Meekmok.com -- Our Fabulous Facilities

In 1991, we began with an initial 50 sq. ft. facility and grew to seven 50,000 sq. ft. facilities in 2004. Now, we are poised to open an eighth!

MFIS VISHAKHAPATNAM GRAND OPENING ANNOUNCED

The Meekmok Foundation for Internet Storage is pleased to announce the opening of its eighth printing and storage facility on March first, 2005. Located in Picture of Jeff RobinsonVishakhpatnam, India, the 30,000 square foot facility boasts a series of high-tech innovations that will make printing the Internet faster, cheaper, and more efficient.

"In the past we've built in the 50,000 square foot range," said Mark Robinson, Chief Facilities Officer for the MFIS, "but Vishakhpatnam will do more in less space."

The key feature is a completely reworked processing protocol, the result of a four-year systems analysis project carried out in MFIS facilities globally. Midway through this process, MFIS researchers began work on a proprietary vacuum-packing technique for bulk text. This breakthrough became the focus of the systems project and facility design.  

Dubbed "Meek-Wrap", the MFIS' patent-pending process involves replacing air with a nonreactive solvent derived from 3M's NOVEC 1230 Fire Protection Fluid and compressing the bulk text and solvent at 100 atmospheres. The solvent is then removed and the text is shrink-wrapped.   "Meek-Wrap results in a ninety percent reduction in square footage devoted to storage," Robinson said. "It is environmentally safe and obviously saves a great deal of money."   Construction of MFIS Vishakhpatnam is currently on schedule for the March first ground-breaking ceremony. At capacity, the facility is expected to house a full 1% of the Internet.

REPORT FROM NAZIR HAT

The Meekmok Foundation for Internet Storage purchased 500 surplus Oki printers in 2004. These printers had been in storage in several shipping containers in the port of Al Jubail, Saudi Arabia since the first Gulf War. Sealed in plastic, they proved to be in excellent condition and were immediately shipped to our Nazir Hat printing facility outside Chittagong in Bangladesh. Printing engineer Chandrabhana Bhatt sent this progress report back to MFIS headquarters:

"The Oki Microline 421 9-Pin Wide-Carriage Dot Matrix printers are capable of print speeds up to 570 characters per second out of the box, and with some mechanical tweaks we have been able to raise this to an average of 610 cps. We have also retrofitted them to the IEEE Parallel connectivity standard from a proprietary military format.

These printers have made our lives ever so much easier. They are very strong machines, designed with an expandable head gap to accommodate multi-part forms and cut-sheet stock, so we have no problems with our print load. The ribbons are rated for a four million character lifespan, but we have found several novel methods for enhancing their longevity using local materials to refurbish them. Similarly, Oki expects the print heads to fail after only 200 million characters, but our mechanics take great pride in taking the heads to 500 million strikes and beyond. We have even started a small cottage industry refurbishing the cobalt magnets and rack-and-pinion drives!

The Microline 421's have entirely replaced our older, more antiquated printers (Epson FXLQ Series). The accurate positioning of paper stock that Oki is famous for has eliminated much waste, and there are few jams.

They are very versatile. Unlike our old printers, we can now reproduce images up to 240x216 in dimension. If we had any complaints, it would be the lack of top-pull tractors and a true pin-feed platen like our old printers, but these are minor inconveniences. The local authorities at first complained about the 56dBa noise, amplified many times by the sheer number of printers operating day and night, but as our productivity increases we have been able to use stored reams of printed Internet material as massive sound-buffing walls. There are no longer any complaints.

Chandrabhana Bhatt
Printing Engineer
Nazir Hat facility"