So as usual, not posting much. In my defense: it's pretty busy around here lately. Let's see:

• Work is crazy and all-consuming, in a good way
• Ina and Graham got married
• Julia's off to China
• Archie is still Archie

So about that wedding - Ina Howard and Graham Park, you kids put together the nicest wedding I've ever been to, bar none. Where do we start? The people - awesome... every damn person in your lives is brilliant, beautiful, friendly - what's wrong with you all? You two - well, you're even cooler than your crowd! The wedding itself - let's see... fun, unpretentious, simple, elegant and deeply personal ceremony, minor mishaps, real intensity, a beautiful chuppa, classic yacht, perfect weather, Statue of Liberty, ice cream sundaes, extended families, dancing, NYC.

Two days later, Julia went off to China - boy is life as a bachelor again a bit different. I'm trying to hold things together - holding the laundry piles at bay, remembering to eat breakfast, sleeping, keeping Archie and the chins healthy (and myself at least alive), reminding myself to socialize (at a minimum, talk to someone on the phone once a day), working out every day, picking up, bathing, shaving, doing *something* besides taking pictures, processing images, or working on an odd programming project or three. It's not like she necessarily reminds to do these things, it's just that I don't seem to have the same natural inclination to act somewhat mature, even human, without her around! Julia is definitely my other half. I miss you honey! :)

My schedule these days leaves little time for anything behind sleep, drink, an ocassional workout, and of course the daily grind. Now and then we get a break, though it usually takes some kind of formal event I can't say no to! This past week was the commencement ceremony at USC for Julia's grad school, the Rossier School of Education, and I wouldn't have missed it for anything - I'm very proud of her, and very relieved it's over for now! So here are the pictures, my first new gallery online in a long time.

Last night was date night, so we decided to go to the movies for the first time in nearly 2 years! Being Tarantino (Jackie Brown, True Romance, Kill Bill, how can you go wrong?) and Robert Rodriguez fans we couldn't think of anything better to see on the silver screen than their new collaboration, the double-feature umbrella Grindhouse featuring "Planet Terror" by Rodriguez and "Death Proof" by Tarantino.

As expected, both features are pure homage to B-film suspense/horror/sci-fi, with gratuitous violence, lots of boobs, and some incredible action sequences. Throught, from the opening frame, the picture is cut with grain, intermittant focus problems, miscuts, fake trailers for even trashier movies ("Don't!" was particularly funny) and other elements meant to (and they do!) evoke the pre-digital, pre-perfection days of cheap B-movies in a cheap movie house. Tarantino is, as always, obsessed with cinema days past, and I can dig it.

So when we're at a point where the first feature is obviously almost over - the final action scene is unfolding, bullets and explosions, zombies, and dead good guys everywhere, the picture goes bad, the sound screeches to a halt, and we watch what appears to be the film melting before our eyes, the 20 people in the theater just laughed at the audacity of the filmmakers. We sit there for at least 10 minutes watching the picture devolve, wondering just how far he'll take it, and how he'll recover and bring the movie back on for it's final scene. And then we wait some more, figuring this is the demented "intermission" we had all been expecting already (two features back to back, with some form of intermission is what we had all heard). Even the standard slide show of local business ads that finally comes up seemed particularly filled with dark humor and irony, and possibly part of Tarantino's sick plan for this film.

Eventually an usher comes in, stammers something or other about going upstairs to check, and we finally realize - after some hushed speculation - that the film did in fact catch on fire and melt in front of us, during a screening of perhaps the one film in recent memory where the audience figured it was just a part of the twisted presentation, and not a real annoyance.

The management all but asks us to leave, offering us free passes, but everyone wanted to finish the film. After about 20 minutes they get the film rolling again and we missed maybe 5 minutes, so we're dropped right into the closing moments of the first feature. No big deal, it's easy enough to fill in the gaps, and we do get to see the final scene, which wraps the movie up.

Then, 15 minutes of twisted, hilarious faux-trailers for non-existant horror films (all the trailers were written and directed by other, well-known schlock filmmakers), and the next feature, Quentin's "Death Proof" comes on, the one I'm waiting for.

Alas, just as the feature is picking up - what a cast! - BOOM! It happens again! The project goes crazy, the image devolves, and we're stuck with another dead film! Arghhhh!!! At this point the amusement of the first incident becomes annoyance, and we decide to leave. Up to the box office for our refund - "no problem, here's your $15 dollars... " says she. "Yeah, but I paid $19" says I. "Oh, but your receipt says $15". "You're right, but I paid $19, so your employee must have pocketed the rest". So, not wanting to argue the point, but after making it clear I absolutely paid more than my receipt, we get our refund plus passes for another film, and go spend the money elsewhere.... Starbucks, and then on to H&M for a shopping spree!

I never knew H&M had men's clothing, and they actually have a lot of nice stuff; I will be returning, even though it is located on the 8th ring of hell (aka, 8th floor of the Beverly Center). Hard to call a $200 receipt a "spree" except that I got a new suit, several pairs of slacks and some nice shirts, a belt, and a few pairs of sunglasses for Julia. Amazing what they can do with sweatshop labor these days.

After H&M we went to Bulan, neé Busaba, one of my favorite dinner spots - a vegan Thai restaurant on Melrose that, aside from their pad thai (which I'm not impressed by) has the best Thai dishes I've ever had, meat-free or otherwise! We had a crispy fish with apple - some kind of vegan "catfish", topped with sour apple shavings, that is unbelievably good - a "duck" curry that is easily in my top 3 curries of all times, and a chicken satay that's better than the real deal. Mmmmmm. Yes, it's that good.

