For some reason this makes me laugh. Probably evidence that I don't get out enough.

You know what? That five-ton Heidelberg ain't gonna move unless you offer free delivery.

Printing Press, Bindery Score Folder, Heidelberg Offset

US $10,750.00

6d 22h 18m

Heidelberg QMDI 46-4 Offset Printing Press 2002

US $38,500.00

20h 43m

DAVIDSON OFFSET PRINTING PRESS MODEL 863 FEEDER

0 Bid

US $799.00

23h 53m

Crabtree-Vickers FALCON 26 Offset Printing Press Poster

US $9.50

27d 15h 35m

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Telus (the local phone provider in British Columbia) has a delicious bundle offering: For about $80, you get local phone service with 4 cents a minute North American calling, high speed internet and internet TV. Plus, PLUS... they throw in a Xbox360 if you sign a two year contract.
Well, I already paid more than $80 a month for phone and internet anyways, so this such a no brainer. So I go to sign up an get what happens.
The web... site... won't... process the order.
I get on the chat with a Telus customer rep and she says because I'm an existing customer I can only sign up for Optik TV. I get redirected to the Optik page where I'm up to $60 a month before the internet and phone are added in.
I tell the rep this is too confusing, I'll call in and try to get this sorted out. So I get the number 604-310-2255. I give them a call, and the phone rings and rings and rings.
Is it just me, or every time I want to order something from a data provider, and if you're a current customer you have to:
1. Switch over to the competitor.
2. Then switch back to get the skookum deal.

Whatever. I'll give this mission a rest and try to phone in tomorrow. If I can't get the $80 a month, I'll have to switch over to Shaw or Rogers.

I always buy my desktops off craiglist. For usually around $150, I get a decent machine that suits all my need and usually a legal version of MS Office 2003. Good enough for what I do.

However, my netbook is brand new. Why? Because Futureshop (and no doubt other stores) offer up to $300 off laptops and netbooks if you sign a contract for an internet stick (about $40 a month).

For us work from home types, a internet stick is a must-have anyways, so it's a no brainer. Nothing like having urgent email to answer and you pick a coffee shop with the wifi down. Or you are stuck in a meeting at an office where there's no wireless because the IT guys are security-freaks.

Anyhow, if you have a crappy laptop and you're a road warrior, there's no excuse. If a cheap guy like me buys new, then so should you:

http://www.futureshop.ca/en-CA/category/computers/1.aspx

I haven't really blogged a lot about print for two reasons 1) Yah, still really busy 2) It seems everybody is running around with rusty exactor knifes looking to slash their wrists.

Ho-hum so sad too bad. However please note that this blog is about prepress, not printing. And I don't know about other old prepress dogs, but the sun has been shining on my butt lately (work-wise). Of course that's because I have been not doing a whole lot of prepress lately.

Now can a prepress techie make a successful transition to being a web designer. Well, let me tell you, you need to know the big secret about making semi-decent web pages: It's called Photoshop. But enough about that. That's not really the tip of the day.

The tip of the day, is that if you transition from prepress to internet marketing (and I highly recommend you do) you will realize that there a gazillion tools and a bajillion services offered on the web for you to do business. One of the tools that you will need is a decent email program. ALL of the decent email programs are online services who have made arrangements with ISP to be able to deliver mail without getting spammed to purgatory. But not all are created the same.

Having tried out about 4 or 5 of these services, I have been using Vertical Response for about 3 months and been pleased as punch. It's got all the features that you need (opt-in scripts, on-page html editors) and it's cheap, cheap ($15 a month for 1000 email addresses in the database, unlimited delivery). Plus they allow single opt-in delivery (if you don't know what that is, I'll spare you the details.)

Some of the other emailers are downright paranoid about being blacklisted, so even if you have a ridiculously low "spam" rate (under 2%), you run the risk of losing your account.

Anyhow, that's the tip of the day.

Yes, I know, a good internet marketer would put a email sign-up box on his blog. Yeah, one day. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Man, I need one of these...

Yes, I do have a lot of interesting blog ideas. Yes, I do have thought-provoking writings to share with my beloved followers, if they still exist.

What I don't have is time. Like today I'm supposed to tweaking the data feeds for one news aggregator site and running landing page analysis on another. Plus the half-dozen other "action-items" on my "things-to-do" list.

Well, I guess that's a good thing. But it's seem like you are always either hiking through a desert or trying to drink from a firehose, isn't it?

