Have been absent for way too long. Hope I'll be able to contribute with some shots myself sometime.
Just a quick note regarding monitor calibration. Note that while the calibration alters the LUT of either the graphics card or the monitor and that this will already make a difference, it is still important to use a colour-managed application to get the correct colour. If you look at an image in a non-colour-managed web-browser, chances are that the colours will look subdued (often the case with laptop screen which have a lower gammut than sRGB). They may also look oversaturated if you are using a wide-gammut display.
So make sure you are using a colour-managed browser (such as Safari or Firefox), otherwise the necessary transformation into the output device colour space won't happen. I understand that Windows Vista and Windows 7 may take care of the transformation even if the application doesn't but I haven't been able to confirm that myself. Try this test page to see whether you can trust the way your browser renders colours of web images.
Adobe LR and PS are colour-managed but not all image manipulation software is. So even if your monitor is calibrated, you still got to make sure that you are producing (and viewing) images that will look the same to others with a calibrated monitor.