Catching up

I'm not averse to new technology nor am I resistant to change but when it comes to the former I sometimes I hold back a while before dipping my toe in the water. So it has taken me until this morning to have my first go at getting digital photographs printed from one those commercial photo centres. Up till now I've had no need for any professional prints, relying on sending my photos by email to friends and downloading photos to my electronic photo frame (last year's birthday gift) for any that I wanted to display at home.

I needed some prints this time because I wanted to send some to a friend who does not have an email account. Yesterday I visited a nearby centre to observe others ordering their prints from those photo machines. I found that it was not easy to observe unobtrusively and I imagine the customers assumed I was sneaking a peek at their photographs. Actually the machinery was such a blur to me that checking out the photographs of others was the last thing on my mind but I ascertained what I wanted to know and returned this morning with my tiny USB thingy to make my order. As with most computerised things nowadays the process was so straightforward I wondered afterwards why it had taken me so long to make the attempt.

Anyway I had a thirty minutes wait for my prints to be ready and spent most of that time wandering around the rest of the store. By coincidence, earlier this morning, I read James' post about the purchase of a digital radio. Now that is another item I have been thinking about for some time but have not yet indulged myself by purchasing.

In truth it would be an indulgence. I'm not aware of much that is on offer on the digital stations that isn't a duplicate of what is provided on the main frequencies. The only real benefit for me is the promised quality of the broadcast. I have noticed a deterioration in the quality of the radio reception I have received over the past twenty years which I put down to increasing interference from building works and new high rise developments in my vicinity.

The cost of the digital receivers is offputting but even more so is the size and, to my taste, clunky look of most of them. Why are they so big? And why do most of them look like they were designed in the 1950s? And another thing, why are so many of them brand types completely unknown to me? At least today, I finally saw some Grundigs and Yamahas; names that are familiar.

I'm tempted to investigate the radios further but where will I place one if I do buy? None of my logical furniture pieces has sufficient surface space available for the size of most of the units on display. It would be just a tad ridiculous to purchase new furniture to accommodate a digital radio.