So, I’ve been grinding away on this for awhile now, and it’s come to light that the solution I’m trying to use won’t work. Yesterday, after many reconfiguration attempts, I got everything running – or so I thought. An AVS mirrored zpool, a valid Sun Cluster Express install with configured resource groups and logical hostnames, etc. The problem was that in a cluster environment, the AVS configuration database has to be on shared storage, like a shares iSCSI volume, a shared SCSI array, or the like. Of course, the point of this whole exercise was that the two nodes would be independent. Having to use a shared filesystem kinda kills that.
On the other end of the phone is just the sound of yet another civil liberty being taken away. It’s never done in so many words, but the right to privacy is being eroded every day in complex laws that most lawmakers don’t really understand anyway.
Ira Glass, from This American Life, talks about working on becoming a professional, and keeping at what you do for years until you’ve learned to do it well.
This, really, is why I started this blog – primarily the photo portion of it. I have no dreams of being a professional blogger or writer – that’s not me – but I do want to hone my skills as a photographer. I realized once I got my first DSLR that I was going to need to go through a few thousand frames before I really got past being a vacation-snapshot photographer and got more into the photojournalist or fine art photographer category. Yes, I know. A few thousand. Foolish. I’m maybe 1/2 way there, in my personal estimate, and I’ve got well over 14,000 images in my Aperture library. We’re now talking about tens of thousands of images before I get where I want to be.
In other news, looking back, I have come a long way. I started this blog (for the picture of the day part) on April 17, 2005 and I must say, it’s been a long trip. I hope everyone else can see the improvement that I can see in the quality of the pictures I’m taking.
Gulf Photo Plus hosts weekend photography classes in the Mall of the Emirates – but it’s all beginner stuff (ISO, white balance, etc).
So far, that is the only class I’ve been able to find, other than enrolling in a university photography class. I currently work at a university, and the kinds of photography classes I want to take have a pretty hefty list of pre-requisites. I’ll have to find who is teaching the classes and see if I can sit in.
