Day 5 of a killer cold. Kids crabby, Dad is crabby. Many unfinished posts in the Wordpress queue. Could not find the “library bag” for the eldest son today, had to send him off to school without it. Bad Daddy.

Bought some traffic over the weekend and sent about 1000 visitors to an Adsense page and made a little bit of money. Checked the logs this morning and oh s—, 99% of the traffic came from China. Google will not be happy.

Must stay away from computer until brain is normal.

Walked into the shop today and the prepress operator was bored. That’s either very good or very bad. It could be bad because business is slow. It could very good because work is coming in and going out very fast right to the press.

In this case, because the owner is thinking about buying a new Mac for the prepress room, I think things are okay. In my fifteen plus years of prepress, I have come to believe there is a direct correlation between the financial health of a printing plant, and willingness to buy new Macs.

Anyways, prepress is like surfing. You are either standing on top of the surfboard riding the wave or you are 3 feet underwater. And Prinergy is one nice bigass surfboard.

So this got me to thinking, what was the best Prinergy customer I ever visited? Having travelled to Prinergy sites in 12 different countries (at least) and 15 US states, it was a bit of a difficult choice, but my vote went to IRL in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Those guys were awesome, whenever we had to a beta in Europe, we would try to get those guys in on the program. Go figure, it’s a printer in Switzerland and when you go in the shop, guys are leaving their Flash games up onscreen, and giving each other email addresses like “JamesBond@irl” or whatever. And not a manager in site.

But truly professional, those guys could make a dead rat run a marathon. We would throw a beta in there and not a week would pass without getting a detailed site summary carefully listing all the bugs they encountered and every possible workaround. In near-perfect english. Jeepers, we couldn’t even get our own application specialists in the software group to write decent beta bug reports.

Hope those guys are doing okay, I did work with them back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Good place to work and I hope it stayed that way.  If you see good tech people and no managers then that means the tech guys have good managers standing behind them (99% of the time). But the only problem with good managers is that, sadly, they don’t stay around forever.

I just did a major rework of Printcraft Solutions web site, a Vancouver printer that employs me about 3 days a week. The new site went live on Friday, and I just finished tweaking the last of the meta tags and titles today.

I’m quite pleased, the new site is very SEO optimized AND looks way better than the old one (or at least that’s what I’ve been told). It’s already ranking in the top 10 for many strategic keywords in the local Vancouver printing market by way of MSN, and I’m eager to see what happens in the Google index over the next few weeks.

In all three indexes (Google, Yahoo, and Live) it ranks ahead of many Vancouver printers that are much bigger, but that’s not saying much. It looks like most Vancouver printers don’t spend much on their web site, and when they do hire a web designer, they hire one who doesn’t know much at all about SEO.

Not that I’m complaining.

Great, great thread on PrintPlanet what to do (and also should you do it?) when the designer sends in a password-protected PDF file and refuses to give you the damn password.

To make a long story short with regard to the technical solution, Apple’s color sync utility allows you to open up the PDF files and strip out the password. Thank you, Apple.

Of course, there is also heated discussion on the copyright issue. Essentially, under copyright law, a printer can be held liable for damages for cracking the PDF file as the designer holds copyright. The thread is very interesting as there are arguments made for both sides.

My take on the subject? Well, my experience with legal matters is this: Is it better to allow damages to occur to you (or your company, or your customer - whatever) and then try to recover your damages in court OR is it better to protect your interests at the present time and risk being sued for whatever at a future time?

Yeah, that’s what I thought too.

With regard to the moral issues of copyright, I trained as a journalist in university, then spent a fair bit of time at Creo in the software divsion. There is no way to avoid appearing just a little bit cynical about this matter so I’m just going to say it: There is no moral issues whatsoever with regard to copyright, except perhaps when the RIAA goes after some wee old grandmother who downloaded the birthday song from the internet to play to her grandson.

Look! A month of free movies from Blockbuster:

Microsoft is giving away about 2000 free USB sticks loaded with hacking software to law enforcement agencies and military intelligence agencies.

