A japanese maple from our neighborhood, bathed in afternoon light. Taken in North Bethesda, MD, USA.
I wanted to try something new and to post a photo directly from my photo catalog. I like the way this looks, more so than posting directly from my Flickr account.
The tree is a Japanese maple, and it lives in our community, in North Bethesda, MD, USA. We were walking one afternoon, and I just knew this was a photo opportunity not to be missed. I have a few more photos from our community in my North Bethesda set, and several thousand more to process and post…
I can’t take credit for this cure. A life-long nurse told me about it a few years ago, and it’s worked for us ever since. I’m not sure if she’d be comfortable having her name revealed here, so I won’t do it. But I’ll always be grateful to her for the advice.
In a few words, cold sores are cured and even prevented by Lysine. Any brand should do. Just go to your local supermarket or drug store and pick up some Lysine pills. They’re white, round, medium-sized as pills go, and they’ll do a number on your cold sore.
I, for example, have had these things since my childhood. Whenever I got stressed, or ate too much sugared stuff, or happened to be recovering from a cold or some other illness and my immune system was down, I got a cold sore. I used to be terribly embarrassed about them, and I still am, to some degree. Sometimes I’d get them four or five times a year, and each one took about 2-3 weeks to go away completely.
Now, whenever I feel that tingle in my skin and know that one’s on the way, I take a Lysine pill. You can take up to 3-4 pills a day, just don’t take them all at once. It’s not a sure-fire, 100% kind of thing, but I would say the overwhelming majority of the time, the cold sore doesn’t even show up on the skin. It just goes away. And when it does manage to break out, taking Lysine while you have it will make it go away sooner.
I don’t know why other cures don’t work, particularly the useless brand-name cremes that cost upwards of $20 for a tiny little tube (they only make things worse for me) — but inexpensive Lysine does the job just great. For less than $10, you get a huge pill bottle that will likely last you more years than you’ll remember.
After getting all excited about my new 24-105mm zoom, I found a strand of thread sticking resolutely to the interior of the front lens. It was definitely inside, and I couldn’t get it to go away. Even if it came loose, it would still be inside, and would probably stick to one of the other interior lenses. It was a factory defect.
I called B&H Photo, who graciously shipped out another lens to me, free of charge, and also paid for the return shipment of my defective lens. While I may be disappointed in Canon’s quality control process, I have only good things to say about B&H. Incidentally, I waited patiently for them to re-open after the Jewish High Holidays (they were closed for over a week) so I could order the lens. It was worth the wait. Things I order from them get here the very next day, because they ship out of New Jersey and I live in Maryland. I pay for Ground and get what is essentially Overnight shipping. It’s an added advantage to their great prices and customer service.
My 580EX II speedlite is another disappointment. It’s been acting strangely since March of this year. Sometimes it refuses to work with the 100mm f/2.8 macro lens. The aperture and shutter settings get completely messed up and the shutter won’t fire. Until now, I had to take it off the camera, take the batteries out, let it rest for a bit, then put it back together and on my 5D, and sometimes it still wouldn’t work.
Yesterday, I finally decided I’d had enough and shipped it to Canon for repairs. I hope they’ll choose to treat it as still under warranty, because I filed the original repair request back when it still had a couple of months of warranty left. We’ll see.
Meanwhile, I got my replacement lens from B&H today, and I have reason to be disappointed with Canon once again. Their QC should be better, especially for L series lenses. This new lens has two tiny specks on the inside of the rear lens. You could almost say they’re not there, except that they are, and it’s really bothering me. Maybe I’m overreacting to this, having been sensitized by the previous defect. I don’t think it’s going to affect the quality of the photos (I hope for that at any rate), but for a lens that costs over $1,000, I expect better build quality.
I leave you with a series of short videos that demonstrate how Canon make their lenses. They’re narrated in Japanese. I saw the English version (in a single video) a while back, but I can’t find it now. For those of you that won’t see the embedded video below (like the feed subscribers), here are the links to each video clip: part 1, part 2, part 3. With all of that emphasis on checking the lenses after they get made, you wouldn’t expect to find strands of thread or specks inside the lenses like I did.
Raoul Pop 