Please, please, not another salad...PLEASE!

Please, please, not another salad...PLEASE!

Greetings from behind the big metal desk with the big old monitor.

Welcome to issue number five. I’m very proud of this issue because it features the first of many "A Day In the Life Of…" columns. In this department, we hope to show you the day-to-day operations of local businesses, how much work really goes on, and how they impact the community. Since the Capital Region Business Fair is the 20th and 21st of this month at the Farm Show Complex, what better organization to spotlight for our premier column than the Capital Region Chamber of Commerce. It’s an informative article, I hope you read it.

How ‘bout that cover? Neat huh? A little retro maybe? A LOT RETRO MAYBE. Nevertheless, it is a tribute to a comment, based on an omission of department, pioneered by a man in Virginia. How’s that for complicated. Here goes. Because of space limitations, I had to pull our MODE@LARGE photo section last month. (This is the section where we go around to local businesses take pictures of staff and patrons and put them in the paper.) The idea for this "photo gallery" section was the brain-child of Jeffrey Lefcoe, publisher of FLASH Magazine in Virginia Beach, VA, for whom I worked. Down there, it is one of the most eagerly scanned sections of the paper, (everybody wants to see if they’re in it). Well, I really didn’t know how popular it had become up here until I pulled it last month. I received some comments as to the value of the section and the empty void left by it’s omission. One such comment is in our new Letters section. So the cover is a picture of our MODE@LARGE photographer holding our new Kodak digital camera, (chuckle suppressed.) A section we will try to never omit again.

I don’t promise that you will see a letters section every month either, but I’ve received enough e-mails and notes this month to publish a few, so here they are. We’ve answered the ones that we felt necessary.

If you haven’t noticed, MODE magazine doesn’t come out on the first of the month. As a matter of fact, we come out officially (as of this issue) from the 5th to the 5th of every month. This was a mutual decision by the staff, born of necessity. The reason is two fold. First, it has been a challenge to get calendar information for AGENDA in a timely fashion. It was our feeling that it was a greater benefit to the reader to wait (and badger calendar providers) for their dates and information than to just omit them because they’re slow. Most of those folk get their info to us on the last day of the month. Second, it is far easier to schedule a print date just after the 1st, than just before it. Comments can be directed to the Publisher, objections will be forwarded to the sluggish calendar providers.

Please do come check out the MODE magazine ONLINE booth at the Capital Region Business Fair on November 20th and 21st. We’ll be showing off MODE’s (finally complete) Internet web site, some really cool new technology, and we’ll be giving away FREE Internet accounts! We’re booth #178, write it down.

MODE magazine is having a little "Meet the Staff" introduction party on Thursday, December 5th. It’s a semi-open affair, so if you’d like to invite yourself, please contact us before December 1st. (Party crashers will be forced to listen to me talk about computers all night.)

Thanks for reading MODE.

Scot Giambalvo, Publisher

P.S. Yes, the titles of my "diet" column every month are directly related to cheap lines from a very cool cult movie. Can you name it? (Hint: My grandfather used to read the book to me when I was sick.)