Twitter update

@DrFreud: McCain just said mORGYges instead of mortgages.  What’s that mean and how should it affect my vote? Thx.

Posted by email from flashkube’s posterous

bailout bill stalled by democracy

While I totally disagree with Barney Frank’s support of this bill, he is one of the most entertaining people in politics today.  The above video is his response to acusations that Nancy Pelosi’s speech before the vote was the reason it failed.

Why are the major parties blaming each other for causing this bailout bill to fail?  What happened yesterday is what democracy is all about, right?  Legislation was proposed by the White House containing no oversight (in fact it had provisions against oversight) and all kinds of fishy talk about expediency.  Congress did their job and threw on the brakes.  The bill was re-written, voted on, and failed.  That is democracy people.  There is now more time for considered debate.  Hooray, I say.

Democracy Now interviewed Rep. Dennis Kucinich before the vote.  While the press has swallowed the initial premise, Kucinich makes the case that the whole thing has a smell to it (he was interviewed before the vote yesterday):

AMY GOODMAN: Is it any better than when it was first introduced by the Treasury Secretary, by Henry Paulson?

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Well, you know, that implies that you would accept the underlying premise. I reject the underlying premise that we needed this bill. And as a matter of fact, that we’re putting this up before an adjournment in an election season shows that Congress is being put under extraordinary pressure to bail out Wall Street. We haven’t looked at any alternatives, Amy. This is—you know, it isn’t as though, if you had a liquidity crisis, that—you know, a real one—that you’d start to look at all the alternatives. We haven’t done that. We have a bill here, a bill of more than a hundred pages, that we haven’t had a single hearing on the bill, you know—on the concept, yes, on what Paulson and Bernanke asked for initially. But, you know, we need to have hearings on this. There’s 400 economists and three Nobel Prize-winning economists who have said, “Whoa, wait a minute! What are you doing? Why are you rushing this?” You know, this thing doesn’t smell right, frankly.

Twitter update

Just inhaled non-dairy creamer.  Wonder what that looks like in an autopsy.

Posted by email from flashkube’s posterous

The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book For Digital Photographers

1/200 f/1.8 ISO 100

Picked up Scott Kelby’s new book on LR 2.  Unfortunately, I have been busy with school and reading other titles to get a grasp of how useful it will be.  I bought it because Scott Kelby focuses on real world workflow rather than describe software feature by feature.  I’ll update you when I know more.

The image above was shot on Saturday and developed on Sunday.  There is a common phrase among both photography and software instructors: Get it right in the camera.  I wonder sometimes, though, how much of the final image is done in camera versus during development.  As long as composition, depth of field and sharpness, and exposure are close to what you had in mind, the rest can be done in post.  I believe this insistence on in-camera perfection stems from the stigma of image manipulation.  Luckily, I grew up in the digital age and have never owned my own film camera (other than disposable).  I don’t have that hesitation to make my images better through software.  To those that say too much manipulation is cheating, I say the following.

The level of expertise necessary to paint with light in software is at least equal to the expertise necessary to do it in camera.  But if one can master both, the possibilities are endless.