I’m not really tired because I’m jetlagged, but I should probably try to get some sleep. But before I go, I thought I’d post this video, because it made me laugh out loud.

Awesome! I wanna try.

There should be a standard icon to augment buttons and links in the iPhone interface for “this will close the current app and open a link in Safari” I don’t know how many times I’ve opened an app and clicked on something to see what it does, only to be taken to Safari. In most cases, I wouldn’t have tapped the link / button if I had known that it would do that.

scott, me, cor, and julie @ sanzaka

Cor and Julie — thank you so much for your hospitality. I had a great (and productive!) time. (updated with photos) (read more »)

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By default, Firefox 3 doesn’t burn out bookmarks into an HTML file, preferring to keep them in its own local database. Because of this, Quicksilver will no longer pick up changes to your bookmarks once you upgrade to Firefox 3 (if you have set Quicksilver to index bookmarks).

To set Firefox to automatically export bookmarks to HTML, type “about:config” in the location bar and hit Enter. Type “export” into the filter field, and set “browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML” to “true”.

Thanks, Cor Bosman, for the information.

Many of my old classmates and co-workers are ending up in influential positions in the tech world, which is very exciting. I continue to live vicariously through them because I wandered off the path years ago and fell with a big splash into the ocean, where I continue to paddle around.

Here’s an old photo I found today while looking through some archives:

interns @ apple in 1997

It’s a (terribly-blurry) photo of Adam Nash, me, Michael Schroepfer, and Scott Kleper in 1997 when we met Woz as interns at Apple. Nash is now Director of Products at LinkedIn, Schrep just (today) left his position as VP Engineering at Mozilla to join Facebook as Director of Engineering, and Klep is CTO at Context Optional, Inc. What’s especially interesting is that all three of them ended up at social networking companies. I guess it’s the next big thing, eh?

Meanwhile, I keep floating around in the ocean, looking for interesting critters. Congratulations, guys! I’ll be cheering you on while wrangling sharks and looking for rare nudibranchs. :)

As a prize for finishing neurosurgery residency, Kenny had a full month off before having to go back to start fellowship. I took advantage of the rare opportunity to head up to Oregon for three days on the coast with his family and friends. The last time Kenny had time off between phases of life (med school and residency, it was), I convinced him to get SCUBA certified and come to Palau with me, steps which set into motion my career as an underwater photographer. The Palau trip marked my first time in the water with a camera, and I came back with a bunch of craptastic images, which are still online as an exercise in humility. :)

I really enjoyed spending time with Kieran, who is now two and a half years old. He’s old enough to have conversations with, which was novel. The baby I spend the most time with is still just babbling (mostly) in his own language. I’ve been quite enjoying seeing babies and toddlers at different stages in development, and it’s also been interesting to see differing parental approaches to raising children.

me, with kieran. i specialize in hanging out with other people’s babies.

We stayed in a house on the beach in Manzanita, which was absolutely gorgeous. There wasn’t much to do there but hang out and go for walks, and aside from a terrible allergy attack, it was just the thing I needed.

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Two weeks ago, I stopped by Peter and Karine’s place to say farewell and wish them a happy move back to New York. It was sad to see them go, but only because I empathize with the pain of moving so often. The truth is that I will probably see them just as often in New York as I did in San Francisco.

baby ella with wetpixel quarterly

Peter has been telling me for some time that the first issue of Wetpixel Quarterly is Ella’s favorite “book.” When I arrived, Ella quickly associated the “Eddic Chen” whose photo is in the front of the magazine with the dude standing in front of her, and then proceeded to happily name every underwater critter in the magazine [video]. I was really impressed — at 20 months of age, she can probably identify more animals in Wetpixel Quarterly than can nearly every adult who has flipped through it!

Olivia, Jane, Linnea, and Ben came over as well to say their goodbyes (thanks, Olivia, for the pizza!). I hope the Kims return to San Francisco soon.

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the boys, working on wetpixel quarterly

Just a few miscellaneous photos from the past couple of weeks: Joe and Rachel stopped by one night and shared some fantastic news, and GG made a surprise visit from Sydney. There are also a few photos of a late night working on the next issue of Wetpixel Quarterly.

