While trying to fill out a voter registration form, I ran into this sad state of affairs:

1. Preview works with the check boxes and radio buttons, but the text fields are only 2 characters wide.
2. SmileOnMyMac’s PDFpen application doesn’t work at all. Radio buttons are displayed randomly on the page, the text fields are not editable at all.

3. Adobe’s own reader works for editing, but they don’t let you save the document! To make matters even more insulting, they have gone out of their way to disable OS X’s “Save as PDF” from the Print Dialog! So you get this comical, yet infuriating sequence:

   3a. “You cannot save this form, instead print it for your records”

   3b. “Save as PDF has been disabled. Use File->Save instead”

ROFL. Stupid Adobe. Another company going down in flames, just like Microsoft, slowly but surely. Maybe this is some maneuver to push people to buy their distiller product or some other software?

Edit:

Found this hack on the Apple forums:

Adobe Reader and Preview can’t save filled-in PDFs, only print them. You can install CUPS-PDF http://www.codepoetry.net/projects/cups-pdf-for-mosx to create a virtual printer. When you print to that printer, it will create a PDF file of the filled-in form

Cool, another reason to rent Apple TV movies.

Read about Netflix decision

I picked up Digital Video Esstentials from Amazon to calibrate my DLP TV set.

The information was good, if not too much. The instructions on how to use the video patterns was poor – They fire too much information at the user without specific steps.

However, once I watched the same segment several times, I figured out what sort of what I needed to do and adjusted the color on my set.

Brightness was close, but still too high. My set (or the PS3, or the video switch) is dropping blacker-than-black information, so I went with adjusting the left pluge bar.

The colors were really off, and using the color/tint settings were doing nothing useful, so I set those back to default (center values) and used the PerfectColor and PerfectTint controls of my Mitsubishi 57732. This worked much much better.

I didn’t really know how the color values would interact, so I guessed and by trial and error, got things fairly spot on. The only error in color is in the green filter, where magenta and cyan would appear as dark gray, not black. No matter what I did, I could not get them to appear black.

The red and blue filters were spot on, and the green colors (yellow, green) were spot on also.

We’ve noticed much more vibrant colors in both SD and HD content. While watching Jay Leno on the TiVo, Jay looks more red (he appeared grayish before) and the products he was making fun of, blue and green packaging just popped in color. Yellow looks fantastic now, vs washed out before.

I found through the other patterns that my sharpness could be 7 vs 0. My set has a 2.5% overscan and passed all of the resolution tests.

I did not use the set for any audio adjustments as this place only permits us to use 3.1, so I didn’t find it worth it to muck with that.

For $20, this is a very good tool in calibrating your HDTV, just be prepared to be confused by their overly technical explanations and lack of clear directions.

I’ve now found 5 spreadsheets for Excel, written in Excel, that won’t open in the 2008 Office for Mac.

• No VBA Macros
• Super slow performance (try 15 minutes to edit a cell)

Are the two big issues. What a joke.

Edit:

• I have tried the latest 12.0.1 version.
• http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t11882-roguegearspreadsheet/ is one of the spreadsheets that fails, if you choose a new race for example