Colin Harman

Working at The Ridge, there is a need to promote different events or to print signage in a larger format than your average 11″x17″ poster. For years, prior to my being the graphic designer for them, they had been using an Epson 3000 which can print a max width of 17″ (not edge to edge, so actually 16.5″) and a max length (despite the fact that it was a roll printer) of 44″. So as you may realize, the size of my printing ability was rather throttled.

However, that wouldn’t be a terrible situation if the Epson 3000 printer worked well and had no issues, but this was not the case.

To keep the list brief, the Epson 3000 not only has only a Serial Port I/O, but is incompatible with the Mac OSX operating system which is what I use to create all the graphics. Also, it had to be babysat and made sure to not get the paper to bunch up on it’s pesky little paper tray, else you would end up with a sweet “accordion effect” on your prints. In the case that you needed to do multiple prints at once, good luck. if left unattended, the odds of it putting ink smears or blots on your prints at random unpredictable intervals were so good I’d bet my money 500 to 1.

If none or all of these symptoms have occurred, then chances are you’re going to get a full page of random WingDing-like characters printed out for your amusement as if the printer was saying, “I know your print is what you would/should have expected, but I thought you’d want to be able to see the wide array of zesty characters that could be at your disposal if you would just use wingdings on your next project.” Oh, and if you thought that the printer could be convinced that there is paper in the paper tray, you’re wrong. There is no convincing it. You have to trick it into thinking it has paper in it, like trying to get your dog to go into the garage when you need to leave by squeaking its favorite toy and throwing it in there like you’re going to spend the afternoon blissfully wrestling together. Yet, as soon as he’s a millimeter past the threshold you hit him in the butt with the door with a swift breeze that almost sweeps the smirk of accomplishment off your face. Needless to say, the 3000 was extremely unpredictable and frustratingly time consuming to print anything. In addition, given it’s print size constraints, to create anything larger than it’s limitations you would need a tall order of some good ol’ cutting, taping, and pasting of print pieces. The best part of all, is it is slow as Christmas. At a mind-blowing 1ft./hour you’re gonna need a good time wasting game on your iPhone while you’re babysitting this troubled lil’ tike. Ya, it was the kind of bliss that’s similar to pounding your head against a cinderblock wall…

So once my threshold of frustration and patience was surpassed, the motions were set in place to move towards getting a new solution that not only would be a replacement, but a step into the next direction of planning for the future and broadening our horizons of printing potential. After many conversations, research, research, budget adjustments, and more research, I landed on the Epson 9880 as the best solution for our current and future needs. Some things I was looking for were to be able to print on many kinds of media (including vinyl or Tyvek), at least 44″ of printable space (edge to edge), straight printing feed (for poster-board), auto cutting, unlimited linear printing length, color accuracy, Mac OSX compatibility, etc., to name a few.

So far, the Epson 9880 has been amazing. I know there are higher cost solutions out there, but for the money we invested, I can’t express to you how happy I am with it. The setup was a cinch, loading ink cartridges, calibration, driver setup was all seamless. The prints are beautiful, and holy crap it’s fast. So far, I’ve only had the chance to print about a dozen or so pieces with it, but what has transpired so far has been glorious. I will continue to post updates as to what I learn through more and more experience with the printer, and will keep blogging about my successes and shortcomings.

Have you ever had frustration with equipment like this, but then were so relieved by its replacement you can’t even fathom how you endured the predecessor for so long? Do tell in the comments, I’d love to hear about it.

There are just some things you simply cannot plan for. For example, how do you plan for something that works on a small scale, but is untestable until moment zero for actual reality. A real life demonstration of these inevitable folly reared its ugly head Sunday morning January 4th, 2008. The trouble I ran into was with the seemingly excellent and functional online service known as PollEverwhere.com.

I introduced the using of this service in a “smaller testing market” in the morning High School service at Blue Ridge Community Church. Realizing the potential dangers of using a system like this right off the bat in a huge environment could be a risk difficult to recover from, I felt this was a safe place to get my proverbial feet wet.

For those of you not familiar with Poll Everywhere’s services and capabilities, it is designed with a moron-proof web interface that allows you to build interactive live audience polls using SMS (text messaging) and a short-code paired with a response. Using text messaging the graph/poll on screen is updated live almost instantaneously. The graphs are customizable and can be fitted to your needs. The downside is because they are live updated, they are only functional in Powerpoint on PC and not on mac (for some reason powerpoint for mac blocks the ability for a .swf object to access an outside source for information (lame).

So the concept was simple:

1. Questions on the screen
2. People Text in their answers to the short-code provided
3. Graph updates and works perfectly
4. Much rejoicing and praise for all

However, unanticipated glitch was found in between number 2 & 3 of the above steps. The whole thing choked up. The first 30 or so votes came through no problem, but after that, one at a time squeaked through maybe every 15 seconds or so. My head is spinning trying to figure out where the bottle neck was occurring. As I was voting from my iPhone, I could watch my vote go through immediately, what was the problem?

Well during the second service I figured out what the actual problem was. It turns out that the service polleverywhere.com was not at fault, nor was the internet connectivity of our church, but it was the local SMS service in that area, regardless of who your cell phone carrier is.

I learned that day that every single cell company in the world is enslaved to the demands of a mere handful of companies that hold a seeming monopoly on the text messaging world. These few companies are what’s called SMS Gateway Providers, and they interconnect with every cell carrier to handle text messaging services. These companies have what are called Short Message Service Centers (SMS-C) scattered about to handle the text messages as they come in. Turns out, that in lower density ares of the country (like Blue Ridge’s location), they don’t have the same coverage as they would have in say downtown NYC or San Francisco. So when we sent them a surge of over 500 text messages in under 10 seconds, they were not quite fit to handle it in our given location, at all.

So needless to say, testing it in the high school room was a success with their limited number of users, however using it in the big room where the numbers increase exponentially was a complete and unexpected disaster.

Like I said, things you can only discover in the moment. Has anyone else ever run into any situations like this before where your lesson could only be learned in that very moment? I’d love to hear your stories in the comments.