This video is probably only hilarious if you don’t understand German. Oh yeah, you probably have to be a Twitter user, too. :)

“And that stupid fail whale!”

HAHAHAHA!

Every time I get an email from Al, it is a wonderful opportunity. (read more »)

Since I moved into my new cave, I’ve been obsessed with light and the position of the sun. For a period of a week, I spent an hour a day browsing light therapy and 5500°K lighting products. I even bought some, and have asked a designer to look into huge light panels for the wall (preferably LED to avoid any further baking from heat given off by generating light).

It’s a good thing I’m located right in the middle of everything here in San Francisco. I’m driven out of the house by hunger nearly every day, and luckily, summer days are long,and it’s almost always still light when I venture out. I’m glad that I’m getting a good dose of natural light every day, even if I am not getting much of it when I sit here in front of my computer.

Plus, I’m isolated here, and it’s really the only time I get to see people. I guess people watching is better than nothing.

My personalized Google homepage has adapted to my new obsession, and the entire right-hand column is now full of statistics on celestial bodies and time. Since I can’t tell where the sun is from inside here, I guess I’ll have to rely on the interwebs.

So… yeah, I love my new place. But it has its drawbacks.

I went to Taqueria Cancun last night (the one at Mission/18th) with Jake, and found a taqueria I nearly didn’t recognize. There was no free water, and during our entire dinner, only 3 Latinos came in to eat. Instead, it was a bunch of well-dressed folks — Caucasians and Asians, mostly — plus the occasional rail-thin hipster in a striped sport coat and funky hat.

the good ol’ burrito mojado

However, the burrito mojado was as I remembered it to be, as was the nasty ambient smell, which only materialized after a yuppie asked a staff member to close the door because it was too cold outside.

Can anyone recommend a good taqueria in SOMA? I know there is a Taqueria Cancun at Market/6th, but it doesn’t seem like there are many more in the area.

I love things that make me laugh out loud. Good night! (thanks, Raven)

A user on my Asian Blush forum has read through and summarized the nearly 1,000 posts in the thread on using H2 blockers like Pepsid to combat turning red when drinking alcohol — a truly Herculean accomplishment.

Here it is: community summary of using Pepsid to combat Asian Blush

Underwater Photography Collage, by Eric Cheng

Enjoy! You can also download some larger versions below, which might be suitable as desktop backgrounds.

Download: [download 1024 px] [download 1920 px]

Michele/Erik sent me yet another screaming turtle sighting. This time, it’s some dude’s Asus EEE PC desktop background (horribly distorted). I assume it’s a dude because I’ll bet 99% of EEE PC users are dudes. (read more »)

There is a Reuters article about Leptotyphlops carlae, a snake species that scientists are calling the world’s smallest snake. Two of the little guys were found in 2006 in a forest in Barbados.

In April, I saw what looked like a little worm wriggling around on the ground floor of our cottage in Kerala, India. We picked it up and took photos of it, and eventually concluded that it had to be a snake of some sort. Here’s a photo:

tiny snake in Dave Patchen’s palm

same photo, cropped closer

The snake was tiny — probably about the same size as the one the scientists in the article are talking about. I wonder if these snakes are related.

If this were an underwater photo, I would be strung up for having touched wildlife. But it’s not, so I guess I’m safe…

UPDATE: I sent this photo to Dr. Hedges, and he responded:

Thanks for your message! What you may have seen is a different species, the Flowerpot Blindsnake (Ramphotyphlops braminus)–also called the Brahminy Blindsnake–a species originally from Indonesia but introduced all over the world, including Florida, Hawaii, India, etc. It is very common. It is usually blackish like that and has very small young (<4 inches) that can fit on a coin but the adults are larger than the adults of the Barbados Threadsnake.

Has anyone out there successfully calibrated and profiled Dell’s 30″ 3008WFP LCD? I recently took delivery of one, and am having a hard time getting colors to look right in a way that makes me confident. I’m using a Monaco Optix XR Pro, which I also use to calibrate my older 30″ Dell 3007FP LCD.

