Monday, January 15, 2007
The New Year
Wow, its the middle of January already. I spent most of last week getting back into the groove of things after spending a good chunk of December and the beginning of January back home. I'm now back in Rochester hammering away at my three top priorities for the new year:
- Finish my thesis
- Continue developing PrintWiki
- Find a job (both near term1 and permanent2)
A lot has happened in the last few weeks that I wanted to write about but I didn't have time to capture. A few tidbits did make it into my draft box but never developed into anything substantial, so I'm publishing them all at once as a catch all post.
Catching-up : Indox
I received a nice note from Peter Renton letting me know that he mentioned Printmode in his latest Label & Narrow Web magazine column The Blogsmith. Here's what Peter had to say:
You won’t find me reviewing many blogs by college students here, but Printmode is one. It is a blog by Adam Dewitz, a graduate student in the School of Print Media at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The focus of Printmode is the convergence of print and the electronic media, and the issues facing printers today. Topics covered include color management, web-to-print, digital printing, and commentary of printing industry news.
Adam also provides excellent real time coverage of industry events. In 2006 he covered On Demand, the Technical Association of the Graphic Arts Annual Technical Conference, and extensive coverage of GraphExpo. He was also a guest blogger of the In the Balance Blog during GraphExpo. One useful feature Adam provides is a "Linked List" - basically these are very short blog posts with links to print industry news. If you are interested in a fresh perspective on the printing industry Printmode is worth reading.
Thanks Peter, and congratulations on your great year!
Catching-up : Kirtas Technologies Tour
Last Tuesday the Digital Books Class toured Kirtas Technologies. They're the company that design and manufacture the automated books digitization systems being used by Microsoft and libraries around the globe. I was very amazed by the operation and will devote a post to them shortly.
Catching-up : PrintWiki
PrintWiki is still in development phase, at the organization, content and system levels. At the organization level I'm still investigating how to incorporate it into its own entity. This requires legal stuff and I haven't had time to engage a lawyer to determine what it will cost to make this happen.
Content is slowly being built (slower than I had hoped) but a current project will change that soon (I'm going to leave it at that as I don't want to ruin a cool surprise).
Over the month of December, PrintWiki was moved over to a server that could provide it with more resources. This is still not the optimal setup as the project is using borrowed resources. I want to get the site on its own server. I ran the numbers and determined that it will cost $500.00 to host the project for the year. In the coming weeks I'm going to develop a fundraising plan to cover the costs of hosting.
That's the short end of things. Here's to a prosperous new year!
1. I'm looking for short term projects to help pay the bills.
2. As many of you know, I was contemplating continuing my education in an Information Science doctoral program. I have decided to put this off for a year or two and go to work.
Posted in: Printmode
