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December 16, 2006
One Hundred and Counting
A milestone has been passed. Just before noon the morning of Tuesday, December 12, I received an email from PayPal indicating that my good friend Christian Michael Vainieri had just ordered a gift subscription for his cousin Anthony Musmanno.
Mr. 100:
Chris does not always wield a tremendous knife, but this is the only photo of him I can find right now. I'm in South Carolina and away from the photo archive. Sorry Christian. You're still a handsome fellow even with the deranged look.
Although I am gratified by the arrival of each and every subscription, this one was particularly special because of it's being the hundredth. That's right, Idiots'Books has come of age, passing into triple digits. Christian will win a fabulous prize, to remain undisclosed until such time as we can think of something fabulous enough.
As previously mentioned, our upper-end estimates of subscriber pool numbered approximately 40. While delighted and flattered by the votes of confidence, we are terrified at the prospects of continuing growth. Our kneejerk reaction to Christian's subscription was to purchase a new printer, the Xerox Phaser 8550, that offers a host of improvements over our current Xerox Phaser 8500.
The 8550:
Let me enumerate the 8550's many benefits for you (it helps to salve the buyer's remorse):
1) the 8550 is a duplexing model, which means it can print both sides of the page by itself instead of requiring either Robbi or me to remove pages, turn them around, reset the printer to print a "second sheet" and so on. The non-duplexing approach results in frequent human mishap, paper and ink waste, time delays, angst, etc.
2) the 8550 prints at a resolution TWICE that of the 8500. Which means that those grainy images we had to tolerate in Death of Henry would be twice as sharp, twice as lovely. If you did not notice the unsatisfactory print quality of the Death of Henry images, we are gratified. If you did notice, thank you for not complaining.
3) our 8500 makes horrible noises and threatens to quit at any moment. Given the frequent need for printing these days, we cannot accommodate systems failure. We must have redundancy!
4) this is a geeky, yet important point with significant economic impact. The 8850 can accommodate the "extended-life" maintenance kit whereas the 8500 only accommodates the "puny, regular" maintenance kit. We currently spend $100 per 10,000 sheets printed (the puny maintenance kit). With the new printer we will be able to spend $150 on 30,000 sheets (the extended kit).
Are you asleep? Hello...? Apologies.
Posted by bogenamp at December 16, 2006 01:21 PM