Above: my new beard. When I returned to my (real) job after the TN trip, I discovered that several of the first-year associates in my group were sporting some pretty aggressive facial hair. I was promised a certificate and a tote bag if I joined in on the cause. Although I have since discovered the the tote and certificate bribe was a joke, I am still enjoying being barbudo. Reagan appears to be a pretty big  fan, as well. I currently have 3 weeks worth of growth. We’ll see how long it lasts (grows).

Next item: I was flipping through some crap that I wrote a year ago and noticed that I picked up Negrita (my 7d) one year ago yesterday. I also realized that some of my favorite stuff that I have ever shot (to date) was shot with my old 40-D. It kinda makes me miss her. Yet another realization that I had, was that some of my most heartfelt posts didn’t even include an image from my camera. *Sigh* Last November was a pretty freaking good month.

Moving on:  I’m not really sure how this weekend is going to go. I’m lined up to shoot a ton of cool stuff, but only if I can some how squeeze it in with the work from my real job. I didn’t even find out that my real job was going to require my services for the weekend until Thurs. So, yeah. It’s tough to get amped about the weekend. I still hope that everyone else has a stress-free pile of awesome this weekend. Do it, do it.

Try to solve the puzzle below. You can mouse over the image at the bottom left to see what the finished image should look like. Click “play again” to re-shuffle the pieces. To move a tile, click (don’t drag) the tile, and it will slide into the blank space. This one is pretty hard, because there are a lot of similarly colored out-of-focus parts.

Try to solve the puzzle below. You can mouse over the image at the bottom left to see what the finished image should look like. Click “play again” to re-shuffle the pieces. To move a tile, click (don’t drag) the tile, and it will slide into the blank space.

Try to solve the puzzle below. You can mouse over the image at the bottom left to see what the finished image should look like. Click “play again” to re-shuffle the pieces. To move a tile, click (don’t drag) the tile, and it will slide into the blank space.

Try to solve the puzzle below. You can mouse over the image at the bottom left to see what the finished image should look like. Click “play again” to re-shuffle the pieces. To move a tile, click (don’t drag) the tile adjacent to the blank space, and it will slide into the blank space.

(slide to view)

Reagan asked me to do some shots for her, like the ones that I did of myself for the hoodie weather post. Terry Richardson would be proud! Hahahahaha. If would have to say that Reagan is basically the cutest girl alive (and I’m not just talking about looks). We did a set w/o lipstick. Then one with.

(slide to view)

Tonight, it is officially hoodie weather. Since I had some time on my hands, I took these photos to prove it.

Tuesday, I dropped back by the piece that Os Gemeos are working on. This time, I was able to chat with Gustavo (above) for a while in Portuguese. I can’t tel you how great it was to chat with a Brazilian that has a proper Paulista accent (not to mention that it was cool to chat with him regardless dialect). He said that they are going to try to wrap this piece up by the end of the week. So, I’ll be back by there, probably tomorrow to shoot the finished product. The image below shows the progress, as of Tuesday afternoon (Moody Blues, anyone?).

I’m still not feeling 100%, but I can’t really take much more of a break from running, and expect to stay sane. If it isn’t raining tonight, I plan to resume with the training sched.. I’m a bit nervous, after taking a full week off. Thankfully my long run, slated for Saturday is only 14 miles. I will have a week to get back into the groove (Madonna, anyone?), before my 20 mile run next weekend.

The part that I’m really looking forward to, about the next two long runs, is that Summer Streets is currently in full effect. So, instead of doing my usual out-and-back down the Hudson River path, I can do Park Avenue, instead. Should be a blast, and a much welcomed change of scenery.

But, the biggest thing on my mind/load off of my mind, is that all of the nerd-stuff that I have been chipping away at for the last week and a half is finally resolved. Everything is now back in a relatively maintenance free stasis (fingers-crossed). I feel like I can finally get back to real life, and it isn’t a day too soon, because I am super behind on EVERYTHING.

After pulling out several hands full of hair (my own, hehe), and consulting with some of the most knowledgeable programmers I know (maximum thanks going out to Andre and Jansen), I was finally able to get the php garbage all resolved and running correctly. As a double bonus, I was able to eliminate all of the malicious scripts from the MySQL db’s. To top it off, I woke up today feeling quite a bit better. I’m going to hold off with running until Wed., just to play it safe. Things are looking up. Speaking of looking up, check out the image above, of the latest work by Os Gemeos (my favorite Brazilian street art duo), going up in Chelsea. I shot it Monday afternoon. It looks like they will probably be finished with it in another day or two.

Below is a sneak peak of some other stuff that I have shot recently. I was able to spend some time in the diamond district documenting some of the work that goes on there. I really enjoyed shooting it, especially since I have jewelers in my blood line. Props to my great granddad MJ. I’m sure that he could have given a lesson or two. If you enlarge the shot, you can see that the dude has tiny diamonds stuck to his hand with Vasoline. That is how they manipulate the diamonds without dropping them on the floor, when they are positioning them, setting them, etc..

Anyway, much love to everyone who has helped me out with this massive debacle, the last several days.

I normally just try to refrain from writing anything, if it is just going to be complaining. But, today, I couldn’t help myself.  In fact the title of this post is quite dramatic. But, I am feeling a bit overwhelmed at the moment. Piper is fine. I’m still employed. Reagan is fine. But… I am sick again. To be entirely honest, I don’t feel like I every fully recovered from when I was sick two weeks ago. But at least before, I could still run, because I could still breathe. I haven’t been able to run since last Wednesday.  I missed the New York Road Runner team championships on Saturday. Today, I still can’t really breathe right. Which means, no Piper visit and no running. It is driving me insane.

To add insult to injury, the hosting plan that I mentioned in my last post, didn’t exactly workout. So, I am trying out a new hosting plan, with my blog as the guinea pig. The tech support guys are really nice, but it is an operation that is pretty new, and from what I gather, it is a pretty small shop. As a result, my request to modify the PHP build running on the server, has still not been addressed. Because of that, I have no GD or FreeType libraries, which half of my plugins require (if you have perused it in the past couple of days, you may have noticed that it has just been displaying the header and a php generated error message). That is why shortcode is appearing where all of the images should be, when a page loads up. The only reason that anything besides error messages is displaying, is because I finally broke down and disabled all of my image handler plugins. It’s like driving a car with no brakes.

As if that weren’t enough, all of the MySQL databases on our old server (i.e. the one where Reagan’s blob, and all of our other sites, including some paying clients are currently hosted), have been infected with a malicious script that is redirecting all of those urls, to spam sites. Awesome. The tech support guys are working on it. But, as of Sunday morning, things still aren’t resolved. To top things off, my (home) office looks like a tornado hit. At least I can control that one. So, as soon as this post is published, things are going to start looking up. Wish me luck on resolving the rest of the crap on the list. I hope that everyone else had a less stressful weekend.