“The device is a USB thumb drive called COFEE (Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor). When you capture an enemy computer, you plug in COFEE and then use over a hundred software to quickly get whatever information is on the machine. COFEE can quickly reveal passwords, decrypt files, reveal recent Internet activity and much more.”

No word whatsoever on how civilians can get their hands on one of these sticks. It will be interesting to see if any of these things make it to blackhat world.

Hat tip to Strategy Page for catching the story from Seattle Times.

My wife has taken a job at Canada Post as a letter carrier. The job pays almost as damn much as what an union pressman makes in the city. This should tell you something about what has happened to the local print scene here in the last twenty years. When I broke in the biz, the pressmen were considered only a little lower than God, and definitely on speaking with a few of the archangels.
Anyways, I look after the kids two days of the week now, and try to put in 40 hours on the other three days and evenings. Hello midnight hour, it’s me at the computer again.
I do sys admin at Printcraft and internet marketing for myself. What is internet marketing, you may ask? Glad you ask that question. I build ecommerce sites that advertise goods from such companies as Amazon, Ebay, and other merchants who have signed up through affiliate networks such as Commission Junction. I’ve got about 23 web sites set up so far.
Jeepers, it’s a lot of work, I’ve never worked so hard since university, when I paid my way through university working the night shift at a grocery store, stocking shelves. But it’s finally starting to pay off, this month at least
The big thing about internet marketing is traffic, traffic, traffic, you get it by organic SEO and by pay-per-click. An old acquaintance of mine from Kodak showed some curiosity in what I am doing and ask for some links about PPC and SEO. No problem, I thought to myself, and then looked at my bookmarks. Oh, okay, none of this makes sense to a normal person. Great, just great.
What does this have to do with prepress? In theory, nothing. In practice, I strongly suspect that the printing companies who will survive the next decade will be the ones who embrace the marketing potential of the internet and that means learning about SERPS, PPC, and organic SEO. And just like prepress, it’s all about the details.
Like right now, if I don’t fall asleep on the keyboard, I have to check my server logs and find out which spider keeps banging my Ebay affiliate links and screwing up my tracking. And then I really should modify my .htaccess file as the canonical urls (http:// and http://www) are both being indexed by google (duplicate indexing is bad). And oh yeah, I still have 4 sites that aren’t being tracked by Google analytics yet because I haven’t pasted in the javascript.
Jeepers, I’m busy. Glad you asked.

Use coupon PREPRESS for 8 bucks off any order at the Nerds shopping site. There’s a bunch of stuff there for under $15 so you can get more than 50% on some items. The coupon is good until end of May.

As we all know, for the small and medium-sized printer, the competition is intense, has been for years, and will continue to be for years to come. Etcetera, etcetera.

I think I have a talent for picking out which printers are going to survive and which ones are going to struggle and which ones will lie still after a vigorous (or not so vigorous struggle). To tell the truth, to survive as a career professional in this business, you have to develop fine-tuned instincts to determine if your employer is raking in the coin (thereby ensuring that your paycheques won’t bounce) or if they are bleeding cash 7 days a week (meaning it’s time to send out the email blasts to other prospects, super quick).

It’s not really a talent, more an accumulation of years of experience. My first 3 employers in printing no longer exist (buyout, bankruptcy, buyout). My fourth was Creo, by the way, still kicking around as Kodak.

One tell-tale sign of a downward spiral is the absolute refusal to spend any money on prepress or computer equipment. When the company owner refers to the prepress hub as a black hole or a money pit, it’s time to get out. Another sign to look for is the total lack of an advertising or marketing budget. Many a local printing owner thinks that yelling louder at their sales people is the way to increase sales.

Which brings to Google Adwords. If you can’t be bothered to spend a few bucks a day on Google Adwords, then what are doing for marketing? Adwords is the cheapest advertising out there, short of free. You can run a campaign for 2 bucks or 10 bucks a day. In all but the largest metropolitan areas, you would be hard-pressed to spend more than 50 bucks a day.

Why isn’t your company doing Adwords?

