"I can no longer sit back and allow...Communist infiltration...Communist indoctrination...Communist subversion...and the international Communist conspiracy...to sap and impurify...all...of our precious bodily fluids".

That lines comes to mind whenever anybody mentions water flouridation. It ties in nicely with the last line of your blog entry.

Congrats on being done with your thesis though! It's a nice feeling being done with all that work, isn't it?

YAY I'm so glad you survived the day. I hope you are getting some good sleep now! Or maybe even a nice nap in the dentist chair. *shrugs* any sleep I think would do at this point.

*HUGS*

luv ya!

Vance

"I can no longer sit back and allow...Communist infiltration...Communist indoctrination...Communist subversion...and the international Communist conspiracy...to sap and impurify...all...of our precious bodily fluids".

 

That lines comes to mind whenever anybody mentions water flouridation. It ties in nicely with the last line of your blog entry.

 

Congrats on being done with your thesis though! It's a nice feeling being done with all that work, isn't it?

Another Dr. Strangelove fan! That has got to be one of my favorite movies of all time. The closing sequence, with all the nuclear detonations and the song "until we meet again" is perfect!

LB, sorry to hear that you have to make two trips to the dentist, instead of getting it over and done with.

Hey David!

I'm glad your day went okay. Personally your dental experience would still have filled me with a deep, consuming dread...but I'm glad you're okay

Okay so this is going to sound stupid, but what's the point of PDF? I don't mean for your thesis I mean in general. I HATE it! I HATE Adobe Acrobat reader, I hate the way the document looks in it, the whole program just sucks in my opinion. I just don't get it. Does it serve some actual purpose??

I'm excited to hear that there's going to be an extra chapter of SOOTB, and I'm very excited about the coming chapter of "When I See You Again" ! I can't wait!

Have an awesome day, and good luck with Monday!

Kevin

Okay so this is going to sound stupid, but what's the point of PDF? I don't mean for your thesis I mean in general.

PDF files allow documents to look and to print exactly as they looked to the persons who prepared them. Complex vector graphics can be included, so that drawings, charts, graphs, etc., will print out at the full resolution of whatever printing device is used, from your desktop inkjet to the highest quality commercial machine. Documents can have fonts imbedded so that you can use whatever fonts you like in the document without worrying whether the recipient has exactly the same version of that font.

Let's say that you want a map in your document. You can draw it in, say, Illustrator, using the Carta font for the various map symbols, interstate and US highway signs, etc. In a PDF, you don't have to worry that the recipient has to have the Carta font or have software that will open your graphics file. Your map will print out at the full resolution of any printer, and the recipient can view it on screen and zoom in close to a small section, and it will still look good. Alternatively, you could use a humungous bitmap file that would be limited to whatever resolution you made it and would look really crappy zoomed in on the screen (and maybe not even so hot zoomed out).

Or let's say that you've written some music for a friend to use. The friend doesn't have the same music notation software as you, nor the music fonts. With a PDF, you can email him a file that he can see on screen and print out at the highest quality of whatever printer he uses. I did this last year, wrote an arrangement for a full band for a friend. In the end I sent him two PDF files, one 200k file of the full score and a 1 MB file with all of the instrument parts. There was never a need to mail a hard copy. He printed it all out on a laser printer, and I'm sure it came out looking great.

The practical alternatives to PDF are Plain Old Text and .doc files. If all you want to convey is the message itself and no formating at all, then POT works great, such as the contents of an email. If you want some formating and maybe some pictures, too, then most people have something on their computer that can read .doc files. You can stick to fonts you know just about everybody has (Times New Roman, Arial, Wingdings, Comic Sans whatever, etc.) and avoid the more obscure features of the lastest version of Word, and most people will see pretty much what you see when you look at the file. The line breaks and such may not be exactly the same, but you don't particularly care, else you would have sent a PDF.

A little more obscurely, PDF files can be password-protected in various ways. Say you send somebody a contract and you don't want them changing it before they sign it, then PDF is one way to do that.

Adobe Reader is a bit cumbersome and takes some getting used to. But it's free, and everybody has it, or should.

But this is great! This is the most negative thing I've ever seen you write.

of course I still wouldn't know how to do any of that stuff with the program

But even if you can't (or don't need to) do any of these things yourself, you can still benefit from receiving PDF files that others have done.

And nowadays, magazines and such are going to a PDF workflow, so a lot of the things you see only in print form came to you via that process.

So my blog has become a place for discussing computer technology? lol