Finally, we got home, kicked back, and watched a few episodes of "Heroes" while I geeked out. A very pleasant Saturday night, even if we did miss our (likely) only chance to see Grindhouse in the theater.

So I've been pretty silent for some months... thought I'd share some updates.

Last year I left The Getty for greener pastures after five years (to the day). It was time to move on, but I felt good about my stretch there. I landed a consulting gig at Fox, doing digital asset management strategy - or so I expected... it turned out to be more tactical than strategic, and though the money was great, the hours even better, it was most definitely not what I was looking for. I was yearning for a challenge, and though it was challenging it wasn't in the ways I hoped for.

Before I went to Italy, I saw Playboy was hiring; zing! I sent in the resume, and began a long courtship in May. After I returned from my travels the process continued, and finally in September they brought me on. Excitement! Another iconic company, another great step for my career. Unfortunately all was not meant to be - for many reasons I won't get into here - and the job wore me down quickly. I saw little, if any, chance for success, and just felt more and more like a patsy - I took responsibility for a situation I couldn't fix, so in the end it was going to be my butt.

Around the time this realization was setting in, a friend at an ex employer began making quiet overtures. Nothing concrete, just asking if I was doing any consulting. I had kept a lot of distance from this company since leaving (on good terms) so I had no idea what to expect, but I dropped the CEO a note asking if I could come down and have lunch, chat, see what was going on. After about 6 hours we had reached a tentative agreement to bring me back on in a senior role, provided we could work out all the details. In another few days we had it all nailed down, and I put in my 2 weeks - all I could afford - with Playboy, knowing whether it was 2 weeks or 2 months wouldn't make a real difference.

It's been about 70 days now I think, and I've had almost no time to come up for air. Strangely, that's the best thing I can say about it - I'm having a lot of fun, working with old friends, with a broad assignment and a lot of responsibility, and things are never dull. Working 70 hours here is less draining and a lot more palatable than working 40 hours at Playboy, or 36 at Getty!

So if you haven't heard from me, don't take it too personally. I might be ignoring you, but it's far more likely that you're a casualty of my new schedule. Fortunately, Julia is doing more or less the same, wrapping up grad school, so we're both highly productive and with basically no personal lives outside of the time we spend together (mainly eating, studying, and sleeping!).

I'm back! I just upgraded my site, redid the graphical theme, and fixed a lot of long-standing bugs, so I'm hoping to get back to publishing frequently again. We shall see!

minutes ( bytes)

After a nasty episode which I still haven't figured out, my site is mostly up on its feet again. I had to manually cleanup a bunch of old posts, and reupload a ton of existing content, including nearly every Quicktime VR on my site. I now have a nice daily backup plan in place, so it was a good learning experience (and reminder of what I forgot to re-implement when I moved to my new server last year!).

I'll be back to new content in a few days once I get the last couple fixes in place. I also put into place a new mechanism for preventing people on MySpace from embedding my content directly in their pages from here - a scan through my logs showed me that half my traffic was actually just my images being presented on people's MySpace profiles without any credit or thanks to me, so I've shut them out. This means, though, that they are more likely now to just copy the image to their own server, so I won't even find out now when I'm not getting credit! So I also implemented a less desirable new process whereby all images that might be of interest beyond my little world will be watermarked with a big "Copyright 2006, Roger Howard" notice. I hope it's not too obnoxious.. a sample here:

Watermarked sample

Is that really distracting? Offensive? Feedback appreciated.

We're both down and out with a nasty cold/flu for the first time in years... Julia thinks I got a cold in Toronto, and she got the flu here, and now we've each got both, but I just think we're sick! In any case our culinary senses are quite a bit off - it's all we can do to eat some broth at this point - so don't expect much from my dining documentary until we're on the upswing.

Stay warm, get plenty of sleep, and eat well!

After almost two weeks of travel I'm finally home and recovering from a nasty cold. I got to visit Toronto for the first time, as part of a user group meeting for our enterprise digital asset management application North Plains' Telescope; most of my time in Toronto was spent in sessions or networking with other customers, so I didn't get out much - one night I did take a long hike downtown, around the university and generally just stumbling around looking for enough light to shoot some panoramas.

After Toronto I headed to Chicago for 3 days of work out of headquarters. I was able to come home that Friday night, but had to go back to Chicago again on Sunday for the next week. 5 more days of work, and not much else, in Chicago and my cold was in full bloom. Exhaustion, cold, and too many changes in my daily rituals took its toll, but after 36 hours home in Los Angeles I'm already feeling a lot better. Hopefully I won't have to spend more than a few more days in Chicago before the end of the year.

Just a quick note by way of making excuses for my pause in updates lately. At the moment I'm in Chicago, but was in Toronto until this morning. I've been (mostly) shooting each day, and have a bunch of updates queued up, mainly waiting for a little bit of Photoshopping and a few minutes to write the descriptions. I'll be in Chicago at HQ until Friday, when I get to come home for the weekend, and then I'll be back in Chicago all next week. Hopefully not much more travel through the end of the year, but there's bound to be at least one more trip.

Last night I was fortunate to meet up with two great people and future relations-in-law: Julia's aunt (on her mother's side) Lynn, and her great-uncle (I think) on her father's side Cory - despite living in the same city, they hadn't yet met each other, so it was a fun time. I shot a pano while we were having drinks at the hotel (to be honest, my "drink" was a Coca Cola!).

Anyway, excuse submitted. Stay tuned for the real stuff.