Brainspill

This isn’t even an April Fools joke. Although I did a cool one of those, too.

On the way to work this morning I had to blow my nose. I’ve been struggling against a nasty head cold for a week now, and am used to this. I drove with my knee, and used both hands to hold kleenex to my nose so I could clear my nasal passages.

I blew my brains out. I didn’t think I would, but I apparantly blew hard enough to pop both my ears simultaneously – immediately and completely losing my balance in a fast moving vehicle, controlled by my knee.

I almost yakked during the ensuing nasuea. I could see the road passing by, and I knew the world wasn’t spinning, but I felt like I was tumbling sideways.

It’s not like I could have closed my eyes for a few minutes to regain my composure.

I managed to slow down and make my way to the far right lane and drive very carefully for a few minutes until my ears gradually clicked back into order, but man, I was scared to death for a moment there.

A while back I posted that I *hate* Adobe’s PDF concept. Here’s a little re-cap of why:

It’s a dead end. You can’t mark it up for revision except in printed form.

It’s restricting – you can’t get halfway through a 10 page form, decide to save, and come back later. Can’t save the form at all, actually (not without an elaborate server-side process).

It’s defacto. PDF this, PDF that. For publishing a whitepaper, sure, it’s not bad. For creating a usable form/document/interactive experience, it sucks.

The saga continues: I spent 26 consecutive hours at work last week creating HTML/CSS/Javascript versions of the PDF forms I’m working with so that the data and form can be stored in a single document. CSS handles formatting the data well, Javascript handles filling the form fields, numbering the pages, etc. They’re pretty cool HTML forms. But they still print poorly (footers aren’t really at the foot), and different browsers still display them differently.

And then Saturday, out of frustration with no good answers, I flexed my search term imagination and discovered the best solution I can imagine…

Here’s the competition, and IMHO, the clearly better alternative: Formatta Filler. The Formatta software, like a PDF, presents a form that the user can’t alter (except to fill in fields). BUT, the user can save his data – combining the form with the data, and preserving it’s ability to be edited later. It handles submission via http better than Reader does (more formats, easier to use), and it’s also free.

The designer app costs more than Adobe Acrobat, I’ll grant you, but it’s still just $1,000. That’s not a bad deal for such a great improvement over PDF’s.

There’s not much about them on the internet, so I’m posting here so others will notice. They ought to put the PDF in its grave.

New with the girl of my dreams this month:

Shaking her head ‘yes’ and ‘no’. And usually opposite of how I’m shaking mine – so she knows they mean opposite things.

Dancing. She’s loved dancing since she was born, but lately we’ve been video’ing her standing at her little piano toy, pounding on the keys, and dancing to the music(?) she’s making.

Sleeping all night. Well, not sleeping, but staying in her own bed. She sleeps most of the night, crying for 5 or 10 minutes when she wakes up, then playing… then sleeping. I cracked on this just this morning and got her up at 6:45 – she’d been crying almost all night. She was in a pretty good mood after that though, playing with me while I got dressed for work.

Wearing shoes – she’d been a socks-only kid until now, and she seems to like shoes. Especially shoe laces she can chew on. Walking in them is a little clumsy and I have to go slower when I’m holding her hands so she can walk.

Facing forward. Yes, she’s still under a year old, but she meets the height/weight restrictions so we got her a new car seat where she can face forward while we’re driving. The baby-seat was getting too small, and her legs were getting bunched up between her butt and the back of the seat she was facing. Doesn’t make for a happy kid.

Slapping the tv screen. We’ve been watching the DVDs a lot lately. We’ve got the ones on Space, Language, Water, Shapes and Animals. She honestly doesn’t care much for them after watching them once, except for the puppet interludes. Loves ’em. The duck is her favorite, and she stares, talks to, and slaps at the tv screen when they’re on.

That’s about it. Here’s the moment you’ve been waiting for…