No Wasted Moves

I spent a few minutes flicking back through my photo archives, both locally and on Flickr. Inevitably I was disappointed about how I had far less photos that I had thought.

It’s disappointing, because I try to take a lot of photos. Not of anything special or monumentous. I just want to take pics of what I see when I’m out and about. I try to take my camera with me as much as possible. I even bought an awesome little camera to take around with me so I couldn’t use the “don’t feel like schlepping around the dSLR” excuse. It’s true, I do take my G10 pretty much everywhere. But there’s a new and unexpected problem. Me. I’m going places, I’m taking my camera. I’m not taking photos.

It’s Resistance and it’s kicking my ass and it’s doing it because I’m letting it.

Enough.

Making pictures is something I need to do so it’s time I stop finding excuses and just do it.

Right now.

What better follow up to shooting the Mont 24Hr than to get out the very next weekend and shoot the 24Hr Solo Champs.

These crazy girls and guys slogged it out around Mt. Majura in sunshine during the day and rain during the night.

I’m pretty sure I managed to get a shot of everyone competing which I was pretty happy about. Of course this is much easier to do when it’s the same folks going around the track and not swapping out for team mates like in the Mont.

My next personal challenge is to not only shoot the riders, fun as that is, but also spend a lot more time around Event HQ finding willing subjects in the support crews. Action shots are certainly gratifying, but looking over the results of the last two weekends, there is a void in my coverage. The off track happenings are missing and my album is much poorer for it.

Here’s some highlights, and as always contact me with your rider number if you’d like to see any pics I have of you.

Last weekend I had a fantastic time shooting the Mont 24 hour Mountain Bike event at Sparrow Hill, just out of Canberra.

It was obvious that everyone was having a great time – despite the grueling physical challenge people were putting themselves through.

Highlights in this slideshow below, plus check the details in the set here to see if I have a shot of you or someone you know!

Just received the regular email newsletter from Kiva, and saw they have included some interesting stats.

In 42 months, 472765 users have provided $66,854,835 in loan capital.

Two things struck me as pretty cool. Firstly, nearly $67 million in about three and a half years is pretty amazing.

But even better than that is that it was raised by less than half a million people – probably even less than that as they only specified Kiva users, not actually lenders. So your average Kiva user has put up about $40/year. Not really a lot to make a huge difference is it? I used to easily spend that on Starbucks on any given week.

So I’m left thinking two things. Firstly, it’s about time I put up another $25 for a loan. Secondly, I’d like to challenge you to chip in $25. Remember, this isn’t even a donation. It’s a loan that gets paid back, so there’s a very very good chance you’ll still get to spend that $25 on whatever the hell you want. Or you can recycle it and lend it to someone else.

What else did you have in mind to make the world a better place today?

Don’t worry, it’s not a trick question. I honestly don’t know just yet. If I did, I’d be writing a post called “How to share an automounted directory using NFS in Solaris 10″. I dream that one day soon I can do that.

In the meantime, I’m writing up the scenario that doesn’t work in the hope that it a) provides me with a blinding flash of insight, b) lets other people know it’s not just them or c) prompts someone who knows the answer to drop it in the comments. Come on, you know you want to!

The General Idea

I’ve got a machine running Solaris 10 10/08 with several user accounts. Home directories for these accounts are in /export/home/. They are being automounted in /home. I want to share the /home/username directories using  NFS. Should be simple right?

The Setup

/etc/auto_master:

/home   auto_home   -nobrowse

/etc/auto_home:

fred box1:/export/home/fred

/etc/dfs/dfstab:

share -F nfs /home/fred

After confirming that NFS is running and online (svcs -a | grep nfs), we activate the shares:

# shareall
share_nfs: /home/fred: Operation not applicable

Sharing /export/home/fred works just fine.

The official Sun docs suggest that the “Operation not applicable” error means I should contact my vendor for an upgrade. Right. I’m fairly sure this was working in Solaris 8, but need to double check.