This may or may not be Jim’s first time eating this much fruit (he’s even been eating veggies!), but it is my first time posting a 3-D video. You can check it out if you have red/blue 3-D glasses. Sturdy ones are like $4 on Amazon.com. Paper ones are probably cheaper.

WOW — this video really suffers from compression artifacts, and the 3D effect is much less effective when compression artifacts ruin the video. I’ll have to figure out how to compress these videos so they don’t lose their “3D-ness”.

Wendy makes a wish upon her birthday candle

I have been in Southern California quite a bit over the past couple of weeks. Luckily, it all included a lot of family time. My mother was in town, visiting from Taiwan, and it was great to see her at Wendy’s graduation and for a day during the gallery set-up. Photos follow. (read more »)

Baby Liam Sather

OK, I’m not surrounded by babies at this moment. At this moment, I am surrounded by Swiss people and sharks. But I was happy to get to see baby Liam last week before leaving for San Diego and then, the Bahamas. (read more »)

Emma the tiger shark and a lemon shark friend

We are currently back at West End hiding from the weather after spending the day at Tiger Beach. We had a total of five individual tiger sharks, including Emma, our #1 supermodel! Emma’s pregnant at the moment; when she swims toward us head on, her normally large head looks tiny against the bulbous backdrop of her huge belly (which often drags on the sand — funny!). (read more »)

The Shear Water ready to depart… with one cool add-on

I convinced Jim to bring the flying boat this time. It is going to be awesome.

In a prior article, I wrote that it would sometimes take upwards of 15 seconds before my Mac would boot when OCZ SSD drives were installed. It turns out that I’m an idiot and didn’t set a startup disk, which is why the machine would sit there on a white screen for so long before starting up.

Set a startup disk, and startup is super fast.

I am on a flight from SFO to Atlanta, and it’s ridiculous. I’m in seat 44D, which turns out to be the worst seat on this Boeing 757-200 plane — the last aisle seat. I dread sitting in this seat. There is currently a line of eight people standing next to me doing all sorts of ridiculous things while waiting to use the bathroom. One elderly woman decided to rest her arm on top of my chair and rock back and forth. I asked her to stop. A guy in tight jeans decided to have a oh-so-invigorating stretch while standing next to me: he turned away and bent forward, sticking his butt into my face. I’ve been jostled by people and food carts probably thirty times since sitting down, and everyone seems to want to rest their arms, shoulders and other body parts on the back of my chair. Combine all of this with a crying, regurgitating baby, super-loud flight attendants sharing their lives with each other, and bad turbulence, and it’s one of the worst flights I’ve been on recently!

