A group of Buford 8th graders walked the halls of CHS yesterday, trying to get a feel for how their next four years of education are going to be like. Poor souls. And they visited just in time to learn of the new bell schedule for next year, which I’ve reprinted here:

So there you have it. We’re still at two lunches, we still get out at 3:30… Very anticlimactic. I’ve spoken to a few teachers recently, and they’ve already started to put in “requests” for their classes to be either block or “singleton.” Just like I’ve said before, teachers that liked block scheduling are pissed, and half of those who like meeting every day are going to be pissed as well anyway.

Today was the day that Apple released “iTunes Plus” - the DRM-free iTMS with higher-quality songs. After some initial problems with the new 7.2 version of iTunes, I downloaded one of these “Plus” songs (Fix You, by Coldplay). I hate to say it, but it sounded better at 256kbps than my other Coldplay songs at 128kbps. And I’m not gonna lie, it’s gonna be a lot easier to import that song onto my Zen than all the others I’ve bought recently off the iTMS…

The problem at this point, of course, is the limited selection of “Plus” quality songs (only EMI’s catalog is currently available). Out of everything I’ve purchased, only 8 songs were able to be upgraded to the higher quality versions (for $.30 each) - and most of them kind of sucked.

Once more songs can be downloaded DRM-free? I’ll be a regular customer, hands down.

I’ve recently been taking a good, hard look at my disgust as Apple products, and decided to give the iPhone another chance. That is, of course, until I saw the screen resolution: 320×480. That, and the hard drive size: 4 or 8 GB. Now, I’m sorry Apple, but the only way you’re going to entice me to spend $500+ on a phone is by incorporating full iPod functionality - that means more than a few hours of video on the HD. And 320×480? My Zen Vision (over a year old) has a bigger screen with higher resolution (3.7in and 640×480).

Fact of the matter is, I like my portable media player more than my phone, so whatever new $600 iPod I get, it better be a lot better than my $300 Zen Vision. ‘Til then, Apple? Keep working on it.

A few months ago I received an email from a representative of Adobe, asking me to review Adobe Acrobat on my blog. Naturally, I was flattered, and agreed on the spot. A few weeks ago, Acrobat 8 Professional arrived in my mailbox, and I’ve been playing around with it ever since. So, here is my first official review for 540 Mbps: Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional.

I’ve never been interested in purchasing Adobe Acrobat. In fact, I’ve always kind of been annoyed by Adobe’s Portable Document Format, or PDF – sure they looked pretty, but I couldn’t edit them without buying the full product (a hefty $449 at current prices). It wasn’t until I actually installed the program and played around with some of its less-advertised features that I realized how cool some of them are.

Features

Create PDFs from websites. By far, I’d consider this to be Acrobat’s most useful feature. I can distinctly remember trying to “leech” websites years and years ago, desperately trying to preserve a webpage in full, worried the webmaster would delete it soon (I was an 11-year-old geek, so what?). Acrobat does exactly this for you.

Much easier than screen-capturing every page.

You simply give it a web address, and it will save that page as a fully editable PDF file. What’s more, you can specify how many “levels” of pages Acrobat will leech for you. “http://www.website.com/directory/” will save every page in that directory as a PDF. You can also tell it to save the entire website as a PDF, essentially allowing you to brose a site offline (all the links are redirected to other saved PDF pages).

I did this to 540 Mbps, and came up with a 646-page PDF file that includes every single page of my website and looks almost identical to the original. Best part? It’s only 8.6 megabytes.

Webpages don’t look exactly the same, however. Saving a page of my high school’s theatre website shows a few discrepancies in the formatting.

Another feature I enjoyed was saving PDF files into other formats which you can actively edit. I saved a screenplay I wrote (in PDF format) into a word document: it worked, though the formatting was less than perfect.

Saving multiple file formats into one document is no trouble at all – here are four different formats saved as one PDF. Perfect (though a bit ugly, given my file selection).

A .jpg, .doc, .shtml, and .html are combined flawlessly.

Heh, you can even save PDFs as HTML files, incorporating CSS! Mind you, they look terrible, but it’s a start.

Text Recognition is ready to use in Acrobat, and for the most part is very effective. OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, had been around for decades, and can even be used to recognize printed sheet music (a technique which just last month saved me from entering in thousands of notes into Finale Notepad). In Acrobat, it’s a simple button you press to activate OCR, and in all the tests I performed on it, the feature had exceptional accuracy. I honestly have to say that the price of Acrobat is almost worth it for this feature (though I’m sure you can find much cheaper OCR programs out there).

Regardless of the background or font, most text can become editable within seconds (top). It doesn’t work as well on physical letters, however, such as signs on buildings (bottom).

Problems

Although most files converted into PDF format flawlessly, I ran into trouble with a few formats. Microsoft Excel files, for example, left my computer a frozen mess.

I encountered some problems when printing different formats to PDF as well. Photoshop documents were severely cropped, and Excel files left me wanting for some additional options to select from while printing, such as printing scale.

Text became overlapped in Excel files (back), but it was still fully editable (front).

Final decision? Despite some minor issues with formatting, Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional is a powerful program that does much more than simply create Printable Document files. Unless you’re a professional that deals with PDFs regularly however (and will utilize the “Meeting” feature, where multiple people can collaborate on files in real time), it’s not worth the $450. Students, however, can get the program for about $160, and I’d definitely shell out that for a program like this (OCR, file conversion, webpage archiving…). Basically, if you think any of the features I’ve talked about would be helpful to you, they’re going to seem even more useful once you get your hands on them. Students: this really is a program you’re gonna want for your system. Those who don’t qualify for the educational discount: you’re better off finding dedicated programs for OCR and web archiving.

8/10

I’d like to print a retraction, as well as an apology to those I offended in a post I made last week. An image I posted made generalizations based on assumptions which made more of an ass out of me than I’d ever wished to on this blog. It was unfair of me to use this website as a medium for me to, intentionally or otherwise, spread rumors which dealt with my friends. I sincerely apologize for any hurt I have caused or problems I may have created for others.

Michael Strickland