Hi.  This is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com.  Well, today's episode has absolutely no redeeming value.  I save thing and I found a few things here on the desk and I thought I would sort of give you an idea.

Most people have never seen these, by the way, but this is very unique.  This was from Indigo, now part of Hewlett Packard, of course, for one of the Drupard shows, '98, and they demonstrated something called the cannery where they could actually print on cans.  They were filled with water, by the way, and so you could have personalized cans.  Well it really never took off.  I mean, how many Italian weddings are there?  All right.  I know I'm going to get an e-mail on that one.

It was called the Omnious then and the problem was this stuff scratched significantly so there was no sapphire coating for aluminum as far as I know.  But you could put pictures on there, you could put type on there; this was from a person becoming a new vice president, this is from a graduation.  So you could -- you know, you could have this memento of your wedding, graduation, or whatever on a can.

NPES, the association for manufacturers and suppliers gave out a bottle opener.

Oh, not everyone has the Cuark Yo-Yo.  I think it also lights up when you use it; I won't do it here, I'll probably break something.

Cannon gave out a memory stick and they put it in this neat little box and I forget how big it is.  It doesn't say on it, but you know anything that's not a gigabyte or two, forget it guys I can't use it all.  Nothing fits on it.  But this is a great giveaway for suppliers.  Memory sticks are -- we can all use them.

I've got dozens of pens.

This one is from Mamaki.  This one is -- oh, this is the cheap Heidelberg pen, this is the cheap Heidelberg pen.  They have a much better one.  This is from -- oh, this is from a group I spoke to up in Canada, CupMac, which is the college and university printing managers association in -- where was I?  In St. Johns, Newfoundland.  In fact, people have looked at the back of my wall; by the way, see my little screechers thing there.  I had to kiss a cod and became a screecher, by the way, which is a big thing in St. Johns, Newfoundland.

This is an expensive pen from Comori.  This is also a larger pointer as well as a pen but it weighs a ton by the way.  I think it's a weapon as well.  Oh, it actually comes in this box and it has a warning sign on it that there's nuclear energy in it or something.

This was the novel my son wrote, "Virus!"  This is one of the few copies that was ever purchased.  So, again, we know how to make books, we know how write books, we know how to make books, but now the problem is for people who self-publish, how do you sell books.

One of my great colleagues is Frank Cost.  He's the interim dean here at the college.  He's been a professor in the School of Printing for many, many years.  But somebody wanted a photograph of him, so he set up his camera and he sat in front of it and as he was sitting there he started making faces.  So as he started making faces he then sort of saved them all and produced a book called, "Facing Myself".  And I think the way it worked was that if his daughter Elaine did something unusual or different, he would just open the book and point to the picture that expressed his emotion at that moment.  There he is on the back saying, "Why did I do this book?"

But in any case, Frank really got into on demand publishing.  He was using Lulu.com quite a bit and produced several books.  Just to show the technology and how it works and what you can do with it and this is great fun and I have one of the few copies.

This was a very unique project, this was a project done by a group of my students and, in fact, there's the whole team of them right there and they found these paintings we have by Kimberly Clark that they commissioned in the 1950s and they researched every one of the photographs and then produced this beautiful book; they researched it, they wrote it, they scanned everything, they printed everything at CMYK plus a spot bronze plus a spot coating.

They even made a DVD of them making the book and it's a documentary -- it's a fascinating documentary by the way -- and called "Hand of a Master."  They only printed 500 of them and they're very, very few left.  So if you ever find this on eBay, "The Hand of a Master," definitely something you want to ought to get.

And lastly, in 2001, our chapter here of TAGA, Technical Association of the Graphic Arts, decided to do something different.  So their technical papers are all inside the book and that's fine, but what they did was they ran the covers through the Zycon Digital Printing machine that we had and they produced personalized covers.  So the image was alternated -- there was several different images -- and the name of all the people attending the conference, they got it in advance, and everyone's name went on it.  And then they hard-covered, case bound the books.  Just an absolutely gorgeous job and there's the team that did it.  And they had a ball doing it.

So not only did we win the major awards, I think we won every award that year because this was such a complex project.  The pictures that they used are called the big shot and they're done by the School of Photography here at RIT and you see there's a house in there with some carolers in front of it, right?  Well, what you don't see there are 1,000 other people and they're walking around with their strobe lights going off.  And so long as they're moving and the other people standstill you don't see them, but if you look in the snow you can all their foot prints.

So it's called The Big Shot, they called it The Big Picture for this book.  And they do that every year at RIT.  I think one year the King of Sweden shows one of their pictures for his Christmas card.

Well those are some of the things that -- oh, the last thing.  Oh, all right.  I don't know who sent me this but it's duct tape bandage.  I haven't opened it and I haven't used it, but it says it's latex-free.  So guys will essentially appreciate this duct tape bandages.

So that's all my opinion.  Take care.

Next time...

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