Category Archives: Materialism

A Partial Upgrade

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My AthlonMP system is aging. Actually, it’s aged. It’s down to 512MB RAM (the other 512MB went bad a long time ago). BIOS updates ended 4 years ago, and the thing doesn’t seem to support drives over 137 GB or USB keyboards, two things that have worked for a long time. (Hint: it seems like a good idea at the time, but don’t buy a server-grade motherboard for your desktop. It seems better, but it’s all these little things that will get you.)

I have a decent enough graphics card, a nice HDTV tuner, a DVD burner, 500/200/60/40 GB drives, a nice keyboard, and a monitor. So all I need, really, is a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM.

So here’s a motherboard. Here’s the processor. Here’s the RAM, times two. Net cost? A little under $500. For a quad-core processor, 4 GB RAM, and a motherboard with GigE. Assuming, of course, that all you need is motherboard + processor + RAM. Which is the case for me. Granted, it also assumes that you have $500 to spend on computer upgrades….

Edit: Seems that the RAM might not be the best. Don’t take my word on it being the right thing.

Today’s Deals

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Going through the circulars, here are some more incredible deals:

  • Office Depot has a 17″ widescreen LCD (1440×900), $139.99 after rebate. Brand-name is Hanns.
  • If you don’t mind an eMachine, Office Depot also has a desktop with a dual-core AMD “4000+,” 1 GB RAM, 320GB disk, Vista Home Premium, dual-layer DVD/CD drive, and a 17″ CRT + an all-in-one printer. $399.97 after rebates, but you’ll pay $725 in store.
  • Movin’ on up, dual-core notebook (TK-55 processor… What’s with new processor names that no one understands?), 1 GB RAM, 120 GB disk, dual-layer DVD/CD burner, Vista Home Premium, 15.4″ widescreen display (with Brightview), and integrated 802.11b/g WiFi. Just $449.99 after rebates, or $629.99 before rebate at Office Depot.
  •  Still in the Office Depot circular, an HP desktop with a dual-core AMD 4800+, 3 GB RAM, 320 GB disk, dual-layer CD/DVD burner, Vista Home Premium, and 22″ widescreen monitor (with Brightview). Seems like a steal at $749.99 after rebate ($919.99 before).
  • Or move up to quad-core with a Gateway system with Intel’s Q6600 processor, 2 GB RAM, 400 GB disk, dual-layer DVD/CD, and Vista Home Premium. Oh, and a 19″ LCD. $879.98 after rebate, $1029.98 in store.
  • Or move up to 58-core system for just $2,249.99 on eBay. (Discounted $250 since I last mentioned it.) 58 processors and 55 GB RAM. It’s at the bottom of the pack of the systems I’ve mentioned for storage, though. I’m not sure on shipping, but it’s worth considering on this refrigerator-sized computer.
  • Back to Office Depot, you can pick up an Acer 19″ widescreen LCD (1440×900) for just $189.99 after rebate. It’s also got a 2000:1 contrast ratio, which seems pretty enormous. Slap this on your 58-core system and you’ll have one hell of a desktop. (I’m not sure that the E10000 even has a VGA port?

Business School

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Kyle’s ending sentence reminded me of something I’ve noticed before: we at Bentley are not normal. Even those of us who aren’t obsessed with starting the next big company still have business on our minds all the times.

The other day one of my friends here remarked, “I want a Gap T-shirt.” Or at least, that’s how you’d have heard it. But what we heard, especially since a lot of my friends here are accounting majors, was, “I want a GAAP T-shirt,” which is actually what he meant. He just said it and we all cracked up laughing. I think I’m going to try to whip one up in Photoshop.

I came across this book on Amazon today. It’s called “Amtrak Privitization: The Route to Failure.” And my first thought was, “That’s not at all what I’m looking for,” (I was looking for a book about car maintenance by someone with a similar name), “but it sounds really interesting.”

The problem is, if you asked a sane person what their opinion of the book was, I think they’d tell you that it was the most boring topic they could imagine. And here’s another book that makes the opposite argument: the government should ditch Amtrak and let the private market “fix” it.

Of course, Railroad Law a Decade after Deregulation doesn’t grip me quite as much, especially at 50 cents a page.

As an aside, there’s one copy for $71.81 on half.com. The next is $101.98. In theory, you could buy it, read it (or use it as a doorstop), and then relist it around $95. It seems like it’s not a hot seller, but $71.81 is unnecessarily low on the part of that seller.

