While I was at Beneath the Sea in East Rutherford, New Jersey, Douglas Seifert and Emily Irving were enjoying all 9 Beethoven symphonies in Manhattan. They managed to drag Marit Miners away for dinner one night (although, dinner with Douglas and Emily is a vegetarian nightmare), and Susy and Stan Waterman for a night of music.
I didn’t get to see Douglas and Emily until Monday; we met at Ippudo for an 11am bowl of ramen and heavenly pork buns, elbowing our way past an entire busload of Japanese tourists to get our table.
@pyknosis I use Crashplan and really like it, although I use it for in-house backups. Offsite: DropBox + harddisk at friend's place. ;). in reply to pyknosis#
I highly recommend DropBox to everyone concerned about backing up data. Install it. Work out of it. Couldn't be easier! http://ech.cc/a4LWXv#
If you are going to sign up for DropBox, give me a referral! (click though to DropBox) http://ech.cc/9pt0eU#
I want to do a bottled vs tap water taste test (I am sensitive — can taste difference between the 2 taps in my house). #
Given that I send about 1 fax per month, I may just start using FaxZero at $1.99 per fax (15 pages max). #
Wah wah wah… RT @tonywu: @sterlingz Exported file via Aperture after 3.0.2 update. Still no metadata visible in Photoshop #
@sterlingz @tonywu Apple has never taken image metadata seriously: has always had errors in output, ridiculously slow search, no hierarchies in reply to sterlingz#
@tonywu It reads metadata from the .thm file. You can add keywords and other meta, but it doesn't sync back to XMP. Plays in default app. in reply to tonywu#
@sterlingz @tonywu LR3 import speed seems to be much faster as well. I am liking where LR3 is going! But I wish I could output XMP for video in reply to sterlingz#
I just ambushed Leandro Blanco as he got off the elevator with his guitar in hand. #BTS#
Noted marine biologist Dr. Eugenie Clark asked me to come to her book signing today so we could meet. The word on the street is true: Eugenie is one of the nicest people ever! I’ve been sending her images for years for a paper she is working on about Plotosus, and feel like our paths should have crossed long ago.
I’ve been updating Wetpixel with coverageof Beneath the Sea 2010 here in New Jersey.
I had two big surprises today.
The first was meeting Carl Roessler, who came up and introduced himself during tonight’s BTS Caymans party. Yes, this is the Carl that Carl’s Ultimate is named after; while spending 6 days on Carl’s Ultimate out in the Eastern Fields of Papua New Guinea, my esteem for Carl went up and up with every dive — what a man he must be to have such an incredible thing named after him! Meeting him in person did not disappoint.
Meeting Carl Roessler at BTS 2010 (photo: Abi Smigel)
And speaking of diving pioneers, Bret Gilliam went on stage at tonight’s film festival to announce his generous donation of 1250 copies of Diving Pioneers and Innovators to Beneath the Sea attendees. But he started by asking a select group of diving pioneers to come up on stage. He ended the list with… me! I was shocked, and ambled up to the stage in my cargo pants and fleece jacket, looking positively silly next to incredibly distinguished folks, who all were in formal attire: Bret, Stan Waterman, Mike deGruy, Zale Perry, Dr. Phil Nuytten, and others. We proceeded to stand up there for 15-20 minutes as Bret continued his donation speech.
After the film festival, Eli, Abi and I went over to the Caymans afterparty to have a drink. As I went to photograph Bret signing copies of this book, he proceeded to tell everyone that I should also sign the book. Since I’m not actually in the book, this caused some confusion:
“Hi, Eric! Will you sign my book?” (confused look)
“Eric… Cheng? I’ve never seen any of your work, but someone told me that you were going to be… or are… famous..?”
Hah!
I wrote, “Have a nice summer!” in one woman’s book, but then crossed it out and wrote a real message.
Bret Gilliam signs copies of Diving Pioneers and Innovators
I am enjoying using Disqus‘s comment engine a lot, but its comment count is totally wrong. In the main journal view, comment counts are correct, but in single page views, they are off by hundreds.
I have a support ticket in with Disqus and hope to hear from them soon.
Stock video footage / show reel of a reptilian snake eel (Brachysomophis henshawi) and a white-eyed moray (Siderea thysoidea) eel, taken with an underwater endoscope (wide-angle macro). Lembeh Strait, Indonesia.
Footage shot with a Canon EOS 7D digital SLR in High Definition 1080p @ 29.97fps, H.264 @ 40Mbps.
Apologies for the obnoxious timecode in the middle. I’ll edit all of my footage from Lembeh into a best-of video as soon as I can!
The first thing I really like about Disqus is that it brings community from other services back into my website. Disqus looks at Twitter, Friendfeed, and other services and pulls in “reactions,” which are posts that contain links to a given journal entry. It will even resolve shortened URLs.
