Another Side

Why does the universe conspire to prevent me from hearing african music. It's happened for at least half-a-dozen world famous African and I always missed them because I was out of town or once I had a gig. Tonight takes the cake. I make arangements to see Sidi Toure but I'm not sure of the start time and I get there too late. 

Which got me thinking...How come a guy who's always late be so far ahead of his  time. In the publishing world, at least. When I was still working with hot type at the Sherbrooke Daily Record, I was envisioning a more photographic process. When we were pasting up pages with Letraset, I was lusting after a $100.000 Cumpu-something. Then I embraced desktop publishing and dreamt of owning my own Laserprinter - right alongside my little Mac SE (with no internal hard drive), instead of driving to Montreal every time I needed something printed. My first desktop publishing on the Mac was a 1 page flyer for the local health food store and it had to be printed in two halves because printing the whole thing at once required more RAM than we had (1 Meg, I guess). Then you move ahead a few years and I'm producing newsletters for the Blues Society and The Jazz Festival, organizations that were barely started with computers and then diving into the online world. Then as I was exporting stories from the newsletters to convert for the website, I was wishing that it was the other way around. Use the web to assemble and edit in a collaborative process and when everybody's happy you click "Print" and out comes a newsletter! That would be beautiful but nobody's invented it yet. This is the mission of Blainco PubIishing Solutions and I'm looking for some tools that do that.  "Content Management Systems" (CMS) have opened the door and they are getting better. But now they've all been made obsolete because from now on, everything to do with publishing will have to be designed with the mobile/hand-held device in mind.  OK, back to the guitar, Brian.