The hot weather has finally hit Vancouver and I have pulled the air conditioner out of the closet. The last two days were a real scorcher but today was not too bad at all with it being about 22 degrees Celsius in the morning.
The wifey and I took our 3 little ones and make them work (work, I tell you) in the strawberry fields of Ladner. In about ten days, the raspberries will be ready to pick, and of course in August, the wild blackberries beckon from every piece of uncultivated parkland in the city.
Now that it doesn’t get dark until well past 9 o’clock, and the oldest is out of school, my evenings are no longer spent in front of a computer, so we shall just have to see how much blogging is done over the summer.
Funny enough, the summer slowdown still hasn’t hit Printcraft yet.

So one of my best buddies sends me quick e-mail this morning saying he has order the magic jack gizmo that is attracting more and more attention in the press: Canada’s Globe has a write up on it.

You stick one end into the USB port of your computer and you plug a regular phone into the jack at the other end. Configure the software on the computer and away you go. Cost is $40 to buy and $20 a year for calls out to North America.

You can take your laptop on a trip and plug your phone into your laptop and call anywhere like you are calling at home.

I did a lot of business travel back in the early 2000s and let me tell you, this thing would have worth its weight in platinium. Reading the reviews on Amazon, customer experiences are a bit mixed: Some people think it’s the greatest thing and other people had a few problems making it work. But for forty bucks, how can you go wrong?

Link to Amazon page on the magic jack here:
magicJack USB Plug

US $36.99 Auction Ends: Saturday Jul-12-2008 7:59:20 PDT Buy this Item   | Watch this Item

I’m trying to join Technorati but it’s proving to be somewhat of a challenge. Now I have to write a blog post and include this code to show that I really own this blog:
Technorati Profile

There you go. Now can you let me in?

Our Konica Bizhub crapped out yet again, so we are looking to get a new color copier in the shop. We need something that can print 3000-5000 pages RELIABLY, can print duplex and can print on paper heavier than 80 pound.

Please leave comments if you have a digital colour printer in your shop that you are happy with.

thx, DJ

Ooops, about a couple of weeks ago, Ebay changed some category numbers for their listings. That meant if you browsed the prepress store  of prepresspilgrim, some pages would come up blank.

It’s fixed now. Sorry ’bout that.

I’m not really writing a lot about DRUPA because most of the news coming out is about 1) Inkjet presses and 2) JDF. With regards to #1, I think inkjet presses are gay because in my opinion (and whatever that is worth to you), they offer no qualitative improvement over offset and they sure don’t seem to offer improved cost of ownership. What they DO seem to offer is yet more opportunity for a manufacturer to lock a printer into a proprietary technology i.e the vendors consumable stream would now include ink.

Oh yah, wake me up when an inkjet manufacturer allows for 3rd party qualification of ink cartridges on their equipment. Zzzzzzzz….

Now about JDF, I see that Prinergy is qualified for a whole bunch of different JDF certifications. I guess this is a good thing but I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, as a general rule printers don’t get excited over certifications and specifications, they get excited (possibly) over products. Perhaps the bindery guys are excited over JDF but hey, I’m prepress with a focus on internet marketing. Maybe it should be expected that when it comes to JDF, I stay stoopid and bored.

But whoa, flexo is cool. There is a good article on flexo products on the Printceo blog. I like the future of flexo and flexo products mostly for one reason: You can print on waaaaay more different substrates with flexo than with offset, and that allows for way more niches which of course, offset commoditization.

The only problem with flexo is the steep, high learning curve. But if you look at it from another view, that’s more a feature than a bug. I mean, do you see Kinkos getting into flexo anytime soon?

I’m Canadian, so I had forgotten it was Memorial Day in the US until an article on the internet reminded me. Up here we have Remembrance Day on November 11th, when the cadets and veterans march down Main street in a parade in the morning. Afterwards, they pop in the local legion hall for a pint which is only a block and a half away from my house.

