sey085

Although I received a bike for my fourth birthday, I don't think that I really got the training wheels off of it until I was at least six, or maybe even seven. After school, my best friend, Ralph, and I would often bike down to the baseball fields, or the dirt bike track, or Burger King, but we never really went further than about a mile or so. Most of this was due to San Diego's unique geography: it is virtually impossible to travel more than a mile from my house without hitting a canyon. And, although I enjoyed riding my bike to school in 5th and 6th grade (not more than a mile), I had to be driven to Junior High School, as it was roughly five miles, two freeways, and two or three serious canyons away. Thus, I pretty much gave up on bike riding when I was about 11. I sort of picked it up again at Stanford, as biking in to school saved me from having to buy a parking permit once I lived off-campus, but again, I never really biked more than maybe two or three miles at any ...

Since it is unlikely that you (dear reader) are a professional photographer, allow me to give you some photographic advice: no one wants to see your pictures. OK, that's not entirely true, but trust me, it's true of most of your pictures. Let me rephrase: no one wants to see your pictures unless there's someone or something they love in them. This, I claim, is almost universally true. Certainly, somewhere in those gigabytes of photos is an artistic, wonderfully captured gem, but odds are that most of them are boring photos of buildings, trees, and fuzzy landmarks. This is especially true of vacation photos. Do not take a picture of the street your hotel is on. Do not take a picture of your hotel from the outside. Do not take a picture of the corridor your room is on. Do not take a picture of the entrance way, the bathroom, the bedroom, and the view out the window. The only thing these photos will do is bore everyone to whom you show them and or provide a chain of ev...