L. M. Lloyd

I just recently got back from a fun, but honestly somewhat cursed, trip to Tokyo. My wife and I have been to Tokyo a few times on business, but this was our first real, no business, vacation. We decided that it would make the trip a lot more fun, if we took our folding bikes, since they can both pack in a suitcase, and travel with us at no extra charge. For those who don't know, my wife and I are kind of bike nuts, and aside from our full-sized bikes, I also have a Bike Friday Tikit, manufactured by a neat little company in Oregon named Green Gear Cycling, and my wife has a folding bike called a Mobiky Genius, manufactured by a  Chinese company named  Yongkang Fengjiang Hardware Manufactory , and sold by a french company called Mobiky. So, we packed up our bikes, and the plan was to spend two weeks getting everywhere in Tokyo by bike, and really learn the city. Unfortunately, at various points we had various bike failures, but the biking portion of our trip ended a week in, when my wife's Mobiky ultimately failed, with no hope of repair in the short time of our vacation.

The trip started off rocky, as a specialized bearing on my bike, which was part of the fold mechanism, completely fell apart. Fortunately, the wonderful people at Green Gear Cycling provided the typical world class service they provide all their Bike Friday customers, and gave me the address of their dealer in Tokyo, and told me he would be expecting me. So, day one of the trip, I unpacked my Tikit, put it together, and my wife and I hopped a train out to Tabata, to go find Amanda Sport, the Tokyo Bike Friday dealer. What followed was easily the most amazing customer support experience of my life. We walked a couple blocks from the train station to the small and easy to miss Amanda Sport shop (thank the technology gods for GPS, or I could have spent hours walking around this sleepy neighborhood looking for the place). Inside there was one lone older gentleman, who immediately seemed to know why I was there. No sooner was I in the shop, than he had the Tikit splayed out on the floor, and was taking it apart to analyze the problem. I should probably say here that my expectation, based on experiences with US bike shops, was that I would drop the bike off with some guy working the register, and they would give me a time or date to come pick it up after the bike mechanic had a chance to look it over. It was instantly clear, however, that my expectations were way off, and that this gentleman (no doubt the Amanda of Amanda Sport) had every intention of fixing my bike then and there, and sending me on my way with a working Tikit. I was delighted by this prospect, but little did I know the delightful service had not even yet begun.

There has not been a single voice which has shaped the modern concept of Capitalism, more than Ayn Rand's. In fact, modern American Capitalism is so rooted in Rand's Objectivist philosophy, that few people realize how indivisible they are. For anyone not familliar with Objectivism, I suggest you read up on it a bit at either the Ayn Rand Institute, or on Wikipedia. At it's core though Objectivism is the belief that there is an indisputable objective reality, which can only be known through pure reason, and that objective reality dictates that there is no moral imperative other than individual self-interest, no higher calling that the pursuit of one's own happiness, no sin other than sacrificing for the sake of another, and no way to achieve one's own happiness but through laissez-faire capitalism. It is a belief that says the only legitimate role of government, is to protect the Haves, from having their possessions forcibly taken from them by the Have-Nots. It is a belief that says that faith, in anything but Objectivist ideals, has no place in a modern society. It is a belief that denounces concepts of equality, emotion, compassion and empathy as irrational anachronisms of a bygone era, which have no place in modern discussion. It is a belief that has no place for humor or humility, as Ayn Rand herself said that to laugh at yourself is to condemn yourself. It is also a belief held by most prominent capitalists and financial industry insiders, such as Alen Greenspan and his cronies, who were so close to Ayn Rand that they proofread her manuscripts for her.

Now, I have spent a couple of decades pointing out the philosophical and logical flaws with Objectivism, and will probably continue for decades more, but for the purpose of this essay, I will try to contain myself to the political realities relevant to the current discussion on health care. I should say that many people, when they become aware of Objectivism, recoil for moral and ethical reasons. There is plenty to recoil from on those grounds, as Objectivism is about as morally advanced as Satanism (which in fact comes to the same conclusions as Objectivism), but that is not what bothers me. What bothers me, is that Objectivism, like most products of late 20th century America, is shockingly naive, myopic and profoundly ignorant of the real history of mankind.  At issue is the fact that Objectivism comes from the all too common belief that if religion is not true, then everything religion teaches must be superstitious nonsense. Objectivism is not the only modern philosophy to go down this path, since it also figures heavily in Postmodernism, and most Subjectivist beliefs as well. However, that is fundamentally misunderstanding the role mythology serves, and makes the classic error of confusing the medium with the message.

I was recently talking to someone about ways to get the most out of your photos, and cheap (at least compared to camera equipment), quick tricks to immediately improve the quality of your work. I was just going to email him some tips, but then I figured more people might be interested, so decided to write a little article. This is all assuming you are shooting raw pictures, not JPEGS, and as always revolves around an Adobe CS4 Bridge/Photoshop workflow, because I truly believe those are the best tools to use. Everything in here though could be easily adapted to work with any photo processing software that supports a raw workflow though. There isn't much new here over stuff I have talked about before, which is why the article is riddled with links to older content, but I'm trying to just get it all together in a handy place. I hope you find it helpful.

First off, for all of this you will need three things in addition to the software already mentioned

1. A Whibal card.
2. A ColorChecker card.
3. Adobe's DNG Profile editor tool.

All three of these tools, when used together properly, will make an immediate and noticeable improvement in the color quality of your pictures with any camera that shoots raw, from the cheapest pocket camera, to the most expensive medium format camera. So, let's look at the tools.

One of the more depressing, yet interesting, things about our present consumer society, is that so much of it is completely counter-intuitive, and at times downright paradoxical. A good example of this, is people's concept of realism. Clearly a cornerstone of our modern materialist mindset, is that such soft and fanciful notions like ethics, self-respect, artistic inspiration and joie de vivre are outmoded, being replaced instead with the hard and realistic score-keeping of our net worth. The question however, is whether this itself isn't just another quaint romantic notion? I mean, you can't really call it realism, unless it reflects reality, and I have reason to doubt that this new cynical materialism reflects reality in any way.

See, I meet people every day who have long ago given up on whatever dream it was that drove them, and instead settled into a job for which they have no great love, simply because it provided a "good paycheck." These people always have a lot to say about the importance of "growing up, getting real, and facing the facts." They will tend to tell you, in a carefully cultivated jaded voice, that if you don't think money can buy happiness, then you obviously haven't made enough. They also tend to spend most of their time away from work blind drunk, in loveless relationships, and constantly worrying about whether they are properly keeping up appearances. There lives seem to be an endless trudge of acquisition, usually of items and experiences which bore them before they have even had a chance to appreciate them, or for that matter pay them off. It is as though they perpetually think that if they just buy one more thing, or go to one more bar, or pick up one more girl, they will finally be satisfied, yet they never are, so try one more time. I literally can't count the number of times I have heard someone already talking about what they want from their next car, computer, TV, stereo, girlfriend, you name it, before they have even had their new one a week.