Retail Therapy - electronic gadgetry

One of the best purchases I have made in a long time is this lap top cooling pad, ($29.99). It sounds a bit lame but it actually is amazing. 6 hours on the lap top and it is still as cool as if I just turned it on. The lap top gets so hot that I worried if the stability of the components would be compromised. This should really help it last much longer.


The other purchase was more of an exchange and upgrade. I had a digital picture frame that was waiting for me to place my photos on a memory card; the hinge however was unstable and it fell over very easily. I was hesitating in using it. While at Costco I noticed a large display of the digital frames. My 8" size was a lower price than I had originally paid and the hinge was a completely different design, it actually looked sturdy.

The beauty of Costco shopping is a 1-year no problem return policy (even on electronics). I went home, found the receipt then returned the unit. Now the decision was whether to take the $10 lower price on the 8" frame or upgrade to a 10.4" for an additional $30. Peter talked me into the upgraded size. Funny, the whole Digital Frame is on the upgrade. Peter originally bought it for me for Valentine's Day. Whatever the reason, I saw the 8" digital frame at Costco for $20 more than he paid which offered far better features and he had no problem with me upgrading. I paid the difference.


Now the holdback was still the memory card (there is internal memory 256MB) . I figured I would take a look at the memory on sale at Costco. I have been looking for a 4GB card that was compatible with both my lap top and the digital frame so it would be easy to transfer the images. There was an 8GB USB stick which fits perfectly behind the new digital frame for $35 so that was an even better deal than I have seen anywhere over the last few months. Now I have a memory card and a new digital frame.


What did this lead to? quilting time? house work? homework? NO
I had to sort all my 6000 digital images on the laptop, of which there were nearly 2000 that were duplicates. That was how I spent the 6 hours mentioned earlier in this post.


Is the frame running pictures now? NO
I still have to rotate hundreds of these images

What have I learned? Deal with my photos as I download them so they are ready to enjoy when I want to see them. Now they are organized but most of my friends are walking up the left side of my screen.