This sort of feature is exactly the reason I moved over to Disqus from WordPress’ standard commenting engine. There is one issue, however. Because I use Alex King’s Twitter Tools, each journal entry is also posted as a tweet to my personal Twitter account. Disqus picks all of these entries up as reactions, which is something I’d rather it not do. This would be a difficult thing to try to filter out, so I’m not expecting it to be added as a feature anytime soon.
Another feature that shouldn’t be overlooked is that people can simply reply to a comment notification email to reply to a comment.
I met with Michael Topolovac today, who recently embarked upon a new project that requires a lot of research into social media and networking. During the meeting, Mike pointed me to Disqus, a commenting system that can easily be plugged into a variety of websites. Upon doing some more research, I decided that I wanted to use Disqus or a similar commenting system here on echeng.com.
I read up on both Disqus and Intense Debate and chose Disqus (for no real reason).
Installation was pretty simple, but the first export of WordPress comments to Disqus (which is called “import” in all of the documentation) failed (generic error — “try again!” they said). The second export seemed to work, but I noticed that I lost the 1 comment still in moderation on the WordPress side. Too bad.
Because Disqus keeps WordPress comments and its own comments in sync, I should — in theory — be able to swap Disqus out for another commenting engine in the future. I’ve read that syncing breaks when users edit their comments or when moderators delete comments, but those issues will hopefully be ironed out as the product develops.
Hanging out with Paul Ng and Lena Goh in Singapore for a night. #
@sterlingz Trying Postbox. No unified inbox! I'll see if smart folders will do as a work-around; otherwise, it is a deal-killer. in reply to sterlingz#
@sterlingz Postbox import ended up with few hundred msgs without subject or recipient. Any problems with your import? in reply to sterlingz#
@sterlingz it was easy to spot. They have no date, so they all show up as latest msgs when sorted decreasing by date. in reply to sterlingz#
I've never found a Mac OS multi-clipboard manager that I've continued to use in the long run. Anyone have any suggestions? #
@ggoodale I'm a Quicksilver user, but maybe I should try Launchbar. I've heard great things about it. in reply to ggoodale#
@sterlingz Trying LaunchBar now. I don't use many of the advanced features of Quicksilver, so I suspect I will prefer LaunchBar. in reply to sterlingz#
I read a lot, and much of what I read lives on the web. However, I rarely actually read documents on the web, preferring to read them offline during time away from the computer (e.g. when I’m waiting in line for something).
Instapaper and Read It Later are two services that reduce the queuing of articles for offline reading to single click actions. I happen to use Read It Later because of flexibility in apps (Instapaper focuses on iPhone), but they are both fantastic. Both offer free versions of their iPhone apps1 and paid $4.99 Pro versions that support things like HTML caching (as opposed to text-only reading). I find the pro versions to be worth every penny of their cost.
Here’s a 1-minute demonstration of me pulling an entry from my journal into Read It Later:
I’ve not found a good way to use Read It Later on my Kindle (Instapaper is supposed to have decent Kindle support), but this isn’t such a big issue because I find the iPod Touch to be more than suitable for reading articles offline. Also, the device is always with me. Instapaper also supports list sharing, which is something that might convince me to switch over, but I suspect that in practice, I’d rather just read the things that my friends tweet about because the act of explicit sharing doubles as a filter for good content.
Other apps I use also support Read It Later, including Firefox (via add-on), Google Reader and NewsRack (iPhone), Tweetie 2 (iPhone), and mobile Safari. This covers most of the applications I use to read online content, so anything I read can instantly be flagged for offline reading on another device.
If you are a consumer of web articles, you absolutely need to get on one of these services. They’re both free, so there’s no excuse not to do so!
@uwWestmorland Awesome, Stuart. I want to plan a trip for the aurora, but have been put off by being at the trough of the 22 year cycle. in reply to uwWestmorland#
Arrived safely in Manado with all my bags. Biggest hurdle is over! #
It's great when you live in a time when you can accidentally download the wrong 11 gigabyte archive and have it not be a big deal. #
RT @sterlingz: New pin code lock is very welcome feature in @dropbox 1.1. @evernote – can you add this to your iPhone app already? #
I'm still averaging around 80MB/s transfer rate to and from my Netgear ReadyNAS Pro. Highly recommended NAS box! http://ech.cc/9YGrx5#
Is this $5 better than NetNewsWire? RT @sterlingz: Newsrack – finally an iPhone RSS Reader that's actually usable: http://zum.bz/ajkFre#
@sterlingz OK. I'm sold. I use ReadItLater, Delicious, Twitter and Bit.ly APIs, and it will be welcome to have that all in an RSS reader. in reply to sterlingz#
Test from Newsrack: Laptop storage and workflow – Wetpixel :: Underwater Photography … http://ech.cc/df583B#
Journal RSS 