Inhuman Swill

I learned something very cool yesterday. Of course, I'm a science geek, but I still thinks it's cool enough to share.

I'm in Los Angeles this week, doing what I hope will be ongoing programming work for a new client. The client is a big printing facility that spits out reams of paper by the minute, sorts, collates, folds, stuffs, and meters. If you've ever received a one-page explanation of benefits from your health insurance company, or a huge booklet with all the legalese for your policy, this is the kind of place that produced it.

I went on a tour of the facility yesterday afternoon. Among the huge laser printers and folding/inserting machines chained together like a mechanical version of the Human Centipede was a big blue roll printer. It was fascinating to watch in action. At one end was a giant roll of white paper, about six feet in diameter and 17 inches wide. The paper was fed at high speed into a unit that printed two pages side by side. As it emerged from that unit, the continuous paper strip went through a complex series of rollers, some set at a 45-degree angle, that turned the paper over so the blank side was facing up as it went into the next printer. As the paper emerged, now printed on both sides, a blade sliced it lengthwise. The two narrow side-by-side strips were then brought together, one on top of the other, and fed into a cutter that chopped them up into perfectly collated stacks of 8.5 x 11" duplex-printed paper.

That was cool enough, but I noticed that as the paper emerged from the machine that sliced it lengthwise, it passed beneath a piece of wire that had obviously been juryrigged. The wire was wound with a spiral of tinsel, the kind you'd use to decorate a Christmas tree. The tinsel brushed the paper as it sped past.

My guide pointed to the tinsel. "Every big print shop I know stocks up on tinsel at Christmas time," he said. "It's perfect for discharging static electricity from the paper."

Which then makes the paper behave better down the line and helps prevent jams in the equpiment. Pretty cool, right? I know.


Crossposted from Inhuman Swill

Friends of ours often ask me to remind them what it is that Laura does for a living. It's a little hard to explain, but this article from yesterday's New York Times does a pretty good job of spelling it out:

(Go ahead and read it now. I'll wait.)

A Push to Promote Familiar Brands Online

(Done? Okay, cool.)

Though Laura's name doesn't appear in the article, she's the one who spearheaded most of that effort at General Mills. That's what she does—comes up with digital strategies for her clients, and then gets the work done. The stuff for General Mills happened while she was at her old job. She's now doing similar sorts of things for clients at her new employer, MSL Chicago, where she is Senior Vice President, Director of Digital.

She works damn hard, and works damn smart. I couldn't be more proud of her.

For the online component of a Sunday story about unique office spaces, the Chicago Tribune used several photographs of the offices where Laura works. Check out numbers 1 through 5, from the Imagination offices.

The following press release excerpt comes from PR Newswire:

CHICAGO, Oct. 30 /PRNewswire/ -- Laura Chavoen has joined Imagination Publishing as senior vice president of digital media. She reports to James E. Meyers, president. Chavoen oversees online publishing, all aspects of digital media strategy development and day-to-day operations of Imagination's digital media department. She also is intimately involved in business development activities for new and existing clients.

"Laura comes to Imagination with more than 15 years of big-time digital media and custom publishing experience," Meyers said. "Her experience at companies such as Scholastic, Yamaha, SkyMall, Razorfish and Harper Collins is an exciting addition to the online publishing and digital media capabilities of Imagination Publishing."

Chavoen's arrival coincides with a significant increase in the staffing and resources of Imagination Publishing due to rapid growth in clients' digital media needs....  [full press release]

She's been there nearly two months now. I don't see enough of her, but I'm so proud of her.

Remind me never to try explaining Boolean logic to lay colleagues again.

