In Praise of the Cheap: There are things that you should never spend a lot of money on. I have learned this the hard way. One of those things is sunglasses. This lesson came courtesy of a misbehaving Hobie Cat on Grace Bay in Turks and Caicos. Bye-bye pricey Ray-Bans. Since then I have never paid more than $10 for a pair of sunglasses. Of course this devil-may-care attitude also causes me to be somewhat forgetful of them, leaving me with four or five pairs sitting in my car at any given time. Still, I think I'm ahead in the long run.
Case in point: While sitting on the sharply sloping slickrock and trying to get a shot of the morning light on Delicate Arch in Arches National Park in Moab, I forgot that my glasses were on my head and they proceeded to tumble across many yards of rock towards a canyon. I just calmly sat and watched rather than risk my life by flinging myself down the slope to rescue them. I just waited to see if they would tumble over the edge. When they did not I slowly and carefully edged my way down to pick them up. One of the lenses had popped out but it snapped right back in. If they were $300 Revos I would have freaked.
Another thing to never spend money on: Earbuds. Unless you are one of those people that religiously wraps them up nicely in a little protective container, your earbuds are going to get tangled and torn. They get wedge into your filthy ears and get sweated on at the gym. And you will lose them -- at some point in the future you'll be looking for them; you'll swear you left them right there but they'll be gone.
I never spend more than $15 for earbuds. My favorites are Koss SPARKPLUGS. Perhaps I have tin ears, but they're my favorites even over more expensive models. They come with cushy cone-shaped plugs (3 sizes) that can be comfortably seated deep in your ear canal such that they isolate from outside noise better than my Sony noise cancelling headphones. You can buy them anywhere -- Target, Wal-Mart, etc. If I lose them or they break I just buy another pair wherever I am at the moment from Newfoundland to Kauai.
A third thing never to spend money on are the little USB pen drives. I use these for document portability (although I am slowing trying to get used to using Microsoft Office Live). They are inherently little pieces of crap. Three or four of them have freaked out and ceased to function on me (I am always backed up). The more clever among us can use their MP3 players or cell phones to double as one of these. $5 - $10 is right. $12 if for some reason you need more than a couple of Gb. (A cheap one at Amazon is linked on the left, or try buy.com; I'm always getting promo emails from them for these little things.)
I recently dropped a couple hundred dollars to repair my HP laptop when I could have snagged a brand new netbook for maybe $400 on sale. We're close to having disposable laptops. If I didn't do a fair amount of photo editing -- which requires some horsepower to be efficient -- I could almost take the same philosophy with computers. Maybe one day we'll reach a point where things are cheap enough that when any of these ridiculous gadgets we use decides to flake out, we'll just be able to pitch it and get a new one. That will be a good day.