Hey, don't worry about that kids' files. He went to design school.

Over the weekend, my ftp client was scraped by a Chinese trojan for access to my web sites. This was a pretty good trick as I wasn't on the computer the whole weekend because of the Olympics. Now I had passwords stored on the family computer in the kitchen which wasn't the smartest thing to do but hey, who knew?

Sunday night I was on the phone with my business partner and he was all of a sudden, hey what's up, the website is down! So I get on the phone and check with the hosting provider and every web site I own (or have access to) is getting knocked out.

So yeah, that's when I learn that there are Chinese trojans that scrape your PC looking for ftp clients like pureftp, coreftp, etc and if you store your passwords on them, they scrape 'em.

Then, once they get a hold of your passwords, they ftp in your account and download the virus that gets triggered if you use php in your website (and pretty everybody on Linux runs php on their web servers).

All yesterday, I was writing up tickets for web host support, trying to get all my web sites restored from backups. The clients sites got up first, with this blog not getting restored until early evening. So now you know why I was down yesterday.

So how do people know the Trojan is from China? Well the servers that load the virus (you can track the IP addresses in Apache logs) originate from China. Maybe in a few years, they will get as sophisticated as the Russians, who first write Trojans to get  PCs (outside their native country) acting  as 'bots for them.

I do know that the Chinese trojans are really annoying a lot of guys trying to make some coin on the internet. I've see (and used) block lists of Chinese IPs addresses, which basically deny access to your website to any computer that originates from China. That's how much of a pain these Chinese scrapers have become.

In the meantime, I have been resetting passwords on all my websites and making sure to NOT store them anywhere on the computer. Fun, fun, fun.

Well, if you don't know it yet, the 2010 Winter Olympics start in Vancouver tomorrow, or today by the time you are reading this. And not only does the family of Prepress Pilgrim live in Vancouver, we live right in the middle of Vancouver, like Main and King Edward, which if you Google-map, you will see we are pretty well dead-center in the middle of metro Van.

So I yanked the kids out of school this afternoon so they could watch the Olympic torch relay. At first they were so excited they could hardly contain themselves, but then they realized that watching the torch relay meant leaving the house and not playing games on the Wii. So a bribe was in order....

Umbrellas! Yes, here on the west coast, we bribe our kids with bright shiny new umbrellas. Then we take their pictures with a crappy $99 camera from Wal-Mart.

Anyhow, we make our way to Cambie Street near 19th Avenue, where the torch runner is to arrive at approximately three o'clock. We are to rendezvous with an elite battalion of youth ninjas, of which my oldest son aged 8, is a member. Of course they are disguised as:

Wolf cubs ie junior members of the boy scout organization. You see, they have to be disguised otherwise they would freak out the neighbourhood. But really, they are ninjas. Honest.

In the above picture, there is a ninja in full camouflage garb. See if you can spot her.
Anyway, we stake out a spot on the sidewalk and patiently wait. Well, the boys wait patiently but my daughter, who is training to be a supermodel, decides to put on her best impersonation of Naomi Campbell and throws a hissy fit. (No pictures taken).
Okay, so finally they close the road and my middle son can no longer play chicken with incoming SUVs. But it is the torch? No...what is it? Oh my goodness, it's... it's...

The Olympic torch relay procession sponsors!!!

Let me tell you, nothing symbolizes the games more to me than the sponsor wagon, complete with free swag. Except that I was holding on to a wailing 3 year old girl (not in picture), so I couldn't run forward and grab one of those groovy free Canada flags.

By the way, the first sponsor wagon was Coca-cola. Grab a coke and a smile. I'd like to teach the world to sing. Drink New Coke. Nobody paid me to write the last paragraph.

Now the second sponsor wagon was RBC, or Royal Bank of Canada.

Now I wouldn't say that RBC is smug or anything like that, but their new company motto is: "Yes, we are solvent because we didn't let crackheads or people on welfare take out mortgages like some *cough* American *cough* banks."
Anyhow, after the sponsors trucks moved on, they opened up the road to traffic and my middle son could start playing chicken with cars in the passenger lane again.
Finally, another procession, this time it's the real deal:

I get pumped, I tell my kids that this is once-in-a-lifetime-event. Not to be missed. And the wifey then tells me that Rachel needs to go pee. Now. Fortunately, there is a Starbucks on the other side of the street, and it's easy to jaywalk when the only cars on the road are police vehicles. Alright, we hustle over to the green mermaid, do our business, and hustle back just in time to get the snaps:

And here's a closeup:

Now we'll have two weeks of road closures and an inability to order sushi from our favorite restaurant because of the out-of-town curlers scaffing all the raw tuna (the curling rink is about 4 blocks from our house).
Wouldn't miss it for the world.

