lake Manyara National Park, Tanzania. Trevor Peterson, Pat Suh, our guide, Samson, and I are the ones you can hear after the moment of silence. Be sure to turn up the volume for full effect! (read more »)

Two Maasai children sit on the ground at the Sukenya manyata, a 3-month celebration in Loliondo, Tanzania. We arrived to find 113 huts built in a large circle, housing between 400-600 Maasai. The last manyata in this area was in 2001.