My Dad was air force but we didn’t talk much about military stuff because a) He was an engineer and b) In the 70s, he spent a fair amount of time in counter-intelligence and basically spooks keep their mouth shut.

My Grandad was a career soldier. He served in the US Army in the thirties in the Blackhorse Regiment which is now 11th Armored that is serving in Iraq (if I recall correctly). But he was originally British so in the mid 1930s he emigrated back to Britain and joined the army there. He was at Dunkirk when everthing stinky hit the fan. Then he got sent off to North Africa and was captured and become a POW for four years.

About ten years ago, when he was still alive and I was visiting England, I sat down to talk with Grandad about his military experiences. He said he didn’t remember the battles and the POW years very much ( and his voice would fade and he would look away). But he talked a lot about his time in the US. He liked looking after the horses, and he said the food was good.

My wife and I saw “Iron Man” yesterday at the theatre starring Robert Downey as Tony Stark. I’ll summarize the plot very quickly for those who have not seen it (I do recommend going to see it, Downey does put on a good performance.”
Downey is cast as multi-billionaire whiz engineer Tony Stark who is taken hostage by bad guys after he is shot in the chest. He has to build a powerplant in his chest cavity near his heart to keep it beating. Ordered by the bad guys to build missiles in his dungeon, instead he builds an iron suit to break free from his captives, that is driven by the powerplant in his chest.
Later on the movie, the chief bad guy, in his laboratory surrounded by a team of scientists, orders an replica of the suit to be built. His chief scientist tells him they can’t reproduce the powerplant, and the chief bad guy snarls “Tony Stark built the power plant in a cave using nothing but spare parts!”
After the movie is over, my wife turns to me and one of the first things she says: “Isn’t that Iron Man guy just like Dan Gelbart?”
If you ever worked at Creo, you instantly get it. For the rest of you, I will recount the famous story of how Amos (CEO of Creo from almost the beginning to the very end) first met Dan.
In late 1980s, Amos was general manager of Optrotech, which was reselling imagesetters from Hell Germany at about $100k a pop. Amos was looking for a imagesetter that was twice as fast, twice as large and offered four times the resolution. David Nims, a colleague of Amos, suggested a tiny company based in Vancouver Canada whose chief engineer was a guy by the name of Dan Gelbart. So David and Amos take a plane from Israel to Vancouver (btw, speaking from personal experience, that’s a long haul) to meet with Dan.
The Optrotech group asks Dan how much money he needs to develop the photoplotter engine. Dan says $500,000. Amos keeps a straight face. Then the group ask Dan how each engine would cost. Dan says $35K. Amos makes a noise, now almost completely convinced the guy was nuts. Dan misunderstands the grunt of Amos and then quotes $28k per engine. Amos calls a timeout so he can chew David out for flying his butt halfway around the world (literally) to meet with a wacko engineer. Somehow, someway, David convinces Amos to take a chance on the guy.
Dan delivers the first engine in 1989, or about a year after the first meeting. It’s got a motor inside from a household furnace. The optical resolution changer was based on a model airplane servo unit. Does it meet the spec? Baby, it exceeds the spec. Creo ends up shipping more than 300 units and supplies spare parts for machines in the field well into the 2000s.

This is one of the famous Dan stories. There are about a million of them. Pretty well all the engineers at Creo thought Dan was a complete genius. And I was impressed because the engineers thought Dan was a genius. I mean, if you have ever worked with engineers (especially Canadian engineers who think they are the best in the world), you know they take special pride in hero-worshipping no one. But Dan was different, you would mention his name and the awe would show on the engineer’s face….

“Hey mister, are you really Tony Stark??!”
It was a great movie. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should hurry to go see it before it disappears from the theatre.

US $7.91 Auction Ends: Thursday Jul-03-2008 22:36:00 PDT Buy this Item   | Watch this Item

US $1,147.00 Auction Ends: Thursday Jul-03-2008 22:40:00 PDT Buy this Item   | Watch this Item

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.

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.