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The Death of the Yellow Pages

In these harsh economic times, it is a popular and entertaining pastime to declare the “death” of such-and-such an industry.  Newspapers are a common target and a popular subject — take Walter Isaacson’s recent Time Magazine cover story on “how to save your newspaper.”  With the global popularity of the internet, blogs, and the omnipresent Google, it seems logical that as more and more people turn to online sources for their information, traditional printed resources will fall by the wayside.  But is this necessarily so?  Specifically, what about another once-popular printed resource?  Has Google killed the Yellow Pages?

Blogger Tracy Coenen of WalletPop thinks so (and she’s not alone).  In July of 2008, she wrote a series of articles entitled “Top 25 things vanishing from America” — in at #24 was The Yellow Pages.  In her article, she referenced the results of a study by The Kelsey Group, a Princeton NH-based local advertising research firm, predicting that usage of newspapers and print Yellow Pages would drop by as much as 10% in 2008 — nearly triple the falloff rate of previous years.

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CRI Recycling, Inc.
http://www.crirecyclinginc.com

Jim and Rosemary Chesser joined the recycling adventure over eight years ago.  Based in Louisville, Kentucky, their family-owned business has blossomed from a one-room office into a sizeable redistribution warehouse located east of Downtown.  They purchase recyclable cell phones, inkjet and laser toner cartridges and provide a variety of recycling services.

CRI Recycling, Inc. offers three main services:

1. Fundraising for non-profits,  through their recycling program
2. Acting as an empties broker for inkjet and laser toner cartridges
3. Recycling end-of-life electronics, computer hardware, and cell phones

In addition, CRI Recycling, Inc. pride themselves in providing excellent customer service — we have personally spoken with several of their customers and all agree that Jim and Rosemary are an immense pleasure to work with.

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Keyboard Shortcuts that can save you time:

Here’s a list of keyboard shortcuts that some people might not know about.  Most of these can be discovered simply by hovering over any particular tool icon in Photoshop, but for reference here are the ones I use most.

• D — Restores the default Foreground and Background colors (black & white).
• X — Swaps the Foreground and Background colors
• H — Selects the Hand tool
• T — Selects the Type tool.  Shift + T rotates through the different types of Type tool (Horizontal, Vertical, etc.)
• M — Selects the Rectangular Marquee tool.  Shift + M alternates between the Rectangular and Elliptical Marquee tools.
• V — Selects the Move tool.
• L — Selects the Lasso tool.  Shift + L rotates between the different Lasso tools (Regular, Polygonal, Magnetic).

Basically, any tool that has multiple types (e.g. the Lasso, the Eraser, the Pencil) has a shortcut key assigned to it, and using Shift + that key will alternate between the types.

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“Do what you love.” Perhaps you’ve been told this by someone, or read it somewhere online, or maybe seen one of those self-improvement infomercials late at night with the guy with big hair yelling at you to Live With Passion and that kind of stuff. The idea is to find something that you would do even if you weren’t paid for it and then pursue that as a career. If you are at all interested in self-improvement, then you’ve probably come across this catchphrase at some point or another. If everyone just pursued their passion then everyone’s lives would be brilliant and fun and successful and great. Really?

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The holidays are upon us, and whether you celebrate Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, or abstain (how would that even be possible in America these days?), it is hard to deny the fact that around this time of year people just seem nicer.  Of course, that’s assuming you aren’t on the fatal end of a Black Friday shopping stampede…  Which I suppose brings me to my point:  My top 5 gadgets that I can live without, but wouldn’t want to (unless, you know, I really had to… I mean, let’s be realistic here, these are just things).

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