After upgrading to Mac OS X Lion, I booted into Windows 7 / Boot Camp and experienced constant Blue Screens of Death (BSODs). Windows would boot, but I’d only have a minute or two before getting a BSOD citing “cache_manager” as the culprit.
The fix was to rename the Apple HFS driver, which can be found at:
Windows/system32/drivers/AppleHFS.sys
After renaming that file and restarting (BSOD helped me to restart quickly!), Windows 7 became usable again. Note that this will prevent Windows from being able to see your Mac OS X file system (not a big deal, for me).
I flew to New York for a Friday meeting and ended up getting stuck here for a few days during Hurricane Irene, which prompted the first MTA shutdown from bad weather in history. While in New York, I have been generously hosted by Heidi—thank you, Heidi!
Luckily, the hurricane turned out to be rather mild, and we slept through the high winds and heavy rain, waking up to a calm day outside. The only signs of the hurricane were a bunch of downed trees and the folks whom had come out to photograph them. I put a few pictures up over at Flickr.
Performance artist Alice Newstead hangs herself from shark hooks at LUSH Cosmetics in San Francisco to draw attention to the plight of sharks and to garner support for AB 376, a proposed bill that will ban shark fins in California. Event organized and sponsored by LUSH Cosmetics and Shark Savers.
Here is a 3D video of a whale shark feeding at the surface during a huge whale shark aggregation in Isla Mujeres, Mexico. I shot it on August 15, 2011, using a GoPro 3D HERO System and an Eye of Mine 3D flat lens housing (a flat-lens solution is required for a GoPro to focus properly underwater).
The video is best viewed at 720p in some sort of 3D mode.
If you own a 3D display at home, you can download a higher-quality side-by-side version for local display (~99MB; link is good for 500 downloads; if it fails, please let me know). The downloadable video is still highly-compressed and doesn’t quite convey the same 3D coolness that original version does, but it is still effective!
Kieran Liu, age 5, had a special experience during his first moments in the ocean as a snorkeler. Showing no fear whatsoever, Kieran swims madly at a 30-foot whale shark, trying to get as close as he can!
Video shot by Eric Cheng in Isla Mujeres, Mexico on August 18, 2011.
Day 3 of the 3rd Wetpixel whale shark expedition in Isla Mujeres, Mexico: We’ve had 3 days of whale shark action so far, and each day has given us something different (but spectacular). The first day, a couple hundred whale sharks were spread out in a rather long stretch of the glassy-calm ocean. The water was relatively clear, considering that it was completely full of transparent tunny eggs from the mass-spawning event three nights earlier. Whale sharks gulped down eggs around us from 8am until our boat left (at 1:30pm).
On the second day, we discovered a small patch of ocean with hundreds of tightly-packed whale sharks. They were so dense that they were forced to feed in layers, and we saw as many sharks ascending and descending as we did on the surface of the ocean (very rare). Our guides were totally excited, saying that the ocean was infestado with whale sharks. After thirty minutes of total whale-shark insanity, the sharks vanished in a coordinated descent into the depths—it was totally bizarre. One minute, we were surrounded by literally hundreds of sharks, and the next, there were only a few left on the surface. All of us, including the local guides, were totally dumbfounded by the strange behavior.
Today (day 3), we found the sharks 4 miles east and 2 miles south of where they were yesterday. It took a coordinated search effort by multiple boats to find them (which took 3.5 hours on the water), and we weren’t in the water until 9:45am. The action was fantastic, with botellas almost literally everywhere we looked (a botella is a stationary whale shark that is vertical in the water, “gulping” water constantly to feed.
I’ve been shooting with both a Nauticam-housed Canon 7D with Tokina 10-17 fisheye zoom lens, and with a 3D GoPro HERO setup (with Eye of Mine 3D underwater GoPro housing). The 3D GoPro setup has been yielding some very interesting footage because I can get the camera in places where a big housing can never go (e.g. right in front of a whale shark that is cruising at speed). I have some interesting 3D footage that I’d love to present, but two failed upload attempts to YouTube are enough; I’ll upload when I return to the States.
In the meantime, here’s a 3D screen-grab from the video (red/cyan 3D glasses required):
3D whale shark gulp with GoPro 3D HERO camera / Eye of Mine 3D underwater housing
I also have cute / precious footage of Kieran Liu (the 5-year-old son of my friends Kenny and Lori) swimming madly after a whale shark (and managing to get really, really close). He is fearless!
I had a kernel panic today (quad-core iMac running Mac OS X 10.6.8), and when my Mac started up again, the Command and Option keys on my keyboard (a Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard 4000) were reversed. Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal—one just goes to the Keyboard Preference Pane and changes the modifier key settings to swap the two keys. But in this case, no amount of changing the modifier key settings had any effect. This is incredibly frustrating for someone who is nearly 100% keyboard shortcut dependent.
After over half an hour of trying various things like rebooting, resetting PRAM, trashing assorted .plist and preference files, I finally unplugged the Logitech wireless transmitter that talks to my Logitech Performance MX mouse and set modifier key behavior using an Apple Magic Mouse. It worked, and the settings stuck even after I plugged in the Logitech Unifying Device (the USB transceiver). Strangely, if I go to the modifiers preference now, it shows that it has reverted to default, even though my keyboard suggests otherwise.
If you’ve discovered this site because you have same problem, unplug your Logitech mouse and make the changes again using an Apple mouse. I hope it works for you!
SHARKS! Video grab from a dive at the south pass of Fakarava
This is a screen grab from a video I took while diving the south pass of Fakarava (Tumakohua). There are hundreds of gray reef sharks there, just hanging out in the current. It was every bit as incredible as it was the last time I was there.
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