Not Compact

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The one “problem” with my 10D is that you can’t possibly fit the thing in your pocket. I’m buying a “grip” for it from Andrew, which is going to make it even larger.

So I don’t feel as bad about tacking a huge lens onto it. Heck, the lenses I use are small compared to what the real pros shoot with.

But here’s what I need. Canon made a 1200mm lens. This thing is ridiculously large. At f/5.6, it’s as fast as my camera at 200mm. This is n amazing lens. This is the only lens where photos of the lens are routinely more interesting than photos taken with the lens. I knew for a long time that the lens was very expensive. But I wasn’t aware of the definition of “very” expensive, nor that Wikipedia had a page on it. It apparently cost just shy of $90,000, and was available only by special order.

So then I found this article about Nikon’s ‘version’ of that lens, a 1200-1700mm lens. Of course, being a Nikon, it’s black instead of white. Linked to from that page is this article on Reuters, written by one of their photographers in France who took the agency’s 1200-1700mm lens to an event this July to get some shorts of the new President of France. The situation is one in which most pro photographers would weep and give up, and the lens is barely long enough. (He jokes that next year he’ll put a 2x TC on it.)

I’ll gladly accept donations.

San Diego

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I haven’t paid all that much attention to the fires in California, especially after discovering that my family out there wasn’t anywhere near the blaze. But take a look at this. This family just got back from their honeymoon and their house was burned to the ground. Very literally. There’s a small pile of ash left.

AT&T is coming after them trying to collect $300 for the receiver that was damaged in the fire. The guy on the phone at AT&T had the audacity to suggest that they should have taken the rented satellite receiver with them when they evacuated.

Way to go, AT&T. Short of changing your logo to a swastika or making fun of 9/11 victims, I’m not sure you could possibly have made yourself look more foolish than this.

Parfum

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Would you buy perfume from a site called “I hate perfume?”

Check out chemist Christopher Brosius’ collection,  including scents like “Ocean,” “Snow,” dirt, mushrooms, basil, carrot, hay, “Burnt Wood,” pipe smoke, leather, ice cream cones, “Celo Tape,” and rubber.

In another collection, he’s got gems like burning leaves,  beach, and some that can’t be succinctly described like Mr. Hulot’s Holiday.

This one sounds like a winner.

Renting a Lens

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I think I mentioned my newfound interest in camera lens rentals. In particular, the prices are lower than I’d have expected. I have a few different things in mind…

The weekend before Thanksgiving, I’m going to an event with all the major presidential candidates. I’ve found that 200mm isn’t long enough to get good close-ups, and that f/5.6 is far too slow for indoor shooting. (Especially as I don’t like shooting above ISO800.) So I need something longer and faster.

  • The ubiquitous choice is Canon’s 70-200mm f/2.8 lens. f/2.8 is extraordinarily fast, and, as an added bonus, it has Image Stabilization, which apparently eliminates motion blur from hand-holding. 200mm isn’t long enough, but with a 1.4x or 2x teleconverter, it’s long and yet still fast.
  • If I didn’t need the image stabilization, Sigma has a 120-300mm f/2.8 lens, which is just as fast but has f/2.8 at 300mm.
  • Sigma makes another interesting one, an 80-400mm lens. It’s slower at f/4.5-5.6, but it has their OS (Optical Stabilization), basically the same as Canon’s IS. And 400mm is nice and long!
  • I’m a fan of zooms, because I like getting things framed exactly, but Canon makes a 200mm f/2.8 prime, which is highly-regarded and small.

There are some other lenses that I’m interested in, maybe for Thanksgiving or just for general shooting, that I’d like to try:

  • Canon’s 85mm f/1.2 lens is ridiculously fast. It gets the shots that nothing else can. (Well, except for its little brother, the 50mm f/1.2)
  • I’m interested in the wide end of things. Sigma has a 12-24mm lens, which is ridiculously wide-angle. There’s some (pretty much unavoidable) distortion at the wide end, although it can be cleaned up in software. It’s seemingly a popular choice with people taking interior shots.
  • Sigma makes all the interesting ones… They’ve got a 20mm f/1.8, which is both really wide and really fast. And it’s quite cheap.
  • Sigma also makes a 30mm f/1.4 lens, sometimes compared to the 50mm f/1.4 series for full-frame sensors. It’s also much cheaper than Canon’s 35mm f/1.4 lens.