Did you ever send a message in IM that wasn't very complimentary toward some third party? And then, just after it's sent, you realize you sent it to the third party, and not to the friend you thought you were sending it to? And you can hear the third party talking loudly at the other end of the office, so you walk over to the friend's desk and quietly explain what's happened? And so the friend walks by the third party's office to check if they've seen their screen yet? And the friend comes back and reports that the third party is at a fourth party's desk talking, and says you should cause a distraction so the friend can get to the third party's computer? So you walk up to the third party, shaking, and ask if they can come see something at your desk? And you have no idea what you're going to show them, but the third party trails along with you, and all the time you're wondering if somehow they did already see the (very) uncomplimentary IM? And you sit down at your desk and fumble for some weird half-remembered problem with the site you can show them that will keep them looking over your shoulder for a few minutes? And you stumble over your words as your fingers fumble for the keys, and you're not making any sense even to yourself but you manage finally after a few tries to find the path through the web site that results in a very obscure error? And meantime your friend is slipping past you out the door, and the third party agrees that this is bad but not worth holding up work on other bugs? And the friend slips back into the room, but then slips out again almost immediately? So you start jabbering incoherently about how you're worried about what would happen if the clients happened to stumble across this path, and the third party considers this, sounding friendly but a little confused, and you wonder if it's because they did see the message you sent and are just trying to cover it up with a brave façade, or maybe your own nervousness is just rubbing off on them and you better get a grip, or maybe you're just scary in general and people in the office always walk on eggshells around you? And then thank fucking Christ your friend slips back into the room and nods that everything is good, and you let the third party go back to what they were doing? And lo and behold it turns out that the weird bug you dredged up is really something bigger, and suddenly the testers are IMing you other examples of it? And you're so fucking happy to fix the bug you can't even speak? And you resolve NEVER EVER to say a SINGLE BAD THING about anyone in IM or email or sign language or hieroglyphs or assembly language ever fucking again until the heat death of the fucking universe?

Nah, I didn't think so. Me neither.

It is, of course, Work Hell this week. I don't know if you're observing it where you work, but we are here.

At any rate, I took a couple of hours this evening to sneak away from the celebration and meet a science fiction friend and colleague and his girlfriend for drinks at a brand-new multilevel sports bar called Tonic East. To think that this is the pinnacle of our technological prowess as a society. But I digress.

We had a lovely time in the roof garden, though the bit where we managed to snag a table was more carport than open-air seating. Coming back here to the office afterward—full of Newcastle Brown Ale, which I will probably have to stop drinking now that they're mounting such an aggressive and ubiquitous ad campaign in our fair city—I strolled uptown on Madison Avenue, only to pass a gaggle young young lasses loitering together in a knot on the sidewalk. Surreptitiously eyeing them and their long (as they are referred to in bad fiction) coltish legs, I thought to myself, "This looks like a chapter meeting of the Future Streetwalkers of America."

Then my eye chanced to fall upon the brass placard affixed to the front of the building before which the delicate things were congregating.


"Ah," thought I, and, "ha."

And now, back to the grindstone, so I can get home at what in these benighted circumstances must do as a reasonable hour.

It was a jam-packed weekend. Most critically, I finished the long overdue final draft of a novelette called "Not of This Fold," which is about Mormon missionaries and alien first contact. That goes into the mail today, and means I can get back to my novel Inclination. The goal is to finish the first draft of that by the end of the summer, so I can finally shave this beard off.

Saturday night, Laura and I went to a dinner party in Brooklyn with some friends we don't see often enough and who are now moving to Maryland. Why didn't we hang out more??? Because we're bad people.

Ella spent last week doped up on an anti-inflammatory because of a slight limp in her right hind leg. She still occasionally pulls up the leg and hops along on three legs for a few steps, but otherwise we don't see much sign of the limp. Still, she goes in for X rays today to see if there's anything to be seen. The poor fuzzball will have to be sedated. Our Maryland-bound friend's guide dog recently was treated for Lyme disease, so we're also going to have the vet check for that.

I got my hair bleached and cut yesterday, and also spent some time recording future Accidental Terrorist chapters for my podcast. Plus, I squeezed in a viewing of the French film Irréversible, which is probably the most profoundly disturbing movie I've seen¹.

( Irreversible, or just irresponsible? )

Finally, I'm jotting these notes from my new office high above 37th Street in Manhattan. I actually have a window at my left that looks down on the street! This is the life.

---

¹ Which may only tell you what kind of movie I don't normally watch.

Like memory structures being erased in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the office where I work is slowly being stripped to the bare walls around me whilst I continue to do my job. I'll be here coding away until 5:00 pm, when they come to take my computer away.

Madison Avenue, ho!