Surfer Portraits
Phil, Andrew, Ro
Archive for November, 2006
Ed y Marcia World Tour update
Planning a two month trip across south east asia and India, in the space of a month and change, is no easy task. I’ve been staying up to one or two in the morning pretty much every night for the past month. I have an arsenal of resources, which I thought it’d share. The item’s on the list below have stayed open in their own tabs in my browser since the beginning. These are tools that make for good planning:
- Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree Forums - indispensable advice and suggestions. i have several active threads right now, from all legs of my trip. for the past month i’ve been on Thorn tree more then my own site (now you know where i’ve been). My Threads on Bali, Thailand, Cambodia / Vietnam and India
- My Backpack account - it’s the life blood of my operation and i’ve become a skilled user along the way. cut-n-paste directly from any web page right into backpack for printing later. it’s my own personalized guide book: Bali, Thailand / Cambodia / Vietnam, India
- Yahoo’s currency converter - amazingly handy
- Seat 61 - great resource for train and bus info. astoundingly detailed
- Kayak.com - my first stop when pricing airline tickets. doesn’t necessarily come out the cheapest, but gives a good/quick idea of what cities are connected. great web 2.0 service, makes travelocity look ancient
- Flickr - that’s right! Sometimes I’m so surprised about how off i am when i read about a location in the guide books and then check it out in flickr. navigate by tags set to ‘interestingness’, example: Hoi An (vietnam). This also works for hotels. tags really do work! I’ve also been posting in the Visit the world group and theCanon DSLR group
- DPreview Forums - the best online forums for working digital photographers. I’m bringing the Canon 5D with me and I’ll be shooting some serious amounts of photos. Gotta do what the pros do, this is where to find out
- Jeremie & Rita’s blog - I ran into these guys on the Thorn Tree forums. They have a great travel blog full of great images and useful info. They turned me on to the a driver service for Rajasthan and I am almost literally copying their exact travel plan for Raj. Without their wonderful blog to light my way, I’m not sure I’d be nearly as dialed in as I am. thanks guys!
After countless nights of research, forum posting and general back and forth, here is our rough itinerary by location. I booked the flights to Bali, Thailand, India and home, as well as first night’s hotel at the beginning of each leg. I’ve roughed out itineraries for each leg, but resisted the urge to solidify anything at all. So without further ado, here’s where the world tour stands:
- Bali: Ubud, Nusa Lembongan, Dreamland Beach & Uluwatu
- Thailand: Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Mae Hong Song and possibly Ko samui or Khao Lak
- Cambodia: Phnom Penh, Siem Rep
- Vietnam: Hanoi, Halong Bay
- India: Delhi, Varanasi, khajuraho, Agra, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, Bikaner, Deshnok, Mandawa
Needless to say, this trip is gonna be bananas and if we come home in one piece, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. I’m fully prepared to have my mind blown. With all roads leading to critical mass when we hit india, I’m glad i’ll have a month and change of traveling before we land in Delhi and just to lighten the load, I’ve been contemplating hiring a car and driver for two weeks during our trip through Rajasthan (it’s actually quite affordable). This would be a nice treat, for our last two weeks.
I’m gonna be taking some heavy pics on this trip. I’m not bringing a laptop, for weight and philosophical reasons, so I spent countless nights trolling photographer forums putting together a decent solution. After weighing all the options, I purchased two 120gb Compact Drives. These drives are basically a card reader, copying device and hard drive in one. No fancy color screen, no editing. Just raw hard drive space and simple verification of copy completion with an added bonus that they run off of rechargeable AA batteries. The idea is to have two, for redundancy’s sake, in case anything happens to one, I have another (theft, malfunction, etc…), traveling with them in separate pieces of luggage. Although with my uncanny ability to shoot 4 gigs of images in a matter of hours, I’m not sure 120gb will last the entire trip. I’ll most likely have to do to some in-camera editing or stop in various locals and dump to DVD and mail home.
Well, that’s the lion share of what i’ve been doing with my nights for the past six weeks. Almost a week til we take off to LA and then off to Asia on the 9th of Dec. I can’t believe how close it is. just around the corner. we are so ready for a good adventure…
T-Minus One Week
In one week, Marcia and I will be tying the knot. My sister rolls into town, tomorrow, from NYC and my friends from LA, arrive on Monday. Marcia’s mom and partner arrive on Monday as well and slowly but surely Friday, Dec. 1st will be here before we know it (it’s also our 2 year anniversary).
