Don, Racquel and me at the Palace of Fine Arts

Me: “Oh… thanks. Um, can you take the shot again? This time, aim the middle of the camera right here.” (points at Racquel’s head)

Buy me on eBay!

I’ve put my MTRON 32GB 2.5″ SATA SSD on eBay. It is the same one I used for these benchmarks.

This is driving me crazy. In Windoze-land, hitting Home will take you to the beginning of a line of text, and End will take you to the end of the line. I had grown quite used to this and relied on it a lot. In Mac OS X, the respective keyboard shortcuts are CMD-left arrow and CMD-right arrow.

The problem is that in web browsers on the Mac, CMD-left arrow is Go Back, and CMD-right arrow is Go Forward. The browsers are typically smart enough to detect whether or not your cursor is in a textarea, but that detection isn’t 100% reliable. Sometimes, I hit CMD-left arrow while I am typing inside a textarea, and the browser goes back a page; I usually lose everything I happened to be typing. I’ve probably lost a small book’s worth of text over the last two years.

Anyone have a workaround?

Curses! My show at 50 Fremont was taken down early. I went tonight in the hopes of getting some good photos as documentation of the show. :(

I’m going to load my Kindle with tons of books before I leave for extended travels this coming November, and I’d like to get some recommendations. What should I read? :)

Mom and me, a long time ago

I ran across this photo just now. My mom was younger in this photo than I am now. I’m behind!!

Since everyone I know seems to be on reality shows these days, I thought I’d push another show. This one will be on NBC.

Shark Taggers follows a bunch of marine biologists as they tag sharks in Brazil (and other places). It just so happens that that marine biologists are led by Dr. Samuel Gruber and a bunch of the people I spent time with at the Bimini Biological Field Station back in 2003.

Back at PIT 2003: Mangroves at night! bug jackets! sharks! fun!

Anyway, I am excited to see both Whale Wars and Shark Taggers! And this, from someone who doesn’t like reality shows. :)

Animal Planet premiers Whale Wars this coming November 7, 2008 (Fridays at 9 PM)! I will be around to see the first 2-3 episodes air¹ before leaving for… uh…

Crap. Am I supposed to tell my parents the whole story?

Anyway, you might recognize this girl from some recent posts. Hey, I know someone who is on TEE-VEE!

I had lunch with Kim and some of the folks working on Whale Wars at the Animal Planet building in New York last week. It was really exciting to get to go into the editing room to see a sneak preview.

Currently, most of my sensitive data is encrypted via encrypted sparse images, but I find managing encrypted volumes to be a pain in the butt (mount, unmount, mount, unmount).

I recently purchased PGP Desktop for Mac, which (finally) features pre-boot whole disk encryption. I love the idea that my drive(s) would be encrypted, and that a password would be required even before boot, but I wasn’t sure what kind of performance hit I’d get if I used PGP on an entire volume. And so, I ran some benchmarks. (read more »)

I found an article on sixgill sharks which states that sixgills have “small, flourescent [sic] green eyes with a black pupil.”

That a perfect example of a writer writing about something he/she has never seen before. In many photographs, the eyes of a sixgill shark do glow green, but that is because sixgills have a tapetum lucidum (like cats do), which reflects light (and thus, appear to glow green when the light source is close to the camera’s lens). In fact, I’ve seen shark eyes reflect like frickin’ laser beams at night when the light source is moved around a bit. It’s creepy.

I’m going to write an article about cats. I found this photo:

Photo: Una Smith (Creative Commons)

… and have concluded that cats have one fluorescent green eye, one glowing red eye, and generally look pissed off. (read more »)

Two OCZ Core Series v2 SATA II 120GB SSDs in a MacBook Pro

(Blah blah blah. Skip to the benchmarks.)

Six months ago, I put a 32GB MTRON MSD 3000 SSD drive in my MacBook Pro as a system drive and ran a Samsung 160GB IDE/ATA drive as a data drive in the slot normally taken up by a SuperDrive.

