What if newspapers came later?

I heard an interesting perspective about newspapers at a meeting last week in Des Moines.

What if printed newspapers were invented after computers? You would find them to be easy to access, information would be easy to find. If the power went off or the Internet was down, you could still read them. They are portable and you can take them anywhere you go. You can?t lose the information unless you lose the paper itself. They have other uses, such as packing material for when you move, or material that can line the bird cage or something to hold over your head if it is raining.

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Just having had a birthday illustrates why the postal system is in so much trouble. I received two cards in the mail and they were from folks with whom I do business. All of the rest of my greetings came through e-mail, Facebook and phone calls?of which there were quite a few. All of the calls came to my cell phone, as I wasn?t even home for the big day.

This is not a complaint. Just laying out the facts of how the world works these days.

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Nancy took me out for dinner in the city for my birthday. We had a tag-team server and manager making a mission out of contacting us every two minutes to see if everything was OK.

Good customer service is nice, but this was over the top. They must have just completed a seminar on how to take great care of the customer.

I was talking about this annoying situation at work; our office manager said she and her husband had the same experience at the same restaurant on the same night.

When the waiter asked if there was anything else he could do for us, I felt like saying he could stay away for about 10 minutes or so.

What really did it for me was when he said Nancy ordered his favorite thing and what I ordered was the first thing he ever ate when he started working there. That was too big of a coincidence to be believable.

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Sometimes I get ideas, so I have to write them down right away. This also happened while we were dining. So I grabbed a napkin and started jotting a few things down. Nancy says, ?You have a BlackBerry in your pocket and you?re using a napkin?? I?m not totally digital.

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We are heavily invested in the Quark Xpress desktop publishing program at the Free Press. Adobe has made great inroads in converting former Quark users to InDesign users; therefore, many of our customers have also converted to InDesign.

We have that program, too, but it doesn?t make sense to work with it in addition to our main publishing software, so up until now InDesign files have caused a bit of a dilemma for us.

I just purchased an extension for our Quark program that will open InDesign files and convert them to Quark. It is called ID2Q.

The first time I used it I almost cried because it worked so well.

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We?ve had a 3/4-ton pickup for a few years now and, believe it or not, I have never checked what kind of gas mileage it gets. My belief is that it doesn?t do any good to check mileage because it gets what it gets?if you need the truck to haul stuff, what?s the point of knowing?

Observing the gas gauge made it seem the mileage was fairly good?until I read in the manual the truck has a 38-gallon tank.

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