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.

I think the next thing I need to master is off camera flash.

• 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.

Over the weekend, we went to the Sharjah Aquarium and out to the new souk at Wafi. Got some pics up on flickr finally. All the shots are direct from the camera (processed to JPEG via Aperture’s RAW converter). Some of them will wind up on the gurucollege.net/pix site at some point in the near future. I’m trying to find some kind of photography class in Dubai or Sharjah, as I’d like to sharpen my skills somewhat, but I’m not really motivated when it’s this hot. I need to just bite the bullet and do it, right?

Additionally, the Seagate drive is back from warranty work, and reinstalled into the array in my personal file server, bringing it up to 2.7 terabytes of useable space – with a redundant drive. This way, I can afford to have a single drive die on me, and have time to replace it, before I start to lose data. Once I go whole-hog (in a year or two) and finish/upgrade the file server, my plan is to have 2 vdevs of 5 devices each, and an extra drive as a spare. I’m not sure how I want to handle the spare – having it as a hot spare and running in the case, or having it “cold” and sitting on a shelf waiting for need. Regardless, I’m going to need a better solution for mounting the drives in the case, and I need to find some kind of hot-swappable drive sled that’s happy with Solaris. Fun fun.

I guess the next project I’m working on is iSCSI exports from my fileserver to my desktop for Aperture Vaults – as Aperture won’t vault to a network drive.

So, I’ve made a resolution in regards to technology. I’m only buying Seagate drives for home use, from now on.

You see, they decided to honor my warranty – for a drive I purchased in the States well over two years ago – and the turn around time was pretty quick. Living in Dubai, I expect all repairs and warranty work to take 6-8 weeks as usually companies just ship the parts to Europe, where they then get ordered, and then replaced, and then sent back… you see the pattern. Seagate has a warranty shop in Dubai. Better yet, they accept direct mail in RMA’s, unlike Western Digital – who simply tells me to contact their local sales office. (And, for what it’s worth, I’ve never gotten a call back from email or vocicemail I’ve left them. I’m going to have to drive into Dubai with the drive – during work hours – to get them to even look at it. And when it’s ready for pickup, I’ll have to take time off work again to drive back in.)

And that’s it. No more drives from anyone but Seagate. This is what customer service means, and what it does to brand loyalty.

UPDATE: The drive just arrived in time for the weekend. 2 days, not 3-7 as they claimed. They are just doing all sorts of things right!

So, I’ve managed to fix the links on the pixelpost page – not only had I wiped out the link to this blog from the top, I’d also blown away the google analytics code that helps me know if I’m doing an OK job with the sites. I learned that google’s code is JavaScript, and most RSS readers don’t interpret JavaScript – so anyone who’s subscribed to my blog via RSS isn’t showing in my traffic profile.

Now, for the weird part. On June 4th, the site went from it’s usual 20-70 pageviews a day to 196. In total, 154 of them came from Abu Dhabi. In the span of 45 minutes. And it seems they went through a significant selection of my photos from the pixelpost site. From a single network provider. I’m not sure how the UAE reports it’s location blocks, but it seems to know when a user in in Dubai vs Sharjah vs Abu Dhabi – so I’m going to assume when they say it’s Etisalat, they don’t mean just some normal Etisalat customer – they mean Etisalat the company. So – whoever you are – welcome! If you like, leave me a comment. (Finally have that turned on here as well as the photoblog – got the comment spam filter working).

So, I’ve joined the crowd and built a home NAS box on Solaris Nevada. At the moment, it’s a paltry 2.0 TB of storage – waiting for a disk to get back from warranty repair before I use the server fully – at which point it will be up to 2.75 TB. Really not bad for a spare drive + $1033.00 before shipping. (When I ordered mine, the SATA card was out of stock.) This should get me through the next year, and free up my MacPro from being a glorified television – or at least, allow me to shut it down from time to time (or, even, allow it to sleep!) and know that my files are available to my wife’s laptop.

Sadly, I’ve got an upgrade planned. Another $1,184.00, and I’ll have a real case (not some crappy Rosewill plastic nasty), the afore-mentioned SATA card, and 5 more 750 GB drives (5.5 TB total). But that’s going to have to wait… a while. Probably a year or more – at which point, 1TB drives will hopefully be $119.00 instead of $179.00. We’ll have to wait and see.