There’s also something unavoidable about going for moon shots, something that requires a nice long lens. (And either a steady hand or a tripod.) It looks like the Thanksgiving time-frame will coincide with a full-ish moon.

Jobs I’ve Overlooked

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Kyle has a book called Gigs that I’ve been reading. Basically they interview hundreds of people with various jobs about what they do. “We feel that the world hears too much from ‘experts’ of all political stripes, and not enough from the people for and about whom they presume to speak,” one of the editors writes. Reading just a bit of the book so far, I’ve realized a few things:

  • People are people. So many people view people at work as just a human embodiment of a company, or merely as an ‘object’ with which they’re forced to interact. (Sidenote: spending some time in customer service should be mandatory for everyone.) A bus driver talks about the abuse she takes when the bus is late. A flight attendant complains about the time someone threw a hamburger in her face because he didn’t want it. The world would be a much better place if people could see that people were people.
  • I’ve narrowed my horizons far too much. I never considered that I could be:
    • A train engineer. He apparently makes about $90,000 a year and gets to see the country. The hours aren’t great, though, and I’d probably get bored.
    • A member of the paparazzi. I love photography anyway. This guy has a wild job. He doesn’t mention his salary (he works for a magazine), only that one of his photos got him into the “six-figure club,” referring to his revenues from a single photograph. He does claim to have been punched by Alec Baldwin, and mentions that he goes to the bathroom in his car because he has to remain vigilant. Those aren’t the working conditions I look forward to.
    • A porn star, although he makes the job sound less appealing than I’d have imagined.
    • Fisherman. It’s intense work, and risky, but he makes good money.
    • Casino surveillance officer. Watching hundreds of cameras. It actually sounds fun, though I’m not sure I’d be making the $40,000+ that jobs out of college are supposed to pay.
    • Drug dealer. He made good money!

There are so many more I haven’t read. Slaughterhouse human resources director? Chief Executive Officer? (I’ll do it!) Clutter consultant? Crime scene cleaner? Taxidermist? Bar owner? Buffalo rancher? Food stylist? Anchorwoman? (Err, man, in my case.) Television station receptionist? Carnival worker? Squash instructor? Transvestite prostitute? Mother? The possibilities are endless for me! College professor! Bounty hunter! Prisoner! Town manager! Psychiatric rehabilitation therapist!

Wung Fah

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We looked into the cost of hiring a coach bus for the day. $1,300.

Multiply that by 5 and you can buy a used coach bus. (Granted, they’re easily $200,000 new, but there are a ton of used ones, and they’re the type of things that are usually driven until 1,000,000 miles or so.)

Assume 200 miles. (This is actually way, way more than we need.) 8 miles to the gallon. (You may do better.) $3/gallon. That’s $75 in fuel.

Assume you pay the driver very well: $20 an hour, and that we have the bus for 8 hours. (He surely makes less, and we don’t need 8 hours.) $160 in labor.

I want to start my own bus company. (More for being hired out for the day than anything than being a Greyhound / Fung Wah, though.) I think I could do it for a lot less.

Buy something like this, spruce up the interior (carpeting?), and re-install the seats, and you’ve got one heck of a bus with 750,000 miles of life left. And, apparently, 100 gallons of fuel already in it…  $10-15,000 buys a nice, complete bus.

$750 a day… Assuming $20,000 fixed costs, you break even after 26 days. You have variable costs (fuel, labor, insurance), too, but really, I think that if you could book the bus regularly, you’d do well.

Oh, and there are lots of little “extras” you could do. Replace those huge old TVs with a few LCDs. Probably under $1,000 total cost if you do it yourself? And, in lieu of showing a movie / TV, you could always do an airplane-style display of where you are or something… Or show ads! No direct value, but I think it’d raise the perceived “value” of the bus.

You could invest your profits into a budget limo service. You compete in the taxi market, not the limo market. If I had the choice in riding in a 12-year-old limo (after removing the garbage from the floor?!) or riding in a taxi, I’d pick the limo. Although I wager most of the costs there are variable costs: labor, insurance, maintenance (probably big on a really old American car?), etc. But really, you’re paying less than it’d cost to buy a used taxi. And this one is even less!