The ThinkPad T61 Pickup Truck

So, the $90 T61 came on Thursday. My original thought while I waited for it to come in was to fix it up a little and sell it. Then I thought about it some more and realized that there's so little money tied up into this, I could make it into a do everything random machine. Kind of like a pickup truck of laptops. Among the things that this machine could do was to set up to test out uploading video directly to an internet service. 

Let me explain myself.... in a former life, I was a coach. I know, weird huh? Chinese guy, born in Hong Kong, coaching football, basketball and track (hurdles)! Toward the end of my football coaching career, I was able to work a trade that allowed me to "film" (actually video, but coaches still call it film) the game instead of going out to scout upcoming opponents. That was an easy decision. Go every week with the Varsity team and be with players that I've coached, vs. driving all over "hither-and-yon" to random places like the "Tomato Bowl" (don't ask) in Jacksonville, Texas and spend 3 hours diagramming plays..... this is known in the trade as "scouting". Don't get me wrong, there were benefits! I know where every Dairy Queen is in most towns in North Texas, and I was able to hook my sister-in-law up with my scouting partner and they have now been happily married for 8 years!

In that time (about 7 years), I've become somewhat of an expert on the electronics end of "filming". Asian man, electronics and cameras; natural fit! Anyway, we got new equipment this year, so I got involved in the process of working with the new gear. In the hi tech world of 21st Century football coaching here in Texas (it's a religion here), we upload our videos right to a "cloud" service where it's viewed and shared with whoever needs it. What we decided to do was to start working with these capabilities to upload directly from the digital video cameras through a laptop directly to the service, thus saving the coaches the time to do it later after we get home from the game.

And this is where the T61 came in. I needed a machine that could experiment with to do these uploads. I didn't want to play around with my X301 and risk messing it up. The T61 was perfect..... well, actually my son's T61 was perfect, with it's descrete nVidia GPU and high resolution screen (1680 x 1050). So he got the $90 machine with the Intel X3100 integrated graphics and I got his machine. I doubt that a 10 year old who mostly uses his computer to play games and watch Pokemon' videos will notice the difference!. Sure, the machine got a little upgrade: 4Gb of RAM, 80Gb Intel SSD, DVD+RW burner, but it was all stuff that I had anyway so it didn't cost anything. I just had to find a way to get it off of the Advanced Mini-Dock that it was locked to and missing the keys! That, of course was accomplished through a YouTube video and now I have my pickup truck.