For today's link of interest, please observe the following.

http://digicc.com/fido/

It is, yes, one of those puzzles where you take your number and do all sorts of clever things to it and end up astounded at what you end up with. Pure inletigence. :-) It's pretty self explanatory - just follow the directions and click on the person in the bottom right hand corner to go to the next slide. You may want to grab a piece of paper and a writing utensil.

Totally zoned out...

So last Saturday I got to tour a couple of floors at the newspaper office, including the printing presses. I would really love one of those thousands of little cubicles on the ninth floor - it's a great view. One of the things we got to observe (emphasis on the torture and dismemberment promised us if we touched so much as a curtain) was the three recording studios and the brand new tv studio. It's tiny - once you cram in four sets, two cameras and somebody to work the camera it's a wonder they have any room left for anybody to film - but it has all the technology of the local news stations.

We will be recording approximately five podcasts in a few weeks, including one that I thought up. Yay me! (Is anyone else besides me insanely obsessed with The Suite Life of Zack and Cody????) It should be fun.

Of course I learned all sorts of interesting facts, which I shall note here. The company has 1100 employees, including 140 reporters and 50 editors, and it's own security force. They have stone owls sitting on the exterior window ledges to keep the pigeons away. Apparently, they're so lifelike that some people think they're real. Umhum. Hehe. I thought it was pretty obvious - the green stuff growing on the stone was kind of an indicator (to me) that they were fake.

The presses actually come from someplace in Europe, and they have a whole team of mechanics that train for years to be able to fix every little part at a moment's notice. With hundreds of thousands of papers going out every day, you don't exactly have time to mess around with a malfunctioning crankshaft.

Oh yeah, and they have this warehouse with enough newsprint at any one time to print six months worth of papers. Do you know how many acres of trees that is???????????

"It's amazing what you can accomplish when you do not care who gets the credit." - Harry S. Truman