We’re both really starting to feel it now. Marcia has been doing most of the wedding planning as I’ve been planning the honeymoon. So she’s been going a little stir crazy. I’ve just begun my own stir craziness, as I looked into the mirror this morning and pictured myself as a married hombre. It definitely is starting to hit home.
Marcia and I are both getting on each other’s nerves, a little more than usual and we chalk it up to pre-wedding stress. We both have a very low stress tolerance. Even as we tried to make it as effortless as possible (without eloping), we’re still stressed out. I can’t imagine what it’d be like if 300 people were attending our wedding. Please remind me why it was that we didn’t elope again? Ah yes, the parents, sisters, brothers, family, friends etc…
Every time I look at her face, everything fades away and I dive into her big brown eyes.
i love my baby…
i love my baby…
i love my baby….
La Gloria
With the prospect of absolutely no swell going on in the bay area, the banderas bay area, we got up before the breakadawn on thursday and headed down to La Gloria for a short half-day surf trip. Indalecio has been talking up La Gloria for a month or so, 3 meter beach break, right and left, about 2 hours south of Vallarta.
Pino Suarez is the town and the turn-off. Past Ejido La Gloria, 7 kilometers down the craziest dusty road, over large sand dunes and a big broad beach, at the top of large estuary lies La Gloria, an open sea, fast and steep beach break, 4-6 feet with a nasty backwash and heavy current.
Phil graciously let us in on his secret break. And we all scrambled to jump up as fast as possible on the gnarly drops, most of us eating it heavily. We all managed to grab a few waves, but Andrew and I couldn’t quite get a grip on the mostly left handed break.
I got out the camera and the video camera, so be on the look out.
Las Carmelitas
Last night Marcia and I took Casey and Megan out to our favorite little big sunset vista restaurant joint in Vallarta, Las Carmelitas. It was great catching up with these guys again, they were last here in June and we all enjoyed the rather large margaritas and a wicked slightly cloudy sunset. The Arrachera was good as always and Casey and I traded camera shots as the girls snickered, men and their toys…
Where You Been?
So where in the hell have I been? Not surfing, that’s for sure. It’s been flatter then crepes for the past month or so.
My texan homebwoy Casey came down for a two week surf jaunt only to find foot high beach breakers. He’s been a little frustrated, but being the well mannered texan he is, he’s been awfully cheerful in the face of daily aggravation. me? I’ve resigned myself to the fact that global warming has dealt the east coast of mainland mexico a terrible hand in poker, and we’ve all folded up our cards and gone home. we’re drowning our depression in street tacos and caguamas, getting slightly larger in the waistline by the day. I’d feel guilty, but us surfers are a brotherly lot and when the scale in the bathroom starts ticking upward for one, we all follow suit.
Enough of the darkness.
Casey and I headed out to La Lancha a few days ago, crackadawn, to find absolutely nothing going on. A day later, a sunset ride at Burros, was actually pretty nice. I dragged the longboard out for some whiteboy-shuffling up to the nose and we both had ourselves a good session. This morning we opted to grab a boat and head to The Cove. Ah yes, the mythical Cove, where sets are always “chest high” as the local boat guys will tell you. We took the gamble and pulled around El Faro to find one footers gently rolling into the small rock beach. nothing even slightly surf-able. We all felt a slight bit frustrated but nobody let it get the best of them. We enjoyed the sunrise and got on the billionaires’ nerves by having a personalized boat tour of the “inside the gates” coastal area of Punta Mita, an unspoken no-no. call me “the dumb gringo”.
I gotta start going down south…
Section Seven
wickedly good graphic design, illustration and an equally impressive flash website as well: Section Seven. I am Ed’s slight tinge of jealous awe and reverence. [via k10k]
In The Slot
absolutely insane footage of a new surf movie by Brian Conley “My Eyes Won’t Dry”. don’t miss it. [via 70%]
Just Back
We just got back in to town from another weekend in Guadalajara. that city is becoming a second home, hmmmm…
Salim and Paulina had their big church wedding on Saturday, in Lake Chapala, and Raul and Sylvia got married as well, just down the road in Ajijic. So we had our hands full, shuffling from wedding to wedding. I got some great pics though and once I get out from under the work I have at the moment, I’ll take some time to edit/process and upload them.