More posts to come.

So, a couple of weeks ago, I exchanged emails with a Kodak field that I knew from waaaaay back, like the 1990s. He was always field while I was always product development. Usually when we talked, that meant something had gone really wrong. Trust me, when things are running smoothly, the product guys and the field guys never talk.

Anyways, it went something like this:

He sends me an email "Look here Pilgrim..." and points to a funny Youtube video. I email him back asking if he is still working at Kodak and...

"Yes, I am part of the thin blue line that remains. For now.
I was telling someone the other day that it is actually kind of an adventure now. Like a computer game of survival. To see how long one can last as a functioning worker before one is fired, laid off, hired away, falls into a tragic downward spiral of drink and recreational drugs, or is driven past the point of endurance to an irreversible psychotic break. Last one standing supports the Prospero."

And I say:
"I have you in my dead pool for the month of March. I hope you don't take it personally."

Him:
"Certainly not! I welcome Death's final, icy embrace. But I must inquire how you calculate such odds"

Me:
"Easy. In the last week of February, I make a post that craps on Kodak management (again) and mention what a close personal friend you are.
In March, you get canned. Power of the press m'boy. Or in the case, behold the awesome power of the Prepress Pilgrim blog."

Last word to him:
"Hmph! I'm not going to be a sucker for a rigged game. It will never work. Kodak management knows perfectly well I have no friends. Besides, I am confident they would never be so petty and vindictive to a loyal worker who bears the red and gold badge embroidered upon his Made in China service uniform."

Hah, it was great talking to them. That's one of the things I miss, is shooting the breeze with the field guys. Pretty well all of them had a good sense of humor and enormous balls, especially the workflow specialists.

Anyhow, this brings (somehow the preamble above was a bridge, trust me on  this) to the matter at hand, Kodak's last quarter. Like no kidding, they made money. No matter how they made money, that's a nice achievement for a company that won the Motley Fool worst stock of 2010 contest. I mean,  I'm right there dumping on Kodak with all the other vultures, but people are saying its worse than Fannie Mae?

There's lots of buzz saying that too much of the profit is coming from patent licensing deals and if you put that aside, there's really no growth in revenue. This is really bad, according to those financial experts with the shiny shoes and the fancy degrees who have really shown John Q. Public how clever they are in the  last few years, what with the financial crisis and all.

On the other hand, you know, if you actually own Kodak stock, it's nice to know that Samsung is paying Kodak $450 million in licensing revenue this year. Nice work if you can get it, and kudos to the Kodak suit that got that deal signed. Hey, if I ever called you guys a bunch of pinheads, I take it back.

So far, the stock has bounced back to $6, and the Motley Fool grumps have sarcastically noted that's the same price that it was 40 years ago. Sure it is, but Kodak paid dividends up until this year, and why don't you get the list of the Fortune 100 companies from 40 years ago, and tell me today how many of those guys are even in business?

Kodak's been trying to go digital since Clinton's first term, and the jury is getting awfully hungry and wants to get this over with and go home to see the kiddies. Honestly, some people just want Kodak to go bankrupt just to see the end of the drama show.  But unless the forecasting is waay off, it looks like we're gonna see Perez at the end of the year, taking shots from the analysts all over again.

Looks like I'm going to do lousy in my dead pool this spring. But hey, wait until autumn.

By the way, the niece and nephew are visiting and they brought the cat. It's a very quiet, child-friendly cat, except that at about 3 a.m. it gets the urge to wage a battle to the death with the living room carpet. I guess what I am trying to say is that I didn't get much sleep last night.

And oh, last evening the virtual private server of my client's main money site went down for a couple of hours. Awesome, I love going to bed with a thudding headache. And right now some supplier wants 2k up front for a SAAS  (software as a service) package. Um, no  you'll supposed to soak me after I get hooked on your service, not before.

Oh hey, were was I vis-a-vis this blog post, after explaining why my brain is numb. Oh yeah, spray-on-liquid-glass. No, it looks really cool. Probably the most interesting thing you'll read today.

I would go home and sleep, but the cat and kids are there. Maybe somewhere in this coffee shop, is a dark corner where I can lay up and have a nap.