{"id":319,"date":"2006-11-10T11:14:33","date_gmt":"2006-11-10T00:14:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2006\/11\/10\/efficiency-of-banner-pages\/"},"modified":"2006-11-10T11:19:05","modified_gmt":"2006-11-10T00:19:05","slug":"efficiency-of-banner-pages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2006\/11\/10\/efficiency-of-banner-pages\/","title":{"rendered":"Efficiency of Banner Pages"},"content":{"rendered":"

One day, I am going to do some original research into a question that has plagued and haunted me – nay, us all – for years – a question that needs to be solved, once and for all, if we are ever to live in a harmonious society.<\/p>\n

On a shared office printer, are mandatory banner pages simply a waste of paper? <\/p>\n

A banner page is a sheet printed at the beginning of every print job, that display the name and details of the print job following, and, most importantly, the person who submitted the print-job. They originated in the old, old days when printers were expensive and were only handled by operators – your job would otherwise get lost in the pile of other jobs. They seem to be less common now.<\/div>\n

Consider the number of lost, stolen and forgotten printouts in the modern office. Do banner pages reduce them enough to pay for themselves?<\/p>\n

I will model the problem mathematically, conduct a number of laboratory tests and field research, and finally blow this mystery apart.<\/p>\n

My only question is whether to seek public funding and get a doctorate from this, or stick to private sponsorship and to recoup the investment by writing a best-selling book on the subject.<\/p>\n

Canon, Epson: the ball is in your court.<\/p>\n

I worked at a company that mandated banner pages on the office laser printer. The spooler used to print out the submitter’s name in large letters in the middle of a blank page.<\/p>\n

In my first ever foray into Postscript, I hacked the code that generated the banner page. <\/p>\n

I changed it to print out personal notepaper. The company logo appeared in the top corner, above the legend “From the desk of Julian”, included my contact details. There was a neatly ruled line, and most of the page was left blank for notes.<\/p>\n

It served its purpose as a banner page (my name appeared on it prominently) and<\/em> then it served a second purpose as professional-looking notepaper.<\/p>\n

I also considered making Phone Messages pad templates. (Remember those, before we had voicemail and email?) However, with room for about 4 copies of the template per A4 page, the number of print jobs I made outweighed the number of messages I took for others by at least an order of magnitude.<\/p>\n

Quite a few people copied my PostScript code. Sometimes, upon quiet reflection, I think it was my contribution to that company of which I am most proud!\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One day, I am going to do some original research into a question that has plagued and haunted me – nay, us all – for years – a question that needs to be solved, once and for all, if we are ever to live in a harmonious society.<\/p>\n

On a shared office printer, are mandatory banner pages simply a waste of paper? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[34,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software-development","category-thoughts-from-the-shower"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}