Kerime B. Toksü's 2literal.com

My birthday was this weekend, which happened to coincide with Vermont’s tax-free holiday, so I did something I’ve never done before: I bought myself a birthday present — the brand-new Fuji FinePix HS10.

In fact, the Fuji HS10 is so new, it’s not even in stores yet. So I did several things I’ve never done before: I bought a product sight-unseen, I bought a product I hadn’t researched on the web first, and I bought a Fuji instead of a Canon, which has been my camera of choice for 20+ years.

What possessed me? Was I in a crazy birthday haze, my faculties soaked with purply serotonin short-circuiting the über-cautious consumerism that is my trademark?

I can’t deny I was in a good mood, but the fact is I’ve been researching Canons for the past six months. Before the advent of digital photography, I used to shoot with a 35mm Canon so I was looking to finally buy an SLR. I’ve been limping along with a Powershot for years and it was time to pony up the cash for a camera with more manual control and better output overall.

So then how the heck did I end up with a camera that’s not only not a Canon and but also not technically an SLR? Because of the video, of course.

After the TEI conference where I was switching madly between photo cam and video cam — and ultimately not shooting enough with either one — I decided that my camera wish list needed to include video, and not just any video but HD. If I was going to spend $500 on a camera, I wanted it all.

So on my birthday/VT tax-free day, I went to an excellent local store, LeZot Camera (crappy-looking website but great store). I told the guy I wanted to see a Canon SLR and that the icing on the cake would be that it shot HD video. Well, the Canon that does all this — the Rebel T1i — is a couple hundred dollars out of my price range at about $750. I was hoping that maybe I’d missed something in my intrepid yet uninformed research, but unfortunately I hadn’t: the Canon landscape looked exactly as I’d seen online.

Oh well, I told myself, I’ll wait a couple more years until the price comes down. I must have looked disappointed or, more likely, absolutely unwilling to buy the T1i when the LeZoti told me about the Fuji HS10 — he’d just seen it in a tradeshow and not only did it include all the shooting features I wanted, plus the HD video, but it also had a manual 30x optical zoom.

If your jaw isn’t on the ground at this last spec, don’t feel bad. Mine wasn’t either but it should have been. Until now, this level/type of zoom has been found only in detachable lenses; Fuji’s fixed lens twists like one of these to give you the control without the bulk. Which was another of my requirements: I wanted the smallest, lightest camera with the most functionality.

Of course I won’t know for certain how fantastic the Fuji is until I have the camera in my hands, shoot some pics and video, then download it all to my computer. Two weeks until the unboxing. Can’t wait!

Sometimes the concept is driven home to me: a great idea is not enough.

I couldn’t help but consider this as I was reading the March issue of Inc. magazine’s “Cool College Start-ups 2010” — how many of these startups will still be in business a year from now? Two years? In last year’s roundup, the story of Michael Dell (founder of Dell Computers) was used as an example of a successful college entrepreneur. But there aren’t too many Michael Dells out there; in fact many of the 2009 college start-upers have already changed course. Does it matter?

I often highlight innovation on this blog because the output of creative minds is so exciting. And the commercialization of such innovation isn’t really the point, is it? If you don’t care whether or not your clever idea pays the bills, then you can simply post it on Instructables and move on to the next.

For example, my current favorite project at Instructables is the solar-powered trike. I can easily picture myself riding up and down the hills of Burlington on this electric trike (maybe I would make it a bike).

I’m assuming the creator (a student) is not planning to commercialize this particular build because he or she has posted it on the web. But a version of this idea could certainly dig a foothold into the marketplace. No special license or gas required for a stable, albeit slow-moving, vehicle. Sounds good to me.

But does the creator have the desire to be working on this one idea for the next five years, ten years? Does he or she have that single-mindedness of purpose?

Successful entrepreneurs are like researchers in this respect: they are happy to hammer away at the same problem, day after day, year after year. This may sound dull, but remember that this idea is certainly multifaceted and holds the promise of great reward: money and status for the entrepreneur; status and money for the researcher.

Yet you might have a great idea, single-mindedness of purpose, a healthy dollop of business savvy and still not wind up with a company like Facebook (which is still trying to monetize, by the way). Oh that’s right, we forgot about timing and luck, often one and the same.

If you tried to get your idea off the ground right before the recession, you might have run through all your capital and come out the other side battered and broke. Or maybe your idea is ahead of the marketplace. I owned a Compaq laptop in the late 1990s that worked like a tablet — not a hit at the time.

It’s pretty daunting, isn’t it. Hopeless almost. And yet…

What drives a creator to create is the process of the making itself, the ineffable thrill of sitting back and knowing you’ve made something unique. So in the end, maybe a great idea is enough. It just might not pay the rent.

If you’re editing video, you’re probably using Apple’s Final Cut Pro. It’s used by everyone who’s serious about video editing, from Francis Ford Coppola to my friend Julie’s son. (And me — a serious beginner on the software.) But what if you don’t already own a Mac? Over the past few months, I’ve been doing my video editing at the local community media and technology center. I can book four-hour blocks of time, for free, two times a week. A fantastic resource, but hardly an ideal situation. Especially when I need to make a tiny edit and can’t without waiting days.

So if you’re doing a fair amount of video editing, does it make sense to switch from PC to Mac?

Not for me. I refuse to pay $2500 for a desktop — the starting price of a quad-core Mac Pro. This entry Mac Pro includes a paltry 3GB of RAM, a NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512MB video card and no monitor, of course. Hardly any hardware for a $2500 layout.

Instead I decided to build a Hackintosh — a Mac clone that can run the Apple operating system, which means it can then run Final Cut Pro. I planned to build this new box over my week off between Christmas and New Years, so I checked out the build at LifeHacker (How to Build a Hackintosh with Snow Leopard, Start to Finish [09-03-09]) and another at Videoguys (DIY7.7: Intel Core i7 8-core [03-24-09]). I combined the ideas of both then priced out the components and came up with an i7 box that would cost about $1100. A lot better than $2500, right?

That’s what I thought until I ran across iBuyPower while jumping between Tiger Direct and Newegg.

I priced out the same build for about $50 less than building the system myself, plus it came with Windows 7.

Wow! I’ve had the box for about a month now and I can report that it has zero problems. I must admit I was looking forward to building my new box, but I must also admit that I was very happy to just plug in the computer and get down to the business of finding out which of my software programs would actually work with Windows 7 (all of them except Adobe CS2, the most expensive, but it was time to upgrade anyway).

I haven’t installed Snow Leopard on the box yet; I’m so pleased with it as is that I’m a little afraid to Applify it. However, the build meets all Mac specs, so I don’t expect any problems (famous last words, right?). I’ll be following these instrux at LifeHacker — Install Snow Leopard on Your Hackintosh PC, No Hacking Required.

Stay tuned for part 2: Installing Snow Leopard.