I’m currently spec’ing out the finishings for the house we’re about to start building just south of Sayulita. It’s been a gnarly few months dealing with permits, engineers, contractors etc…
One of these days I’ll upload the architectural plans. It’s gonna be beautiful if we can ever get the thing started.
Google Calendar
I’ve been planning our SE Asia / India trip without a calendar. iCal just doesn’t do it for me. too ridged. to 5 years ago. and even if I keep my calendar synced between computers, every time I move from the office to home I have to manually sync. pain. So, today, I fired up Google Calendar, looking to have one place online to organize the various legs of my trip.
The app is beautifully designed and simple as can be. At first it seems like the best solution, but as I started adding things like Airline dates and such, using this app quickly became a nightmare. I’m sure most of the problems I encountered are because I’m using the (outdated, almost pre-historic and certainly on it’s last legs) Safari. In a calendar app, 90% of your time is spent in the “event details” HUD, adding dates, times, notifications, meta data etc… This is where the meat of the app is. And it’s for this very reason that Google Calendar was giving me such a headache:
When I try to edit the time, if I choose “4:30pm” from the popup time picker, all is well. If I choose to add the date manually as “4:28pm” the application automatically reverts the time to “4:28am”. If I then type in “1628″, the app happily converts the number to “4:28pm”, nice. It took me about a half hour of wrestling with the app to figure this out.
It’s not so much of a deal killer, but a definite hiccup in the app, when one of the main focuses of the site is such a pain in the ass. Try adding dates and times for 8 flights over a 2 month span. Once you figure out the work around, Google Calendar becomes a pleasure to use again, especially with the “agenda” view, nice touch and particularly useful for us trip planning peoples. Now if I only I could get the app to register an event that goes from 4:40pm 2/10/06 to 12:50pm 2/10/06 (our flight from Hongkong to LA), but I guess I can’t ask for everything.
Or you can just say screw it and upgrade your backpack account to use the backpack calendar, which is the most wonderful piece of minimalist software ever.
Wedding Invite
Just thought yall might like to see the wedding invitation Marcia and I cooked up, complete with mexican folk typography:
Lily Allen
Currently digging on Lily Allen’s album “Alright Still”. Especially ‘Smile’ and ‘LDN’. Yes, guilty pleasure for sure. I’m just a sucker for anyone that has that sing-songy vibe over ska sampled beats with a good dose of cursing. I hear strains of all kinds of Trojan artists like the Skatalites and Tommy McCook. Some of her album is so so, but your girl will definitely have this album on rewind, it’s addictive. hat tip to Melvin for hooking it up.
Media Temple Webmail
Please file this entry under “innocent kavetching”:
On the Media Temple’s site, they have a page with 10 Reasons to switch to their service. Here’s #8:
World’s greatest designers.
The world’s hottest, most talented designers have trusted (mt) for years to serve their digital creations. Being the most critical demographic on the Internet, we believe this has strong merit.
Sounds pretty cool. I bet 90% of those designers are on a mac. extra cool. I bet out of that 90%, that 70% of those people use Safari as their primary browser (maybe more).
I click on over to the details page for their new Grid server to read:
AJAX Webmail
Check your messages more than 10 times a day? Want to access all your messages from anywhere? Get attached to a webmail solution that loves email as much as you do. Manage all your email in one place with the sexiest looking webmail client you’ve ever seen! Just like your favorite email program, you can drag and drop messages, manage your appointments, create to do lists and much more!
That’s great! So I set up Apple Mail to use IMAP, cuz that’s how I roll. I even got IMAP to save drafts and sent mail, courtesy of a tutorial from One Digital Life (thank Paul!). To make sure my drafts and sent mail were being synced with my web mail I logged on to Media Temple’s wicked “AJAX Webmail”. They give you 4 options:
- simple (any browser)
- simple (ajax)
- Advanced (IE6+)
- Advanced (mozilla)
I chose simple(ajax), with no success. Both ‘Advanced’ options, didn’t work either. The only option I could actually get to work properly was the simple (any browser) option and even that one has quirks (it was telling me I had 30 or so emails in my drafts folder from 1969. when I tried to delete them, they wouldn’t die).
So… I called up tech support to ask what the deal was. They promptly told me that Safari isn’t a supported browser for email and if I wanted the full monty I’d have to use Firefox. I fired up, er, um, Firefox and checked my webmail. And I gotta say, Media Temple’s webmail is one dope looking application. It beats the pants off of GMail, Yahoo etc… maybe not the new .mac ui, but it’s pretty cool. But I’m just a little ticked that Safari isn’t supported, the tech further gave me some schpiel about how he read that Apple was going to discontinue Safari development cuz it’s a buggy, terrible browser. Oh sure! I believe that one.