• Hey, friends. Need your help to get some signatures on an anti-shark finning petition. Takes 1 minute. Please help! http://bit.ly/gJsc4 #
• Nash no like Star Trek (spoilers) http://bit.ly/LBRQF #
• Giving Seesmic a try. Userlists across Facebook and Twitter? Yes, please (although I suspect I’ll stick with Tweetie and Facebook). #
• Added QR Codes to my online journal (click on “qrcode” in each entry to see). http://bit.ly/KAT8U #
• @gilesshaxted Read up on QR Codes! You snap photos of them on mobile devices, and they go to the page. in reply to gilesshaxted #
• Argh. #
• @corbosman Awesome, Cor. I love my Panasonic LX3. It’s the camera I use the most these days. Did you manage to find a black one? in reply to corbosman #
• Wetpixel Quarterly team meeting tonight in Oakland. Was lots of fun! #
• Which SF police station should I go to get a fix-it ticket taken care of? Went by the Bryant St. station – was a madhouse (plus, no parking) #
• @lfstewart Yeah, I’ll probably end up going to that one. Thanks for the recommendation! in reply to lfstewart #
• The police didn’t even check to see if I put front plates on my car before signing off! #
• Just finished intensive multitasking-fest. Need… sustenance… #
• Hey, anyone know where I can get a male mannequin for cheap? #
• RT: Psyched to see “V” come back. This is one of my early favorites from the 80s. http://abc.go.com/fallpreview/index?pn=v (via @adamnash) #
• I often get “shite” instead of “white” when I type “great white”. “Great shite shark.” It’s a new species! #
• @pyknosis We feature Clark Little in issue 5 of Wetpixel Quarterly. http://bit.ly/2H5A4 (re: http://is.gd/B5Cx) in reply to pyknosis #
• Thinking of swapping to Verizon MiFi from Sprint EVDO ExpressCard + Cradlepoint router + heavy battery combo. Cost to upgrade? $100. #
• A moment of quiet at my gate at SFO. Bumped into Ed Wu here — hadn’t seen him in a long time! #
• The crowd on Virgin America is strikingly young. I wonder if it’s just the SFO->SAN route. #
• Just set up (most of) my show in San Diego. Sold a print while setting up! Don’t know yet when it will open to the public. #
• Turned on iPhone after a day in airplane mode and MobileMe deleted all my contacts. iPhone #FAIL #
• Naked Cafe in Solana Beach — fantastic brunch place (esp for vegetarians)! #
• The pushy one got pulled out of line for secondary security screening. Personality profiling is satisfying! #
• @AnnabelleA What about $1399 MacBook? ;) in reply to AnnabelleA #
• Updated my herb garden timelapse video: http://bit.ly/XLvYF #

Me, in front of some of my prints (photo: Wendy Cheng)

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few weeks preparing for an upcoming underwater photography exhibition at the Taiwanese American Cultural Center (TACC) in San Diego. I’m here in San Diego now, and my father and I spent the last two days installing hanging rails, moving and unpacking crates, and finally, hanging 14 of my best prints. This is a special event for me because six years ago, the TACC hosted the first gallery space to display my work. (read more »)

Michaela Brockstedt, Laurel Stewart, Adam Lau, Jane Call, Eli & Courtney Woolery and me

Michaela hosted a Wetpixel Quarterly dinner in Oakland last week, which was a lot of fun! We all work so hard on the magazine while working other jobs. It’s good to socialize every once in awhile — it reminds us of the things that actually matter in life!

hooding ceremony 2009 at USC

Wendy was hooded at USC a week and a half ago and will be moving to NYU at the end of this summer to become a professor. I’m so proud of her! I flew down to LA, just for the day. (read more »)

Hanging out after the concert: Laural, Antoni, Eric, Pam and Thon

I really enjoyed performing with the Stanford Symphonic Chorus a week ago. Need to play cello more!

Sorry for the jumps in camera position. It’s hard to keep a little camera on a gorillapod attached to a computer and an AC adapter on a kitchen counter for days at a time without bumping it every once in awhile!

UPDATE 5/24/09 – I built a new movie and replaced the one on this page. The herbs keep growing!

UPDATE 6/9/09 – Yet another update! The garden is prospering, although I left town for 2 weeks and had a couple problems. Firstly, I couldn’t raise the lights so the tops of the fastgrowing herbs hit the lights and burned to a crisp. Secondly, the system ran out of water. I replenished the reservoir when I returned home, and all is well.

Cindy and her daughter at the Silver Phoenix book signing

Congratulations to Cindy Pon for the release of her new book, Silver Phoenix: Beyond the Kingdom of Xia! P and I went to her San Francisco book signing, which was at Books Inc. in Laurel Heights. (read more »)

I am very active both on Twitter and on Facebook. When I post a new Tweet (from my phone or various Twitter clients I use), it is reproduced as my Facebook status and also appears in a sidebar in my online journal. When I post a new message on my journal, an announcement tweet is automatically sent, which also appears as my Facebook status. It sounds very complicated, but it’s not. Install Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin for Wordpress and the Twitter app on Facebook, and you’ve reproduced my setup.

