Hope Springs Eternal..... At the April Flea Market

Even though the Dallas 1st Saturday Computer Flea Market no longer looks like this (times 10) and is reduced to one section of the area under Woodall Rogers Freeway, I still like to go every now and then. The fact is, you never know what you will find there!

This time, checking a "junk vendor's" tables turned this up. Yup; it's a MInolta MC Rokkor-X, 50mm/f1.4! One of the Holy Grails of old glass. Yes; I'm aware that it's not one of the uber-rare f1.2 lenses, but I'm not sure what I'd do if I came across one of those! Back to the f1.4. For those who care about such things, this chunk of glass is well know for not just being fast, but ultra-sharp as well. Of course, being from a "dead" system makes it all the more mythological, however with the current crop of short back-spacing mirrorless cameras, virtually ALL lenses of this type have become highly sought after and the prices have gone up accordingly. What do I want with it since I have the Nikkor version, "chipped" for my current Nikon DSLR system? Uhhhh......a week of carrying it around Disney World has caused me to consider down-sizing. NO; this is not the same as my long-running series of wanting a smaller/lighter secondary camera to go with the main D300. I'm considering completely changing out of the big heavy Nikon system all-together. This will become a separate post (possibly a series) by itself. Anyway; to cut to the chase, I got this lens for $15 total including a ThinkPad power adapter!
Anything else interesting at the Flea Market? 

This..... What is it? That is a Sony Vaio PCG-N505VX of 2003/4 (there-abouts). Yes, that'd be a smoking hot PII/333 running with 128Mb of RAM on a 6Gb PATA hard drive. It's also one of the thinest notebook computers ever made....still. The case is completely of magnesium. It was complete including the floppy drive, power adapter AND dock. The only thing it didn't come with was the optional PCMCIA external CD-ROM drive. Yes; it does indeed power up, although there's no OS on it. What are my intentions for it? Mostly just to let it sit there and look at it for now, but I might get around to putting some version of Linux on it like Puppy. It was $10. It was a pretty nice morning!