One of the great pain in the rear ends with regard to Prinergy integration is its refusal to play nice with Windows drivers. Hooking up a Prinergy system to Lotem Quantum or Trendsetter is a cinch. If your plotter or 3rd party imagesetter (if anybody still uses those things anymore) has a Postscript RIP in front, hey no problem.
But outputting correctly to a copier or deskjet inkjet is pure hell, if not impossible. You have to have a Postscript driver and a lot of manufacturers don’t provide one. And the ones that do, most times the Postscript driver is not well maintained (translation: buggy as all get out).
So I was cruising the web one day and found Hot Folder 1.2 on a shareware site. It takes in TIFF and spools to Windows drivers printer and as soon as I saw it, it was like, oh yeah, I’m gonna try that.

You can run it for about a week and then you have to pay $20 for the license. And I paid the twenty, let me tell you. I can’t tell you how many hours in the field I spent trying to get Prinergy to play nice with 3rd party printers, so $20 was like nothing for me.
Just for giggles, I tried a direct connect from Prinergy to an Epson 7000. After rooting around on the Epson web site for a little while, I found the non-Postscript driver. I set up the Holder folder application (really easy to set up, I don’t even need to post instructions), and spooled a 360 dpi TIFF to the hot folder. It worked. Then I tried a 720 dpi Tiff. It didn’t work. I then fiddled around with the driver settings and tried again. It worked. Man oh man, where was this application about 7 years ago?
Note: This would probably work with Apogee workflow as well. And Artpro. And virtually any workflow system that can output a continous tone TIFF.

Someday my grandchildren will ask me: What was the biggest disaster you ever witnessed? And I will answer them: The summer of 1998, the day Time Magazine was late at Roto-Smeets.

To say it was a disaster is an understatement. To miss the deadline of Time Magazine back then was an apocalypse, unforgiveable. When the Platemaster system went down, the board of directors was notified as well as the executive team of Roto-Smeets, one of the largest printers in Europe. Time specified in their contract that if you were late, then the contract was broken and they could go elsewhere. And I was there when it happened.

I was actually there to do damage control over another bloop-up, otherwise known as Prescript I. You see, back then, Creo didn’t have the PDF workflow today known as Prinergy. Instead it had a Postscript-based system called Platemaster, which was actually years ahead of its time. That workflow had a fanatical following that held onto the system years after Prinergy started to dominate the large printer space. But it did have some flaws, like no trapping. Or color management. Oh yeah, and because it was Postscript-based, and because back then Windows servers topped out at 350mhz, every once in a while the RIP would barf on a imposed signature of Postscript, usually at the worst possible time.

Prescript was suppose to fix the RIP barfs, by “cleaning” the Postscript so that there would be no surprises at the end of the line, when it was time to make plates. I joined the Prescript team just after the release of Prescript I. How well did it work? About as well as any version I of any software product. Not well enough (cough) to meet the expectations of our customer base.

Creo Europe was especially upset about Prescript. Okay, they were pissed. A lot of big deals were on the edge because Prescript had been advertised to fix the RIP barfs which were killing the platemakers and it when it had been released, it stank out the joint.
Earlier in the year, I had been sent on a fact-finding tour to gather problem files and generally offer my Johny-Canuck butt to various customers so they could kick it and feel better. Now I had returned with version 2 to save the day, be a hero, and not incidentally, get some deals closed so that Creo Europe could have a good quarter.

Roto-Smeets was one of those customers that needed some impressing. And then one of their Platemaster systems blew up. Okay I wasn’t actually there when the moment of disaster struck, it was actually Matthieu Bossan who bore eyewitness testimony. Matthieu was one of two (count ‘em, two) application engineers employed by Creo Europe in 1998 (The other one was Tomas Leferverbre. We also had a demo specialist by the name of Stefan Steinle who knew his way around Platemaster. Stefan had the joy of demonstration Prescript to various customer - “Here is Prescript ripping its way through a job…, Scheiße! it crashed again…”)

So Matthieu goes in to install a service pack on one of the Platemaster servers. He installs the service and does a reboot. He waits for the server to come back up again. And waits… and waits. Baby that server is hard down, as in hardware down. Service call goes into DEC and the parts won’t come in until after Time Magazine is due to hit the trucks.

