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 »)

side of a food van, okinawa, japan

I found these today while looking at photos from Okinawa, and thought they deserved to be posted again. I should probably submit them to Engrish.com. (read more »)

I don’t know why it took me so long to discover the conflict, but Wordpress’ Lightbox and PicLens plug-ins don’t work so well together. When both installed, PicLens works, but Lightbox freezes if you try to navigate to another image while one is already displayed.

I put out a cry for help using Twitter, and Cor Bosman wrote back with the answer. It was in Cor’s best interest to figure out the problem, anyway, because he’s using a similar system. :)

The problem is that lightbox-2 and wp-piclens both use a function called “pause()”. “Pause” is so common that I’m amazed that someone would use it in javascript code.

To fix the problem, we just renamed all instances of “pause” in lightbox-2’s lightbox.js to something else.

me, with Vienna Teng in the cottage

On Sunday, June 29, 2008, I drove up to Healdsburg to see Vienna Teng perform at the C. Donatiello winery. It was the first paid show of their new music series, and the venue was really great. Seating was cafe style (holding about 150 guests), and Vienna performed from a stage just overlooking the seating area. (read more »)

View Photos »

I had a great time in New York at the end of June. Even though the primary reason for the trip was to record in the studio with Vienna Teng, I had plenty of time to see friends. Al let me stay at his place again, which was great. On my way out, I left him a surprise on the 8-screen trading station in his office.

New York Highlights: fantastic Indian food with Al Vinjamur, Matt Shattuck, and Al’s friend, lunch with Matt Moreno, a ride on the Roosevelt Island tram with Vienna, brunch with Bev, Jason Heller’s surprise birthday party, coffee with Victor Wishna, pizza with Tony, and dinner with Heidi Connal.

I don’t really like New York so much, but I love the people who happen to be there.

View Photos »

On the way home from Healdsburg last weekend, Bill and I stopped in West Portal to have lunch with Mandy, Elliot, and Aaron at the rat poo restaurant. Since I wrote about it already, I just wanted to post some photos.

Oh, and there was a super-cute, huge dog on the sidewalk outside. She didn’t care what anyone did, so I walked up and stuck a camera in her face.

View Photos »

A 21-year old Vietnamese-Australian girl named Natalie responds to a racist message. Awesome.

Can you imagine having millions of views as a video blogger?
(her other videos are great, too)

Andy Biggs and James Wiseman in Houston

Andy Biggs and James Wiseman took me out to lunch during a layover in Houston last month (on my way back from Bonaire). During lunch, an old man in coveralls (I’m told that’s what they were) spontaneously stood up and sang a patriotic song.

“Welcome to Texas,” Andy remarked.

Indeed.

After Andy and James dropped me back off at the airport, Caroline came and hung out for a bit, and we geeked out, chatting about streaming video until I had to run through security to catch my flight.

Thanks for the company, guys!

A friend of mine invited me to join Doostang, “an invite-only career community started at Harvard, Stanford, and MIT.”

OK, I get that. That’s sort of my community, so I joined, imported my LinkedIn profile (neat feature!), and invited some of my friends to connect. The site seemed to do the right thing, which was to identify from my contact list the people who were already Doostang members and to only ask them to connect. But shortly after, I received an email from a friend who tried to accept my invitation, only to be rejected because the link put her “on the Doostang welcome page…. and there’s no way to register or login unless you’ve been invited by a Doostang member…”

So does that mean that I inadvertently invited my entire contact list to be members of Doostang? I hate it when people add me to social networks without my permission, and I hope that I didn’t just spam everyone. If so, that qualifies as unforgivable trickery on the part of Doostang.

Speaking of being invited without permission, the person who solicited me to join Doostang used my personal e-mail address instead of my public one, so I was forced to add my other e-mail addresses and try to change my listed primary address. I added three more e-mail addresses, but none of those actions resulted in having a verification e-mail sent as promised. I went back to the e-mail address list and re-sent the verification e-mail (link cleverly hidded under “edit”), and finally received a verification e-mail, but upon clicking the link, Doostang said, “Invalid link for email verification.”

Doostang isn’t inspiring confidence. The people in their target “elite” market are probably not very forgiving of poor technical and interface design, and may not continue to use the site if it continues to throw strange errors.

Plus, I’m not really looking for a new job, so I’m not sure why I joined to begin with.

Finally, “Doostang?” Are you serious?

Urban Dictionary has a definition for what the word might mean, but it’s not one that they will want to be associated with their business.

This has become somewhat of a tradition at the Bonaire Digital Shootouts. :) (read more »)

I can’t imagine the amount of work that went into this video, which was done by an Italian artist named BLU. It’s around 7 minutes long, and is worth every second of the time it takes to watch it. (via gizmodo)

I just booked a ticket to Amsterdam with travel during high season. The ticket was $940 plus taxes. $529 in taxes (!). Total rapeage.

$940 + $529 = $1445

Tax breakdown:
$290 security surcharge
$117 fuel surcharge
$122 other taxes

$290 in security surcharges plus $117 fuel surcharge? Man. Someone is making lots of money on the war, and it isn’t us.