I’ve always consumed Twitter activity in Twitter and Facebook activity in Facebook. I use their respective web clients as well as Tweetie for Mac OS X, Tweetie for iPhone, Facebook for iPhone, Facebook for Blackberry, Tiny Twitter for Blackberry, Twitteberry for Blackberry (2 twitter apps for Blackberry because I haven’t found one that supports multiple logins).

If I see a tweet I want to reply to, I reply using Twitter. If I see something in Facebook I want to reply to, I reply using Facebook.

Luckily, I can’t keep up with Facebook statuses because I seem to have accumulated over 800 friends over there; this effectively makes me not even try to keep up. The Facebook news feed provides an excellent way to “Hide” news from friends and companies I don’t want to see daily information from, but it is still so overwhelming that I only really see the first page of updates when I go there for my fix.

My Twitter activity is still manageable because I only add people whose are compatible with me in Twitterland (no guilt over removing a good friend who tweets to the world every time he/she eats a bagel).

However, I do have a group of friends who, like me, duplicate tweets as Facebook statuses. I recently installed Seesmic Desktop, and for the first time, see Tweets and Facebook status updates roll in at the same time. I can reply to one or both right there in Seesmic, but the question is, in which community do I reply?

Seemic Desktop already de-dupes tweets coming in from multiple Twitter account communities. Hopefully, it will one day be able to group duplicate updates across Twitter and Facebook accounts and reply to both at the same time.

In any case, it’s nice to see attempts to harvest updates from multiple communities to provide a single place to participate online. I haven’t seen any application do it right yet, but I’m glad people are trying!

• Time to go outside to see the sky and sun. Pupils… need… constriction… #
• Japan to hunt 216 whales in northwestern Pacific for ‘research’ http://bit.ly/7Ug1A #
• I have hit the limits of my Mac Pro (processing images for Very Large Prints). #
• And… right after I wrote that last tweet, my Mac Pro froze. Argh. #
• @cindypon Thanks, cyn! It was really great to see you again, too. The bubs are huge and cute. :) in reply to cindypon #
• Body odor next to me in the theater. I can see the hair creeping out of his long-sleeved shirt. Causal or coincidental? #
• Star Trek: lens flare on maximum. (Oh, and it was awesome on IMAX) #
• Evernote for Blackberry is here!! http://bit.ly/ZqV8v #
• Made me laugh out loud: http://bit.ly/V6caZ #
• Canon 5D2, 50D, G10, Nikon D3X, D90, Sony A900 RAW files supported in Mac OS X 10.5.7 (released today): http://bit.ly/2illS #
• @chriskac Guess you’ll have to go the warranty route. That is normal proceedure for things over 30 days old, right? in reply to chriskac #
• OK, the new Apple customer care video commercial is awesome. http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/ #
• Blackberry App World isn’t ready. It locks up my Bold when run. Also, my BB has been restarting periodically since I installed it. #
• At my sister’s PhD hooding ceremony. I’m so proud of her!! #
• The PhD hood is sorta yonic. #
• @Daffs Congratulations on your hooding and graduation!! :) in reply to Daffs #
• Performing tonight at MemChu on Stanford campus: Mozart and Haydn. Should be fun! #
• Giving TripIt another try after a couple years away. @johnolilly seems to like it — a good sign. #
• @adamnash You’re going to love Star Trek. I await your multi-page, analytical blog post about the subject. in reply to adamnash #
• At Stanford (again). Livia and Robert are playing Brahms Double with Stanford Symphony tonight. #
• @adamnash let’s see if you can sneak in a spoiler in your post title. Har har har. in reply to adamnash #
• Could you please not bring your baby into the concert?! #
• WTF. 100% failure rate for AT&T mobile plan changes. Change plan or tweak feature? Blackberry stops getting email. #
• Anyone else out there on non-Enterprise Blackberry service having an email outage? (Mine’s been out since 1030p last night) #
• Tired of non-gadget people giving me gadget advice. #
• Just bumped into Chester in the alleyway. It had been too long! #

Baby Marc — so cute!