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Ron and Valerie Taylor recently sent me a few autographed copies of Blue Water, White Death, which really made my day (thank you, Ron and Val!!). If you are a fan of the ocean and have never seen BWWD, I recommend that you buy and watch it immediately. It is a real classic. In fact, I should have a showing at my place once I’ve unpacked enough to host something.

I don’t know why I need three autographed copies, but since they all have my name on them, I suppose I’ll be keeping them all unless I find another “Eric” that I like enough to give one to. (read more »)

This is going to be interesting. Let’s say my flight starts on day 1. I fly from Yap (in the Federated States of Micronesia) to Guam and arrive a full day after I leave (on day 2, 25.5 hours later in calendar time). I spend the night in Guam, and wake up on day 3. Then, I fly from Guam to Honolulu and lose 2 calendar days, arriving back in time on day 1. After a short layover, I get on a plane to New York from Honolulu, and arrive the next morning, on day 2.

Entering this itinerary into my travel calendar was not easy.

Things are spilling out of my brain these days, and in order to catch them in a way that won’t cause chaos, I’ve started mind mapping again. It seems to be helping.

This mindmap above was made with NovaMind, which I’m thinking of purchasing once the trial period expires.

This image has been sent to me so many times that I thought I’d finally post it (presumably sent to me because it includes a “shark attack” item). I’m told that there are an average of five reported fatalities by shark attack each year, worldwide. This year, I believe there have been four high-profile, shark-related deaths so far. We’re ahead of schedule, it seems. (read more »)

To add to the iPhone blog mayhem, I thought I’d write down some thoughts about my first week using iPhone’s firmware v2.0. I’m using 2.0 on the original iPhone; I have driven by Apple and AT&T stores numerous times in futile attempts to procure a 3G model, but I’m simply unwilling to wait in line to get a phone. I did, however, get a chance to play with Kenny’s phone while I was in Oregon, and it is indeed much faster in side-by-side tests when compared to my EDGE model (although Kenny complained about battery life on 3G and also said that subjectively, it didn’t feel very fast). (read more »)

sand at a beach in manzanita, oregon coast

The wind blows so hard outside that it creates dunes on the beach, and each day, signs of human activity are erased (except for the dead trees from the logging industry that litter the coast).

Vienna Teng and Alex Wong work with Eddie Jackson @ Dubway Studios

As many of you know, I went to New York for a few days last month to record with Vienna Teng in the studio. It was my first time recording in a non-classical setting, and I had a lot of fun (both recording and hanging out). Here are a bunch of photos from the shoot, which took place at Dubway Studios. (read more »)

Wordpress 2.6 was just announced, and I have upgraded this journal. It only took one command in the shell to do this — I highly recommend using Subversion to check out / upgrade your Wordpress install. It’s really the best way.

All of my plugins re-activated successfully except for Alex’s Popularity Contest, which simply required changing one line of code to activate.

Incidentally, I’m using Mike’s modified version of Popularity Contest because it plays well with wp-cache. It seems to be working fine, and required the same code change as the original version in order to be activated without a fatal error in Wordpress 2.6.

Here’s an interesting statistic on why no Wordpress installation should be without Akismet: in the 2 minutes that the plugin was inactive, I received two comment spams. They went into moderation, but I’d go insane if Akismet wasn’t active in my plugin list.

Also, the iPhone Mobile Admin plugin doesn’t work on Wordpress versions past 2.3, which is unfortunate. I found it to be really useful.

Finally, if you upgrade to 2.6 and have Google Gears installed, be sure to click on the “Turbo” link in the upper-right hand corner of your admin interface to enable Gears for the Wordpress admin interface.

Let me know if you see any anomalies around here!

This may be common knowledge for those of you who live in S3 land, but it took me awhile to figure out.

If you’re on Mac OS X or have access to a system with Ruby on Rails installed, it’s easy to delete a bucket and all of its keys. (read more »)

I’ve started uploading little video clips to ECHENG.COM. It’s about time my website had more video content! (read more »)

Here are the iPhone firmware 2.0 applications that I have installed and think are useful.

(read more »)

A friend gave me a tip today about how to take a screenshot on any iPhone running firmware 2.0. Press the sleep and home buttons simultaneously. The screen will flash white, and a screenshot will be saved into your Camera Roll as a .png image. (read more »)