At the time, the MTRON MSD 3000 SSD appealed to me because it is a single-level cell (SLC) SSD, which tends to perform evenly and consistently, especially when being accessed at smaller transfer sizes. Cheaper drives use multi-level cell design (MLC), which historically has had a lower mean time between failures (MTBF), and has been less consistent in its performance. Still, big flash vendors like Samsung have recently switched from SLC to MLC for their consumer products, which suggests that a great deal of progress is being made on MLC drives. MLC drives are MUCH cheaper than are SLC drives, and most consumer solid-state drives use MLC designs, while the enterprise environment still relies on SLC. (read more »)

Kate Devaney, Eric Cheng, Al Vinjamur, Kirk Kazazian

I stayed in New York for a few days after Dave and Kim’s wedding to catch up with friends and to represent Wetpixel and Sea Shepherd at the LUSH press event.

I was excited to get to hang out some with Ella, Peter and Karine’s daughter. She is a smart one.

Special thanks to Al Vinjamur for letting me stay at his place again. Here are a bunch of photos from the week…

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Kim at the Sea Shepherd booth, LUSH press event

Kim McCoy and I manned the Sea Shepherd booth at the LUSH press event at the Hudson Hotel in New York a couple of days ago. I had never before in my life been surrounded by soap people and members of the fashion/fitness press! The female to male ratio was at least 10:1 (which is always nice). (read more »)

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tweet, tweet, fail. 1pm 9/25/08.

… well, except right now.

Actually, Twitter has been pretty reliable for me lately. I’ve been much happier with the service than I was a few months ago. It’s free, so we can’t complain.

Well, we can complain because it makes us feel better. But there is no legitimacy to the complaints. :)

New York HDR Experiment, Canon 1Ds Mk III

In the few minutes before running out for dinner, I set a tripod up and snapped a few images out of the window. They turned out OK, but I think the exposures were too long. The swaying of the building actually shows up in some of the frames!

Kim McCoy in New York

I spent most of the day fighting with encryption on the Mac. Yargh.

I did, however, get out for meals. I went to Candle Cafe 79 with Kim today, and had some really fantastic vegan food. She hates being in front of a (still) camera, but I’m trying hard to get her used to it. Met up with Tony, Scott, and Ai-Jen for dinner at Josie’s, which was also delicious.

Dave and Kim at Cipriani, New York

Did I already mention that Dave and Kim’s wedding was the most incredible wedding I’ve ever been to? I think I did. Cipriani is a great venue for weddings. It features 60′ ceilings, and Dave and Kim packed the venue with yummy appetizers, beautiful floral arrangements, club-like/dynamic lighting, a 12-piece band, and more. Pat Suh came with me (the first time I’ve ever brought anyone to a wedding), which was great because I only know most of Dave and Kim’s friends in passing (and I enjoyed getting to know you all better. :).

Here are about 40 photos from the event; most of the images are of the people I knew best, but there are plenty more on the full gallery site, which also features inexpensive print sales and full resolution downloads. Dave has the link, and should be sending it out to everyone soon!

As a side note, I shot virtually the entire wedding using a 15mm fisheye lens on my Canon 1Ds Mk III. There was a small army of hired photographers there as well, who seemed to be taking lots of portraits. I focused on shooting the mood. (read more »)

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Wedding @ Cipriani — incredible venue

I have never been to a wedding quite like this one. It was really, really well organized, and everything was pretty much perfect. There was a 12-piece band and the most insane spread of appetizers. Congrats, guys! (read more »)

I’m totally sold on CoolBook, a Mac OS X utility that sets the voltage levels supplied to a Mac’s CPU at different clock speeds. I became tired of my 2.33Ghz MacBook Pro’s fan spinning up all the time, but I didn’t want to compromise by running it a clock speed. After using CoolBook and tweaking fan settings with Fan Control , my computer is now cool and quiet most of the time. I’ve even tweaked my settings so the fan rarely spins up when I’m on battery power (and the CPU stays relatively cool). (read more »)

The Queensboro Bridge at night

Pat Suh and I went to Dave and Kim’s rehearsal dinner tonight, which was held at Water’s Edge in Long Island City. The restaurant has a beautiful view of Manhattan and the Queensboro Bridge. I was looking out the window all night wishing I had brought my tripod. Instead, I propped my camera up onto a railing and tried to hold it steady for the exposure.

Exposure details: Canon 1Ds Mk III, 24-105/4L lens @ 24mm, 0.5s @ f/4.5, ISO 1600