I happened to be down in Palo Alto at the same time Joe and Rachel were, so we met up at Cho’s to get a quick bite to eat. I had only seen baby Marc once before (3 months ago), and it was really nice to get to play with him again. He’s got the most beautiful big, gray eyes. (read more »)

After upgrading Missing Sync to the latest version, I stopped being able to connect my Blackberry to Blackberry Desktop Manager in Windows XP running in VMWare on Mac OS X. The RIM composite device appears in the USB menu, but connecting to it does nothing.

The culprits are two background Missing Sync processes running in Mac OS X. I used Activity Monitor to quit those processes, and my Blackberry connected in VMWare with no problems.

• Business users posing as Facebook users: if you invite me repeatedly to the same group or to too many events, I will remove you. It’s abuse. #
• Baby Jack saw a guy with a tattoo of skull and crossbones, and exclaimed, “SEA SHEPHERD!” (Jack is 2 years old). #
• The default Windows “ding” on the Bank of Bmerica ATMs — does it make anyone else nervous? #
• I am in the iCrap aisle at Marshalls. #
• Congrats to Cindy for her new book release! San Diego book launch photos are up. http://bit.ly/hKWbQ #
• I’m performing next Friday at Memorial Church, Stanford, at 8pm: http://bit.ly/zkdIM #
• Choosing images for an underwater photography show in San Diego later on this month. #
• Regarding the San Diego show: I’ll have more details soon. Stay tuned. :) #
• Amazon releases Kindle DX with 9.7″ e-ink screen: http://bit.ly/18qV8X #
• Email comes in faster than I can reply. I give up. #
• Just de-friended fake Facebook person / business number 2. There are only so many event invitations I can stand. #
• I have some Canadian currency that I got when we were at currency parity. Now, it’s like I lost 30%. Yippee… #
• Bucky Dennis catches 1060 lb hammerhead shark. What a hero, eh? You disgust me. http://bit.ly/2X307 #
• @adamnash Please wish Carolyn good luck for me! It has been way too long since I’ve seen you, and I still have a gift for you from Indo… in reply to adamnash #
• Twitter has made it big time. My friends are using it to announce new babies! #
• I hear the latest issue of Digital PhotoPro has an article about me. Anyone have a scan of the feature? ;) #
• @adamnash Your new baby has a Nash mouth. in reply to adamnash #
• Just went through 3 months of snail mail (scan / pay / file). Feel cleaner now. #
• Super slow motion wave and surfer shots by BBC. Incredible! http://bit.ly/DVD8r #
• How can I block all “Which XXX [are|do] you…” notifications from Facebook? I told you my age already — it should be obvious! #
• “Radio path unavailable?” Damn you, AT&T! #
• @macgeekpro Those stats are why I chose the Intel X25-M over other SSDs. http://is.gd/nPSf in reply to macgeekpro #
• @adamnash Way to post semi-nude photos of your wife via Twitter!! Oh, and beautiful new baby. :) in reply to adamnash #
• Headed to Cindy’s book signing. http://cindypon.com #
• At Slideluck Potshow — adam lau’s antarctica campaign show is coming up in second half! #
• Saw Tim Wheeler (Whale Wars!!), Mike Goff (junior high) and Tomo (met in NY once) at Slideluck Potshow. Small world… #
• Rehearsal at Stanford for the concert on Friday in Memorial Church. It’s going to be fun: 20+ piece orchestra and 200 singers! #
• It is waaay too early. #
• After three roadside naps, I am back from Monterey. That was painful… #

article about me in this month’s Digital Photo Pro

There is an article about me in this month’s Digital Photo Pro magazine. The print version has a small micro-portfolio of some of my work. I haven’t seen the actual issue yet, but a friend send me a scan of it (thanks, Steve!).

UPDATE: See the article here [download pdf]