badges

[Matto Marjanovic <maddog@mir.com>]

Following up on the discussion about badges at tonight's meeting:

 a) Pre-scored cardstock for printing badges, and the associated
    plastic sleeves in which to dangle them, are available in just
    about every major office supply store here (the US being a
    country that has major office supply stores).

    These have already made it onto the shopping list; I am just
    reiterating for those who missed the party tonight.

 b) If whomever chooses/buys the badge cardstock can get the
    dimensions to me, I can set up a nice template so that we have
    snazzy DC14 graphics on the badges.  (A lot of times boxes of such
    cardstock, or the manufacturer's websites, have some kind of link
    to a printing template with the sizes/positions of the badge
    units.  Or, someone hands me a blank sheet, or sends me a scan of
    a sheet which shows the perforations.)

 c) Even better, tell me what information should be present on a badge
    (e.g., real name, nickname, email address, social security number,
    etc) and I bet with a little low-budget scripting, we can mostly
    automate the generation of the badge graphics for all ~300 attendees.

 d) There was some discussion about having a printer available
    at the front desk to print badges on-site on-demand when
    someone shows up and the appropriate badge is not waiting
    for them.

    As an alternative, I think it will be less hassle to just have
    a small stock of blank badges on hand (i.e., logo graphics only,
    no name), write in the name with a marker, and instruct the
    person to come back for a properly printed badge later in the
    day or the next morning.  That way, errant badges can be batched
    together and printed 6-up on the stock later on, and the attendee
    doesn't have to stand around waiting for someone to futz with a
    printer (and the associated software).

    If you want to get really fancy, put a "needs new badge" bit in
    the database that the frontdesk can frob, and printing more badges
    once or twice a day becomes basically robotic.

-m