Monthly Archives: May 2012

The blissful 99 days of summer are almost upon the Pad and Quill household, so it was fitting to commence an assault on my reading list over the holiday weekend. Being as I’m 44 and have never read the Ayn Rand novel, it seemed a suitable accompaniment to a 16 mile hike along the gorgeous Superior Hiking Trail. It is well known that I am a IT mental midget, so I was quite impressed with myself in making my purchase from Amazon and downloading it to my iPhone 4s and iPad. Enclosed in a P&Q Little Black Book and a Ziploc bag, the weighty novel only added a mere 8.2 ounces to my pack weight. The beauty of hiking with your iPhone 4s is that you can then add additional weightless novels, like Fifty Shades of Grey, a novel of which I understand might be all it takes to get Mr. PQ interested in hiking and camping. The remote nature of nature has many benefits.

Unbelievable. This whole project has been such a blast that I thought I would share the history of how we came to make the world’s smallest bookbindery case for the iPod Nano.

Will B., our operations manager, brought the idea up to me as a joke about six months ago. We make the Little Black Book for the iPhone 4/4S, how about one for the smallest Apple touch device, the iPod Nano? We thought about it, laughed and then put the idea aside as the very busy holiday season of 2011 was upon PQ. In early January the idea came back and we decided, what the heck – let’s buy a Nano and see if Eric, our CNC wood cutting technician, could make a teeny tiny frame for this idea. He did, and within about 3 hours of design, the moment I held it I knew we had to do it.

I contacted our master bookbinder who made the

A new tablet or an ‘S’ on the end?

Apple has had an interesting naming scheme when naming their new iOS products. The original iPhone was simply that, but the next version referred to the iPhone’s new cellular network update, faster processor and a changed case design, the iPhone 3G. This was followed by a 3GS which made sense as this smart phone was really just an upgrade in speed to the existing iPhone 3G. The exact same pattern came in 2010/2011 with the iPhone 4/4S.

The iPad is in its 3rd generation. With the newest iPad, Apple chose to simply refer to the product as, well the iPad, not iPad 3. This does makes sense with the way they have named the iPod lines and makes one wonder if the iPhone 5 will follow the same pattern. Having owned the new iPad (3rd Gen) for about three months now, I wonder if the new iPad really deserved to be called the iPad 2S?

The Retina display is gorgeous

We have a graduate, how did this happen? Mrs. PQ and I can hardly believe our oldest quill is graduating from high school this spring. Memories now flood my mind of holding her the moment she was born in a Minneapolis hospital, her first steps, learning to ride a bike, learning to drive a car. As I compiled a montage of her life from iPhoto for her graduation party, I was awash in a mixture of sweetness and a tinge of sorrow that my little girl is heading out of the house. She has made us proud, working alongside us through the PQ start up, really applying herself in school and most importantly becoming a woman of integrity that both her parents are very gratified to see.

The college is set (hello scholarships!) the dorm is picked out and of course the Dad is on the hook for a new Macbook Air or Pro; I would have our daughter work on nothing less than a Mac. Of course if she had it her way, she would head south to her new digs with an iPad 3 and a Macbook.