I’m not trying to knock Media Temple here, their hosting is great, their tech staff is helpful, immediate and even funny and even their simple version of webmail whips the pants off Dreamhost’s squirrel mail, but there seems to be something not quite right, when a major feature is touted and it doesn’t support a large swath of the people paying for the service. It’s always the details that people remember. It may seem like some little nothing, but being a new customer and having this kind of annoyance makes a definite impression.
What do other Media Temple / Mac OS X / Safari users have to say? am i just getting old and cratchety?
Feature Request
It seems to me that information is out-dated the minute it hits the server. In a perfect world our information would be tagged with a date. Info on travel, electronics, events, prices etc… any type of info that will most certainly change with time, would all be infinitely more usable and held within context. Over the past few weeks I don’t know how many web pages I’ve read, only to figure out later on that the info was 4 years old or something. simply because there was no date attached.
indo bound
Today, I woke up the asscrack-a-dawn for a morning session. we stopped by veneros and burros to find nothing shaking. undeterred we made for la lancha to find small 2-3 footers, but with some actual push behind em. I got in a couple of genuinely nice little rides, first time i’ve surfed here in the bay in like a month at least. It’s been super dead and we’ve been getting wicked red tides. i hear the northern swells are starting to come, so hopefully things will be picking up soon.
After my sun-burnt morning sesh, i spent most of the day planning the Bali leg of our trip. Do you sense that this entry has a surfing theme? As it stands now, we’re going to hit Ubud first for about a week or so, hopefully staying at Casa Luna Honeymoon Guesthouse (kinda queso-y name but beautiful looking rooms and a decent price).
After Ubud, we’re going to head over to Nusa Lembongan and hopefully staying at Jungutbatu Bungalows, obviously I haven’t booked reservations yet, but i’m getting on it now. Lembongan is a small island across the strait from Sanur and is home to several world class surf breaks: Playgrounds, Shipwrecks, Lacerations and a few others. If you’re a surfer, you’ve probably heard about these breaks and you’ve definitely seen them in magazines and videos. I certainly have, although I never truly did the knowledge to find out where they were. Now I know. And I’m so looking forward to a little slice of surfing lore and to finally see these breaks with my own eyes. my first real surfing trip to ‘indo’.
We have up to a full week on Lembongan, but as Marcia doesn’t surf I’m prepared to spend only a day or three as long as she can stand crystal blue water and white sand beaches. tough life.
I am Ed’s ecstatically happy inner-child.
–
if anyone has any insider info on Lembongan, please let me know:
- good places to stay
- getting from the hotel to the break
- things to do non-surf related
etc…
meebo
meebo is pretty damn cool. In browser chat on all the various networks in one interface. I usually use ichat, but all my buddies in mexico are on MS Messenger (they love hotmail here, god only knows why?!).
PlainSimpleDesign
now this is what i call a minimalist blog, well done! Plainsimple Design. I’m itching for that QualPeeps redesign [via subtraction]
Properly Vac’d
Yesterday, Marcia and I went down to the doc’s office to get our vaccinations for our trip to asia. Shots of Hepatitis A+B, Yellow Fever and Typhoid. and Malaria pills. After the first shot, i turned white and almost blacked out. I don’t know, in my old age, I just don’t like metal things sticking into my body. probably why piercings never took. A day later and my right arm is still aching from the Typhoid shot. I still don’t quite understand why I got that one. I tried telling the doc that I already had Typhoid. He muttered something about ‘being safe’ and got the needle in the arm.
Marcia did some research on our Malaria medication and turns out that chloroquine doesn’t work on asian strains of Malaria, so I’m on the internet hunt for an alternative.
Vaccinations are a strange thing.
Update: Folks, if you are traveling to a foreign country and there is a chance you will need vacs, do yourself a favor and do your research first. The CDC website is a good place to start. In our case, I didn’t do any pre-research, we made an appointment with a local “travel doctor” who looked up the vacs in a 30 pound text book from the 80s. This morning I went to the CDC website to find out that Yellow Fever is not a recommended vaccination. Further, the Malarial med that works in south east asia is called “doxycycline” and “azithromycin” can be taken for most stomach bugs.
Know-the-ledge, kids.