Now the Roto-Smeets guys weren’t dumb, they had TWO platemaster systems. But in the summer of 1998, ad revenue for TIME was good and the size of the magazine had grown and grown, meaning more pages and more signatures and more plates that had to be imagined in finite amount of time So some calculations were made and oh scheiße they weren’t going to make ALL plates in time according to the contract.

And that’s where things stood the day that we will suppose to go into Roto-Smeets and do the Prescript II install. Everybody was in shock. We were told not to wear any Creo golf shirts or T-shirts or anything like that. But the Creo Europe guys were happy to see us from Vancouver. Rolo-Smeets was based in Holland and one thing about the Dutch is that they are raised by their moms and dads to be nice to Canadians (This is because of WWII, when the First Canadian Army liberated Holland from the Nazis in 1944. Every year in my hometown of Ottawa, there is a tulip festival when the Dutch send bulbs in gratitude).

So there we were, a group of Canadian stuck in the plant where Time was late, with a few Creo Belgians who made sure the Canadians were close at hand when the Dutch customers hovered around. Paul B. eventually showed up with the server that we were supposed to install Prescript on. Paul was so like many other prepress sys admins I meet over the years, capable and tough and squeezed on one side by buggy software and systems that didn’t quite work well together, and squeezed on the other side by upper management that didn’t understand IT very well but knew the cost of everything. So Paul was under a lot of pressure, and had been for quite awhile.

So I set to work on the server and of course the Prescript II application doesn’t want to install. Two hours later, the script that should have taken 3 minutes to run kept barfing. Of course this was the cherry on top of the icing of a scheiße cake. Finally we figure it out and I remember the exact solution more than 10 years later. For some strange reason the CD drive was mapped to the C: drive on the computer and on Windows NT 4.0 that causes the installer to abort. So we mapped the CD-ROM to another letter and it worked. Then Paul pulled out some crappy Postscript files that causes Prescript I to barf and they worked through Prescript II just fine. So we were able to retreat with some dignity that day.

The very next day I was part of a team to fly into Norway to install Prescript at another hot site. We nearly got stuck in Oslo when the unions in Norway decided to call a general strike. We asked just what the heck they were striking over but nobody could tell us the reason why, they had so much stinking oil up there and it was a nice summer day so why not call a general strike. There was only one flight out of the country in three days and we made that flight, the plane had been allowed to take off because it had organs aboard that were needed for a transplant patient in France.

When all the dust settled Roto-Smeets didn’t lose Time and eventually ordered a third Platemaster system. They may or may not have used the incident to get first dibs in Europe on a super-secret product that Creo was working on at the time, code name Araxi. I joined that team in autumn of 1998 and after about 3 name changes, the Araxi team released Prinergy in late 1999. Roto-Smeets was the first European customer of Prinergy and they made the first plate in Europe from the Prinergy system. I know this for sure because I was there when the plate was imaged. It was a VLF plate, 16-up, and Prinergy ate the signature like it was ice cream and spat out the plate so fast that Roto-Smeets never had to worry about being for Time, or any other job, every again.

And so Prinergy was released and the world changed for so many of us in the prepress universe but it was so very groovy because we were at the center of it all. The future looked to be without limits as Creo grew and grew and the dot com boomed and whatever we touched seemed to be put on the verge of a wonderful transformation. Like a previous generation in 1968 we had our summer of limitless possibilities and like that generation that had the betrayal of Watergate and the tragedy of Vietnam, we had the dot com crash and September 11th, 2001.

As for the European guys, Paul got eventually promoted and it still working at Smeets as far as I know. Matthieu got kicked upstairs to management. Tomas kept working in apps until I lost touch with him. Stefan moved to Vancouver and became the Prinergy product manager for about 3 years until he moved back to Munich with a wife and a baby - a little Canuck baby. As for me, I live in a little house in Vancouver with my wife and three small children who are sweet and innocent (like we all were once) and with a future that has limitless possibilities.

And so it goes.