I was going to post the following as a comment to the article “The Most Dangerous Appliance in Your Home: The Television” but their captcha anti-spam thing doesn’t work (I f**king HATE captchas) so I’m posting it here in an extended form.

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I also agree with all of these statements. The best step you can take in fighting the constant feed of manipulation is to TURN IT OFF or better yet, cancel your cable subscription. I do watch some tv, mostly on dvd of downloaded episodes of currently running shows I actually enjoy.

Many Americans are in a habitual state of behavior by which the tv is turned on immediately after coming home from work, school or whatever fills their day. Often, the tv stays on through dinner and remains on until bedtime. Many of these people then watch more tv in their bedroom prior to sleep. Some fall asleep with the tv on, set to a sleep timer. “I can’t fall asleep without the tv” is one argument. The tv delivering some feeling of comfort and security is frightening to me. In these kinds of all too common cases, the bombardment of messages, suggestions and advertising is constant.

Try, for one week, to not turn on the tv when you walk into your home. The desire to watch will seem, at first, almost unbearable. After that week, you may just realize how little tv contributes to your life and, in fact, how much it takes away.
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I recently discovered that InDesign CS3 has extended a feature present in the CS2 version. In the previous version of ID, you would place a PDF and choose the pages you wanted to place. When placed, a link to the file was created and it was treated just like any other image (meaning you couldn’t edit the PDF contents within InDesign). This feature has been expanded upon greatly with the latest incarnation of ID by allowing the placing of other InDesign files (.indd). This works better than the PDF placement because now, with the addition of importing multiple images at once, you can place multiple pages without going to the File>Place (or Cmd+D) over and over.

This feature would be useful anytime a larger project is divided into smaller parts and separated into multiple ID files. I recently have been working at a promotional products company who creates a yearly catalog. The catalog is divided into multiple sections (folders of files) and each section is split into even more InDesign files. Each section is then printed and bound separately. To expedite printing, you could create one master ID file for each section with the entire section laid out in one file. What’s great about this feature is that when any placed ID file is modified, the master layout with the placed pages will automatically update the linked file, just like an image. When viewing the Links panel, all pages and images are listed. You can choose “Edit Original” on any pages or image linked to a placed page. It’s pretty slick when you start using it.

A word of caution, since ID must load all the pages you want to place into memory, the initial Place command can seem slow (this could have been unique to my machine or the company’s network so your milage may vary). Once the loaded cursor appears though, you can drop, drop drop until all chosen pages are placed in the new document. Also like images, the pages come in at 100% so no scaling or box creation is necessary.

If you found this tip useful, post a comment telling other readers how you implemented it and whether or not it increased or decreased the production process.