So, I got myself a Sigma 70-200 f/2.8 lens, and it’s amazing. Great pictures, smooth, fast zoom speeds – all good so far. The lens has exactly two problems – size (7.5 inches long) and weight (3 pounds). This doesn’t sound like all that much, but it really weighs you down. And, the real problem, it doesn’t fit into my camera bag at all. Which of course means, I need a new camera bag.

So I’m looking for suggestions. The bag needs to be able to hold a pair of 50mm prime lenses, a Sigma 10-20 wide angle, a Nikkor 24-120 zoom and the Sigma 70-200. I’ve liked Crumpler bags in the past, but I’m also a huge fan of the Lowepro stuff.

So, yeah… suggest away.

I’m half tempted to make this page (the one you are reading, assuming you’re not using an RSS reader) the main redirect off the http://www.gurucollege.net/ URL – as the recent upgrade of pixelpost on my photoblog seems to have overwritten my dual-linked headline bar. Grrr. I hate it when I don’t check the docs carefully enough to prevent these kinds of things. Of course, if I spent a just a little more time working on this site, I’d see things like this more often.

Working on a writeup for Solaris Nevada, Sun Cluster, AVS, ZFS and… a file service. So far, I’ve got the ZFS over AVS stuff down pretty well, and I’m working on the Sun Cluster part of things. What I’m working towards is a multi-protocol (CIFS and NFS at least) high availability – and with AVS, I can have each node in the cluster be in a different building. Cool stuff. Of course, I’ve managed to destroy the development boxes a few times – well, the HDD partition tables at least – trying to be clever with stuff. But I’m getting there.

Hopefully I’ll be heading into Dubai this weekend to take pictures of stuff and get a few hard drive bay brackets – I managed to fry the logic board of a drive having it laying inside my el-cheapo server case – and I want to get some proper mounting hardware to keep this from happening again. The drive is in to Seagate for repair – I’m not sure if they will honor their warranty in this situation – but with the inability to add a single drive to a raidz set in ZFS, the fileserver is on hold (again) until that comes through. Bah.

Enough for now. Here’s a video of a monkey washing a cat.

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=1+stick+of+butter+in+cups&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

So – google considers “1 stick of butter” to be a valid unit of measure. This is how I know that there are 32 sticks of butter in a US gallon, but 38.4304135 in an imperial gallon. Who’d thunk it?

When the front page has posts from February on it, and it’s June, you know you’ve been away from the blogging a little long. This may or may not be a bad thing, really – but whatever. In my absence I’ve been focusing on the photoblog side of this site and my flickr page. On the tech side of things, I’ve been working with Solaris Nevada and AVS at work recently – some really cool stuff in there, if you care.

Yes, it’s the 1st of April. This means the internet is full of people trying to be funny with over the top stories about how Microsoft has just purchased Apple and discontinued OSX, or how Google has decided to be evil, and has inked a deal with Satan. Guys… stop. Stop hurting humor. I mean, really. Stop. The point of April Fools Day is to trick someone into thinking something is true – usually involving some degree of personal embarrassment. What the internet does… is sad. So stop. Stop hurting America, er… humor.

“Food prices in the UAE, which pegs its dirham currency to the weak US dollar, will probably jump 40% this year after surging 30% in 2007, Al-Saeedi said last week.”

http://www.arabianbusiness.com/513493-uae-to-subsidise-nationals?ln=en

Ingredients:

• 2 bell peppers (any color)
• 1 small white onion
• 2 chicken breasts, cubed
• Olive Oil
• Balsamic Vinegar
• Lettuce
• Small tomato
• 1 smoked sausage (optional)

Preparation:

Cook the onions and the peppers in a saucepan with a lid. Start them cooking in olive oil. Once they start to soften, add 2 teaspoons of balsamic vinegar and ¹⁄₄ cup of hot water. Put the lid on the pan, let simmer till most of the water has boiled off. Turn the heat up, and add the chicken, and cook till the chicken is looking almost done. Add the sausage – sliced up thin, and add 1 tablespoon of Bird’s Eye Chili sauce. (I’m using Nando’s Hot Peri-Peri Sauce). Add a little more water, and let it all simmer down again.

Serve on a bed of lettuce and tomato.