11th January 2013 As of today, Jessops no longer continues to trade. It is but a third specialist purveyor of photographic equipment to go this way. Jacobs, another Leicester headquartered competitor, met the same fate as did the Wildings chain in the northwest of England. These were smaller operations than Jessops who may have overreached itself during the boom years and certainly had their share of financial troubles in recent times, the latest of which putting an end from the operation.
Many are pondering what is happening and the temptation is to blame the rise of the e-commerce and the economic situation for all of this. In addition, I have seen poor service blamed. However, where are we going to go now after this? Has photography become such a specialised market that you need a diversified business to stick with it? After all, independent retailers have been taking a hammering too and some have gone out of business like the chains that I have mentioned here.
It does raise the question as to where folk engaging in a photographic purchase are going to go for advice now; is the web sufficiently beginner friendly? There seemingly are going to be less bricks and mortar shops out there now so coming across one-to-one advice as once would have been the case is looking harder than it once was. Photographic magazines will help and the web has a big role to play too. It certainly informed some of my previous purchases but I have been that little bit more serious about my photography for a while now.
It might be that photography is becoming more specialist again after a period when the advent of digital cameras caused an explosion in interest. Cameras on mobile phones are becoming ever more capable and cannibalising the compact camera market for those only interested in point and shoot machinery. Maybe that is where things are going in that mass market photography doesn’t offer the future that it once might have done given the speed of technological advance. The future and present undoubtedly are about as interesting as they have become utterly uncertain.
Thinking over the last ten years or so, there has been a lot of change and that seems set to continue even if I am left wondering if photography has shot its bolt by now. My first SLR came from a Stockport branch of Jessops and was a film camera, a Canon EOS SLR. It certainly got me going and was exchanged for a Canon EOS 30 from Ffordes, an internet transaction during which the phone system around Manchester and Cheshire went on the blink. That outage may have exposed a frailty of our networked world but there has been no fire to melt cables in a tunnel since then. Further items from Jessops came via the same channel such as a Manfrotto 055 tripod and my Pentax K10D. A Canon-fit 28-135 mm Sigma came from Jessops’ then Manchester Deansgate store and another Canon-fit Sigma lens, a 70-300 mm telephoto affair, came from another branch of the chain, although not the Macclesfield branch since that had yet to be established and there’s no photographic store left in the town now after the Jessops and Wildings closures.
Those purchases have become history just like the photographic retail chain from which they were sourced. These days, I am more than comfortable in making dealings over the web but that concern about those starting out that I expressed earlier now remains. Seeing how that would work is set to become interesting. Might it limit the take up of photography on a more serious basis? That is a question that could get a very interesting answer as we continue into ever more uncertain times.
20th April 2007 My work in the last week has put me on something of a learning about Oracle. This is down my needing to add file metadata to database as part of an application that I am developing. The application is written in SAS but I am using SAS/Access for Oracle to update the database using SQL pass-through statements written in Oracle SQL. I am used to SAS SQL and there is commonality between it and Oracle’s implementation, which is a big help. Nevertheless, there of course are things specific to the Oracle world about which I have needed to learn. My experiences have introduced me to concepts like triggers, sequences, constraints, primary keys, foreign keys and the like. In addition, I have also seen the results of database normalisation at first hand.
Using Oracle’s SQL Developer has been a great help in my endeavours thanks to its online help and the way that you can view database objects in an easy to use manner. It also runs SQL scripts, giving you a feel for how Oracle works, and anyone can download it for free upon registration on the Oracle website. Also useful is the Express edition of the Oracle 10g database that I now have at home for personal learning purposes. That is another free download from Oracle’s website.
My Safari bookshelf has been another invaluable resource, providing access to O’ Reilly’s Oracle books. Of these, Mastering Oracle SQL has proved particularly useful and I made a journey to Manchester after work this evening (Waterstone’s on Deansgate is open until 21:00 on weekdays) to see if I could acquire a copy. That quest was to prove fruitless but I now have got the doorstop that is Oracle Database 10g: The Complete Reference from The Oracle Press, an imprint of Osborne and McGraw Hill. I needed a broader grounding in all things Oracle so this should help and it also covers SQL but the aforementioned O’ Reilly volume could return to the wish list if that provision is insufficient.
5th March 2007 Having had my main PC’s case hot to the touch last summer, I was wondering what was causing it. Components like CPU’s and graphics cards would need to generate a lot of heat to manage that. However, my main suspects are the hard drives in the machine: they do run hot after all and sit in a drive cradle connected directly to the case framework. As it happens, I was in Manchester’s branch of PC World yesterday and spotted Akasa hard drive coolers in stock for just £7.99 each. These dualfan units screw onto the base of your hard drive and their power connector can couple between a PATA power socket and a PSU power cable so that they can draw the power that they need without adding to case clutter. I bought two of the things and installed them; I’ll now see how they get on.