Whenever I see an actor on television or movies at the wheel of a car talking with a front seat passenger I cringe when the driver isn’t paying attention to the road in front of him.

If you're working in the forest products industry you've probably had a similar experience to this.

Marketers are always coming up with new names for improved products, but it seems they don't expect their customers to be able to count higher than five.

Patents are supposed to spread knowledge by making those filing for a patent describe the innovation in detail.

If you've had any exposure to Lean Manufacturing, you'll be familiar with the term Poka Yoke, invented by lean guru Shigeo Shingo in the 1960s.

According to the OECD, Germany recycles or composts 65% of its waste. The remainder is incinerated, since there are no landfills in the country.

Maintenance philosophies have come a long way in the last few decades.

I heard it said recently that in the last ten minutes, more data have been generated than since the prehistoric era until 2003.

In January 2018, the US Department of Commerce slapped a tariff ranging from 0.65% to 9.93% on Canadian producers of uncoated groundwood paper.

Unless you live near the equator, you are aware of seasonal changes and how to react to them. But did you know that papermaking can also be affected by season?

One of my first summer jobs as a teenager was playing the organ for weddings at various churches. It was my first experience as a freelance employee, or what musicians call playing "gigs".

According to the Greeting Card Association, Americans still send 6.5 billion greeting cards every year, about 1.6 billion of which are for the Christmas season.

A few years ago, I visited a major department store to purchase a sofa, but the item I wanted was out of stock and had to be back-ordered.

If you don't live in one of Canada's two largest cities, Toronto and Montreal, you might have missed the latest skirmishes in the battle between paper and electronic formats for newspaper readers.

One of my favourite activities is hiking to mountain-tops. I start out with a clear objective to get to the top, and when I arrive there I'm rewarded by great views!

At one period in my career, I was working at a paper mill where I had a lot of projects that depended on the mill running.

In March 2017 the newsprint mill in Thorold, Ontario was indefinitely idled. Ontario Paper Company started up this mill in 1913 and was a pioneer in the field of recycled furnish, having experimented with it briefly during World War II to extend its pulp supply.

I have participated in some paper machine trials that failed badly but taught some valuable lessons.

I remember the first time I saw a colour picture in a newspaper in the 1960s. I also remember the last time I saw newsprint being made on a fourdrinier machine, in the 1990s. Newsprint and printing technologies have come a long way since then.

You have probably all had this experience at some time. I got up one morning for my morning shower, and the water turned cold on me!

Many years ago at a paper mill I was working with, superintendents read the values of their key performance indicators (KPIs) off circle charts and transferred them manually to a whiteboard every morning, and most of the morning meeting was spent discussing those values and what had happened over the past 24 hours.