Foreign Perspectives

The computer we bought today will be the last major purchase on our part for a while although I imagine that I could talk myself into getting Office 2007 for it rather than using Office 2003 that we already have. The new computer comes with a limited time edition of it so I’ll likely have a look into the cost of a student upgrade as they’re usually sensibly priced.

We’ve a slide scanner and digitizer pencilled in as our next IT purchases.

The slide scanner will let me use the massive library of slides that I’ve built up over the years rather than having to license photos for Whole Earth.

The digitizer is to let me improve the quality of maps used on our listings sites and to bring them all in-house. One limitation that we have at the moment is the totally over the top price to license maps for some countries: no license and you’re stuck with the very basic maps that the CIA put out in their World Factbook.

Snag is that a decent digitizer can run to hundreds of pounds and it’s something that we’d use relatively rarely: after the initial burst of usage, we’d probably only be getting it out of the box once or twice a year.