New Car Smell
Well, I made it to the other side. That new car smell on this site comes complimentary with Media Temple’s new grid server hosting platform. Yes, I know, this new site doesn’t look that much different from the old one, but trust me, it comes with 10x less headaches then the last one. and one of these days i’ll finally get around to the chocolate-minimalist redesign i’ve had on the back burner for months. I can feel my blood yearning for late night coding sessions.
Well, here’s the dreamhost story in a nutshell. In one way or another they have been my hosting service for over 10 years. For the past 4 years or so, I’ve had at least 4 different domains running and most sites that i’ve built from the ground up have been hosted on dreamhost. The one thing that I always hated was their account management tool called the “dream host control panel” or “web admin panel”, seems they can’t figure out quite what to call it, i just call it ‘ugly’. It hasn’t changed much in ten years (!) and is ridiculously convoluted. web panel aside, you just can’t beat dreamhost’s prices. they are cheap for sure.
About six months ago I started receiving heavy spam on my wordpress installs on both my site and my sister’s. spam bots were attacking the comments and the contact form. I installed akismet to fight the comment spam.
A month or so ago I started receiving automated mails from Dreamhost tech support saying that my user id was being throttled down because of too much mail being sent by that id, further, my id would be disabled if I didn’t stop sending so much mail. and they suggested that it was probably spam bots hitting a contact form on my site. I researched the problems other wordpress users were having and stumbled upon Bad Behavior, installed it and that seemed to be catching at least 100 attempts a day. I kept on receiving various emails from Dreamhost telling me to stop the high usage. I wasn’t quite sure what to do about it. 4 days ago I received an email telling me they had disabled my user id.
Admittedly, I probably could have done a bunch of things to prevent the high usage, least of which was pulling the contact forms altogether. For that part, I accept my culpability.
The way Dreamhosts’s service works is that you get one central id and anything created with that id is affected. All the sites I host and the url registrations I create with Dreamhost all fall under the same id. With the disabling of my user id, one by one all of the sites I was hosting went down. I emailed tech support again to ask for them to re-enable the user so that i could pull the contact forms and really figure out how to manage the situation. I snarkly gave them 2 hours to answer my email before I pulled my accounts. what can i say?! i was pissed.
I didn’t hear back from tech support for a full day and a half and you can bet i sent more then one email. “what about the tech support phone number, Ed?” Dreamhost don’t have a phone number to call, how convenient. By the time I heard from tech support my decision was already made. I signed up for Media Temple’s service and started the arduous process of transferring over 8 url registrations and 4 hosted domains.
i didn’t make this decision because I was pissed. I made this decision because I was sad. I loved Dreamhost. or at least I felt they were like the underdog and deserved my support. But after such a big fuck up by their tech support department, there was no way i could stay. I’m not running ecommerce sites or even sites that get more then a few hundred unique visitors a day, but for my hosting service to pull down my sites for 2 days and then not answer my emails is just redonkulous.
Well, so far the transition has gone pretty smoothly except for a few hiccups in learning Media Temple’s beautifully designed ‘account center’, which were remedied by calls to the tech support phone number (can I get an ‘amen’?!). I guess in the end, you get what you pay for. We’ll see if it was worth all the hassle…
wonkiness
So maybe some of you out there have noticed that this site had been down for about a day and half. yeah, big screw up on Dreamhost’s part. So, over the next day or so, I’ll be moving my entire hosted file mess and url registration over Media Temple’s new grid server hosting platform.
If things get a little wonky, that’s why. After I’m done and safely done with Dreamhost, I’ll tell you all about it my sordid story.
See you on the other side!
La Ticla Photos
I took some photos of locals fishing on the river and against my better judgement, I braved the river with the camera, large lens and tripod, held over my head, to the other side to take photos of Adan Hernandex, Kalle Caranza and the sayulita crew, tearing up the river mouth section. Nothing too spectacular, but some good solid shots. Some aussie guy with a Transworld Surf photog shirt on asked me how I got the equipment over the river, and I related my river crossing. He said I was brave and I said I wasn’t sure if it was bravery or just solid stupidity, I’d have to cross back over the river before I’d be able to make that call.
As I was shooting on the opposite side I thought to myself, that I’d really have regretted it, if I had come to Ticla and not gotten some really good surf shots, all because of a little river.
Once I maxed out my flash card, I packed the gear up and trudge back across the river, almost losing it twice (Marcia is glad she wasn’t there to see that one). Enjoy the photos.
