The "Golden Age"

Maybe it's because I've just experienced the almost perfect sports weekend.. First; all my schools/teams won: Friday night, both North Forney and Forney High, then Saturday, the Ags win at Tech, followed by the Sooners (my brother-in-law's team) beating those jackasses from down in Austin (who are really responsible for the demise of the Big 12), then the Rangers beat the Justin Verlander led Tigers despite a 2+ hour rain delay! .....Oh, and it RAINED, here in drought-strickened North Texas, dropping the temperatures into the 80's in the process!!! Or maybe it's because I just came home from a "once-in-a-lifetime" trip to Taiwan and Hong Kong during which virtually all my acquired technology came into play.....and worked flawlessly. So it feels like that Heineken commercial from last year, "Golden Age" is playing repeatedly in my head.

Anyway, what's my point today? It's that in today's world, the previously unobtainable can be had by us mere mortals with regular jobs and families. Basically, I have 3 main hobbies, and although, they are all different, they can all function together. There's photography/cameras, computers, and audio/video. The ultimate concept would be that the convergence that all of us "of a certain age" (around 50+or-) has been seeking since we first watched The Jetsons not only has occurred, but can be had if planned out and acquired properly.

Let me start by examining how NOT to do it. If you make the fatal mistake of buying at retail and becoming Best Buy's best customer (like many people), here's what would have happened to you to get to where I am today:

• "Nice" notebook computer that's light enough to carry around and powerful enough to do some minor photo editing on the move: $1500 or so. Yes, I know you can buy a decent machine around the $1000 price-point, but remember you are trying to replicate my $3000-3500 ThinkPad X300. I ended up paying around $200 for this after selling my previous machines that it replaced. Not to mention getting onto the internet in random places like Hotels in Taiwan and airports in Japan.
  
• High-end desktop computer with 2 large (1 22", and 1 20" hi-res LCD monitors) for around $1200. I built mine for about $800 total, over about a year, to handle the heavy duty photo-editing after the pictures are all dumped.
  
• Nikon D300, $1800, and 18-200 VR lens, $950, MB-D10 vertical battery grip, $250, for obvious reasons. I picked all this up for right around $1200 total.
  
• A/V computer connected to my main system; I'd guess-imate to run around $800 for a machine of similar capabilities. I built mine for around $200 of accumulated parts. Although my main TV at a less then HD resolution is a lot more fun to view the pictures on at 41" in the living room than crowding around my the monitors in the office.
  
• Home server, which replicates my 4Tb+ WHS should run around $600 and it cost me about $300 to build. Of course, this serves up the files and protects them by duplicating the folders.
  

I'm not even going to get into replicating my main A/V system. So roughly, "Super-Best Buy-man" would have spent $7100+ to purchase all of my various hobby pieces. And I'd say that someone could easily spend at least the $3000 or so to get an A/V system together pushing everything up over $10,000! Holy Smoke, that's a lot of money! I'm not saying that the roughly $2700 that I've spent using "Frugal Propellerhead" methods aren't inconsequential, but a $4400 differential is HUGE. I am confident in saying that it's enough of a difference that in all probability that I wouldn't be able to have/do some of the things I have/do now, or if I did, it would be with far inferior equipment!

It's kind of hard to remember when I'm out on vacation somewhere shooting pictures with the D300 with 18-200mm attached, reviewing and dumping the pictures onto the X300, backed up on to an 80Gb iPod, then bringing them home to edit on my big desktop workstation and storing them on the WHS file server, then pulling them up and displaying them on the big TV in the living room. When I think about all this in retrospect, I'm both grateful for what I have and a little overwhelmed by what can be accomplished today for the costs.