Miscellanies

A few years ago I purchased the remnants of the company I used to work for, NORD Photo Engineering. We made package printers for the school picture and wedding industries, and except for a couple specialized products were all but pulverized by the switch to digital image technology.
I'm finally to the point of scrapping a lot of the printer parts, and it's always a bittersweet feeling when I have to leave more of this legacy by the wayside.
However, along with the remaining inventory, jigs, and tools I inherited, I also took possession of all the assembly drawings. Since this company had it's roots in the 1970's all the drawings were painstakingly hand-drawn by draftspeople, whited-out, revised, redrawn, and some with a list of ECO's (engineering change orders) a mile long.
Some of the drawings I still need, but most are long obsolete, becoming a real burden: piles of heavy paper, large, dusty, tending to slide into a floor-covering mess if you try and stack them, hard to scan, and some, the true "blueprints" not accepted by the recyclers.
What to do? There is so much work in them, so much detail, but still I have to face it and get rid of them somehow.

One answer: they make great, classy, interesting, GARBAGE BAGS. The material is somewhere between plastic and paper and deals with wet coffee grounds famously. Above you see #42856 Vacuum platen, print box, living out the last of it's legacy. You have served me well to the last. Sniff.
So if anyone is interested, I'm also selling the real paper drawings as wrapping paper. I figure a nickel a piece plus postage because I'm always saying, "If I had a nickel for every one of these frickin' drawings, I'd be a rich man." So place your orders now, no guarantee which part number you will receive, that's part of the fun. Please specify, A, B, C, or D size. Order now and be ready for the holidays.

I came across one of those things that made me chuckle out loud on the internet the other day: Bad Translation.
Surprisingly enough, this one was from a Sony website that I was searching for a printer driver:

"For specifying the defrosting place of a compressed file, double click..."
of course, "We would appreciate your kind understanding."

But that can't top the Chinese bicycle parts manufacturers, home to such web gems as:
"Bicycle parts at fabulous prizes!"
and
"Dae Yung Tire Co.", your trust is important to us.

I also think it's interesting that Blogger spel-chek reminds me that "internet" should be capitalized. I thought we were way past that...