About Me
The author of this blog, prepress pilgrim is DJ Dunkerley of Vancouver, British Columbia. As you may guess, he has some years experience in prepress, having first picked up an exactor knife and hot wax back in 1991, or about the same time as when dinosaurs first walked the earth.
But seriously, that was about 3 years before the internet. I mention this because just the other day, my nephew asked what games I downloaded off the 'net when I was a teenager. Uh...couldn't do that, instead teenagers of my generation typed in BASIC code from Byte magazine. Or programmed games ourselves on the Vic-20.
But then the nineties arrived: Interesting times. Computers came into the shop and jobs were open to anybody with an appearance of intelligence and a dash of youthful enthusiasm (i.e. willing to work cheap). I worked for about three different service bureaus/print shop before being hired as an applications specialist by Creo in 1997, by the software development group.
It was the career equivalent of hitting a goldmine. Creo was about ready to burst onto the international prepress scene, and the software group was the hottest place in the coolest company on the Canadian west coast. After a year of being an application specialist for a little-known product called Prescript, I transferred to a secret project (yeah well not known to the public) called "Araxi." The product later acquired the name Prinergy.
After a stint at running the beta roll-out of Prinergy in Europe, the powers that be decided to let me run a small office dedicated to connecting Prinergy to any third-party printer/proofer I could lay my hands on. Professionally speaking, that was the most interesting and fun year of my career.
Early 2001 Creo merged with Scitex and I took up an offer to visit Creo Australia and help with the roll-out of Prinergy 2.0 there. Creo was like in that in those days, one fantastic opportunity after another to work on your personal development and take on challenging roles.
When I returned from Australia they kicked me upstairs and made me a project manager. I worked briefly with the Iris inkjet division in Billerica, Boston before the Epson juggernaut made them redundant, then I worked with the Israelis in Herzlia. The engineers and the software developers, the guys that I worked with, were all right, more than allright, they were really good guys. I had a couple of good years working with them where we got projects out the door that were successful commercially and well-received.
Since leaving Creo in 2004, I have worked for myself at Blue Butterfly Consulting (www.bluebutterfly.ca). The last few years I have been focussed on internet marketing. Below are some samples of a few experimental sites that I have worked on in the past. At present I am marketing a news site for west coast-based investor relations firm.
Check out some of my store sites:
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D.J. Would you want to see press releases from time to time from HELIOS re its PDF prepress workflow server products? I ask now instead of later. bgr
by the way, I see a lot of people googling for the e-mail address of prepresspilgrim. I haven’t set one up yet, but you can reach me at
dj.dunkerley at gmail.com
Can I ask the origin of the codename “Araxi” if you know? Now that I (sort of) understand where the Volume Names on our Prinergy servers originated!
I understand ‘araxi’ was Dave K’s favorite restaurant in Whistler, but not being Canadian, they just have been pulling my leg! (Hello, D.J.! It’s been a while!)
Those early days at CREO were a blast. My husband was one of the original pioneers. Alas, after 25 years he is finally receiving a severance package. He was so saddened when CREO was bought out by Kodak. He knew it would be the end of an era. The so called culture changed dramatically and it was no longer the same company he had loved. At the end of June he leaves with a couple hundred others. This company and the original guys he worked with that grew this company from nothing were his life. SO SAD it had to end.
Just a heads up to let you know that your site is now being blocked by WebSense. I don’t know a lot about how that works but I think it is a sort of master list that companies subscribe to. Anyway, they have you categorized as a social networking site.
DJ. I was trawling the internet for pre-press information and came across you’re site. Can I suggest you add a bit more oooomph to the term prepress other than working with Creo products. I too have used Prinergy (albeit in Powerpack mode) and believe me there are better products out there.
Ummmm… yeah sure…
How about this?
No wait, what about this stuff?
No? Well try this stuff instead?
Lastly, before I forget, before people to your site which you posted to my blog, do you think you should put some content on it? Right now it’s one page with the words “under construction” on it.
FubarGuy: Pete’s correct. The project name was based on the famous Whistler restaurant. As software developers typically do, they used the project name everywhere in the code — it’s so ingrained, it would be impossible to remove.