Well Pungi and I are really loving Austin so far.  Last week we made a trip to a nice little place called Balcones Park that some of my coworkers had shown me before.  It was almost as if Pungi knew there was a river and other dogs around.  He got all excited before he even got out of the car.  As you should be able to tell from the look on his face, Pungi had a blast.  He was in doggy heaven.  The park is really just a river with a trail along the side.  There were a lot of other people there with their dogs and some that were even wading through the water - in the middle of January!  There were even some daring teenagers that were swinging off of ropes and jumping into the river.  That was a little too daring for me.  I stuck to dry land taking pictures.

Pungi really is a difficult dog to take good pictures of.  He's so black that either he is exposed properly and the background is blown out or the background is exposed properly and Pungi is just a big black blob.  Luckily there were a few shots that turned out well (though many more that didn't).

Austin's been great for me so far.  My apartment has a stream that runs right behind me along with a lot of trees, very good for Pungi.  Also, it's only about a mile and a half from work.  So my commute is a nice 3 minutes.  A slow commute for me is if I don't make it through the one traffic light between here and work nearly doubling my commute to 5 minutes.  It sure does beat going from Manhattan to Long Island and back every day.

OK, this ought to do for now.  Yesterday Pungi and I went to Bull Creek park which seemed like another doggy heaven.  There must have been at least 20 dogs there, all off the leash, running and playing and swimming in the river. Those pictures will have to wait for later.   Until then...

 

Enjoy the Balcones Park album.

Every now and then we are presented with opportunities in life and it's up to us to choose, either to stay on our same course or to take a new direction.  One direction may not necessarily be better than the other, it's mainly up to us to make life what we want of it, though at times life does make it difficult.  Nevertheless, all of us decide whether or not we are going to act or be acted upon.  We can either let the tides of life carry us along wherever it may take us, or we can choose to act for ourselves and make life what we want of it.

 

One such opportunity recently presented itself to me.  For those that don't know over the past year and a half or so I've been separated from my wife, Andreea, and we will soon be divorced.  As difficult as this has been for me it has led to an increase in opportunities that I might not have otherwise considered.  I wouldn't be tied to New York for instance.  So I had been passively looking for anything that might be interesting.

 

Around November of last year I was able to find something that I feel is in my best interest both personally and for my career.  So after three great years at Nikon I have left New York to join Bibble Labs in Austin, Texas.  I was lucky enough to work with some very talented people at Nikon and develop some good friendships.  I also made a lot of good friends in New York, all of whom are already missed.  I'm also very excited to be working at Bibble now and for the new friends that I'll make here in Austin.  I arrived in Austin on Jan. 1st and started at Bibble the next day.  If you were at the Imaging USA Photo Expo in San Antonio, TX last weekend then you already met me as "the New Guy."

 

I think that Pungi and I will have a lot of fun here.  Pungi just arrived last Friday after spending the holidays in Utah and it wasn't until last night that all of my stuff finally arrived which is partly why I haven't updated Cutterpillow in so long.  Not that I couldn't update it from elsewhere, but I guess I just didn't feel comfortable yet without my dog and my stuff.    Anyway, with that I'll leave you with some pictures from Mount Bonnell at sunset - the first of my pictures to be processed with Bibble.

 

View the Mount Bonnell album.

If anyone has run into this error in Xcode then I feel your pain.  The error message is not very helpful at all and it turns out that it occurs in many circumstances, none of which have anything to do with the Perforce root.  For me these were the symptoms - I'd just added a new, larger hard drive to my G5 and used the Migration Assistant to transfer the contents of my old hard drive to the new one.  After I did this, I started getting the following error in my Xcode projects that use Perforce:

 

No files in this project were found under the Perforce root:

 

These projects were working just fine before so they should be working now.  There's certainly nothing wrong with the Perforce root because my new hard drive contents are pretty much a clone of my old drive.  I've just been putting up with this for the last little while using P4V exclusively but finally I was fed up.  I started googling for solutions and the most common one seemed to be deleting your Perforce password in the Keychain Access application.  I tried this and it still didn't work, same error.  Then I tried running p4 info on the command-line and found that:

 

tcsh: /usr/local/bin/p4: Permission denied.

 

Doh!  That's a pretty stupid problem.  So I went into /usr/local/bin and sure enough, when I had reinstalled p4 I failed to set the permissions properly and the binary was not executable.  I corrected this by chmoding it to 755 and then fired up Xcode again hoping for it to work.  But no, I still got the same problem.  So this time I tried changing the P4CLIENT, user name and password settings of the project to garbage values. Then quit and reopen the project - same error.  Then I went into Keychain Access again and deleted the entries there (there was my original one and the new garbage one).  Again, quit and reopen the project and this time I was greeted with a Perforce error, the usual error that it gives you when you try to login with the wrong user name and password - this gave me some hope of success.  I went to the Perforce settings for the project and corrected the garbage that I had entered before and finally it started working.

 

I then tried openning some of my other projects that had the same problem and they all are working now (no Keychain funny business needed).  The moral of the story is that this is a pretty weird error message that can mean any number of things.  It could be that your p4 binary has messed up permissions or that the keychain entry for Xcode is messed up or a combination of these.  If anyone else runs into this problem then I hope this helps.

 

The rest of the photos from the I.S. 143 Performance Ensemble are now up.  This was a great performance by a group of very talented young kids.  I tried to get photos of everyone.

 

View the I.S. Performance Ensemble album. 

 

Last Sunday, Sept. 17th, I photographed the Harlem Meer Performance Festival in Central Park.  I'm still working on sorting and editing the photos of the I.S. 143 Performance Ensemble and they will be posted shortly.  During the intermission Leighann Lord performed and put on a very funny show.  Here are some photos from her performance.  You can find Leighann online at her website, leighannlord.com.

 

View the Leighann Lord album. 

 

Josh was certainly the most versatile among us.  He did everything - knee boarding, wake boarding and water-skiing.  This translated to some good wipeout shots among other things.

 

View Josh's wild man album.