Because the 3007FP doesn’t have custom RGB control, I profiled the display at a native color temperature @ 2.2 gamma and only calibrated it using brightness and contrast controls. The native color temperature is actually fairly warm and is pleasing to the eye. I’m not working in the optimal lighting environment; my space is full of 3100°K halogen lights, and all I have at the moment is a single 5500°K bias light to light up my desktop area. But I’ve never been surprised by printed or web colors produced while working on the profiled 3007FP.

The 3008WFP has custom RGB control, so I thought I’d give D65 calibration a try. Adjusting custom RGB to R99, G95 B97 seemed to do the trick, and the Monaco hummed along, happily creating a D65 profile for me.

I first noticed something strange when Facebook’s gray background bars all turned pink.

The 3008WFP D65 profile by Monaco failed miserably. I set the monitor back to the “Desktop” preset, which is presumably a native color temperature, and re-calibrated and profiled using the “native” setting in the Monaco software. The colors look fine now, but are significantly cooler than are colors on the 3007FP, which sits right next to it.

Dell 3007FP on left, Dell 3008WFP on right

But which colors are accurate? I have no idea. At this point, I have faith in the color fidelity of either display. I have no idea what the 3008WFP is doing in the “Desktop” preset. I also tried setting both the monitor’s preset and Mac OS X color profile to AdobeRGB, but that had the effect of make things look a bit too saturated. Setting both to sRGB made for a very “natural” feel, but again, I am not sure if it’s accurate.

I should never I have sold my Sony Artisan.

Aaron and Natalie drove up to the city to have brunch with me in Portrero Hill (two Portrero brunches in 2 days!). We went to Universal Cafe, which featured a most excellent brunch menu.

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susan and brad @ universal cafe

Brad (of Cracottes dolphin fame) and Susan Brown drove up a couple of weeks ago to have brunch with me at Slow Club. It was really great to hang out with Brad and Susan; I hadn’t seen them since the Digital Shootout 2007 in Bonaire.

I love brunch in Portrero Hill. I like the food, ambiance, parking availability, and the relative lack of hipsters when compared to some other areas (like the area I happen to live in now).

Anyway, you can see some of their work. They are good shooters!

Today is Eric complain day.

I went to the San Francisco DHL office to pick up a package, and the driver for my neighborhood told me that DHL has cut a lot of the drivers and office staff, and that it ultimately “affects the customers more than it does [the staff].”

“I called you on Tuesday to attempt delivery,” she said.

What I’m wondering is why that was the first and last attempt.

My package had a delivery attempt on July 28, and no reattempts thereafter. The phone at DHL’s SF office (which is housed in a trailer right now) rings off the hook, and has been doing so for more than 2 days. Even DHL headquarters can’t reach them; I spoke with several service agents by phone (all excellent, by the way) who said that SF was unreachable by both phone and internal messaging system.

3:22pm “A supervisor will call you within 30 minutes.”

5:15pm “A supervisor never called you?”

No.

I suggest avoiding DHL if you live in San Francisco. I had to physically go to their trailer/office in order to find out what was going on with my package, which arrived barely in one piece, with a big hole in the side.

I finally purchased a second monitor and fired up Aperture in dual-monitor mode. It’s too bad dual-monitor support is broken.

8,192,000 pixels of dual suck

My main monitor is a Dell 3008WFP 30″ LCD connected to an ATI Radeon X1900 XT in PCIe Slot-1 (x16 lane width). My second monitor is a Dell 3007FP 30″ LCD connected to an NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT in PCi Slot-4 (x8 lane width).

Using Aperture in any secondary display mode resulted in the primary display exhibiting two rendering anomalies:

1. extreme posterizing in 100% (zoom) view
2. some images render as black (no image) in the “normal” fit-to-window view

The secondary display content worked fine. Screenshots of the window produced no artifacts, but the rendered display looked terrible. The crap render persisted when I dragged the main Aperture window from the primary display to the secondary display, so it isn’t a monitor or video card issue.

In frustration, I disconnected the second monitor from the NVIDIA card and re-connected it to the second DVI-D port on the ATI Radeon X1900 XT. Everyone seems to work now.

I kept the stupid NVIDIA card just so I could use it with a second monitor. Now, it appears better to have a single card than to attempt to use two.

Come on, Apple! Get your shit together. You only have to deal with, what, 4 video cards drivers on the Mac Pro? You’d think they would work flawlessly.

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 »)

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 »)