Leopard upgrade notes… (read more »)

Dear travelers: I may be going on a dive trip to India in April, and will end up in Chennai at the end. Can anyone who has been there suggest places to tour from there? Should I stay in Chennai and look around there, or should I go somewhere else?

I will have a crapload of gear, so lots of local flights are not ideal unless it is easy and inexpensive to fly back to Chennai for the outbound international flight.

Thanks, in advance!

I love using SpinVox to have my voicemails transcribed and emailed to me, but I’m having problems getting accuracy in translations. For example, here’s one I got today:

Eric, hey it’s Quack the Messer. Hey I’m checking at your tab and I think it looks fantastic and I’m pretty not ya it feels great and it’s nice and wide. This is like the real Bear. It looks to you at all. so I think you should go for it. So I will make sure what to do.

I don’t know any “Quack the Messer”!

Or, maybe it’s that all my friends are mumblers. Still, I have been impressed when people leave messages that are very clear. Here’s one that Mandy left me when I was testing the service:

Hello, Eric. This is Mandy & I just wanted to say shooby dooby shananana, lalalalalala, ok. Bye.

Fun stuff. I love SpinVox.

the good ol’ days

I’ve been having vivid dreams for the past couple of nights. The dream I had two nights ago is something I can’t post here, but the one last night involved playing the cello. I tell people I play the cello, but the real situation is that I am trying to hang on to my identity as a musician. Sure, some of my closest friends are musicians, which means that I hear the gossip and participate by osmosis, but it isn’t quite the same.

Last night, I had a dream that I was playing principal cello in some orchestra piece with a big solo. During our first rehearsal, I totally botched the solo, and was lectured by the conductor after the rehearsal was over. It was in a big hall and everything. I guess dreams do parallel things going on in real life, eh?

Well, I gave it a try. After being frustrated with the performance of FireFox on Mac OS X, I decided to give Opera 9.2 a try. I used it for about 2 weeks as my primary browser.

The reason I was driven to trying a new browser is that FireFox crashes on me regularly and is starting to feel bloated — at least, on Mac OS X.

When I installed Opera, I immediately noticed how fast and snappy everything is. I loved the built-in sync feature, too (I use Google Browser Sync on FireFox, but it doesn’t sync with Opera on my Blackberry). But in the end, compatibility issues forced me back to using FireFox. (read more »)

Eli and me on Halloween with Stan Waterman and Rick Belmare

I just returned from DEMA (the biggest dive industry event in the U.S.), where I covered the event for Wetpixel. Eli came with me to represent our magazine, and Matt and Heidi helped man the booth and walk the floor.

I’m back, and I’m exhausted. If you’re interested, you can read the show report over at Wetpixel. There are tons of people pictures in there!

Eli Woolery and me in our hotel room on Halloween

I travel a lot to places where I don’t have access to the innernets for long periods of time. But I am also a Twitter user, and those two things don’t mix well. By the time I get back, old tweets I haven’t read yet have already scrolled off of the page (and off of the RSS feed), lost forever. I don’t pick up my “with friends” RSS feed in my normal feed reader because this makes me read duplicated messages when I am in networked areas.

To solve this problem, I decided to add my “with friends” feed to Google Reader, which I only use as a block embedded on my personalized Google homepage. Since Google is always on and all-knowing, it grabs and archives all of my friends’ twittering, and I can go back in time forever. It’s been working very well, and I don’t mind making a specific trip to the reader page just to catch up on tweets. Screenshot: (read more »)