07:55 – I start work on our federal and state incomes taxes today. As far as I can see, our LLC makes zero difference to how I’ll do the taxes. The revenue and expenses for the corporation go directly to Schedule C on the federal return, just as they did when I was operating as a sole proprietor. And the state return simply uses figures plugged in from the federal return, as always.
Speaking of the state return, I finally took some time yesterday to get my new Epson V300 scanner up and working. There was no prayer of that happening on my main office system, which is running Ubuntu 9.04 (!). So I took the scanner back to Barbara’s office and connected it to her system, which is running a more recent Ubuntu. Epson supplies Linux drivers, but the installation wasn’t completely straightforward. I had to install an older version of one of the support files manually, after which the scanner was immediately recognized by xSane. I did a test scan, and everything appears to be working normally.
What motivated me to finally get the scanner running is that the stupid North Carolina PDF tax forms can be filled out and printed with Adobe Reader, but they can’t be saved. How stupid is that? So, my choices were to just print an extra copy of the completed return for our records or to get the scanner working. Either that, or to what I’ve done in a couple prior years when I didn’t have a working scanner: put the completed forms on the floor and shoot images of them with a digital camera.
Barbara tried to give Colin a bath yesterday. As usual, she stripped down and got in the downstairs shower and then I brought Colin into the bathroom. The last time, he was pretty good about getting into the shower with her and seemed resigned to being bathed. This time, he simply refused to get in the shower. He was terrified. He actually snapped at Barbara. I could feel him shivering in terror. So we bagged it. With the weather getting warmer, it’s not a big deal. Barbara will wash him outdoors with the hose at the next opportunity.
We’re starting to get queries about the biology kits, which will start shipping next week. Other than the supplemental DVD included with each kit, we have the first batch of 30 kits made up and ready to go, with components for 30 more in the on-deck circle. We hope that’ll be enough at least to buffer the initial flood of orders when the book hits the stores, but of course we’re prepared to order in components for and assemble a lot more kits quickly if the initial flood of orders is larger than expected. We’re also in the process of making up 30 more chemistry kits, and we’ve penciled in some time in a couple of months to begin assembling forensics kits. Obviously, we’re going to be busy for the next few months.
North Carolina PDF tax forms can be filled out and printed with Adobe Reader, but they can’t be saved. How stupid is that?
That is Adobes fault, not North Carolina’s. I use Acrobat X to create many PDF forms. To allow the form to be saved you have to create a submission document. And Adobe puts a submit button on the resulting PDF. Clicking the button is supposed to email the contents of the form so that the results can be collected.
Again, the clueless dolts at Adobe decided what they thought was the way to do things, in that everyone that uses a PDF will want to submit the form if they want to save the filled in form. There is no option to do otherwise, saving is only allowed for a form that is going to be submitted.
Don’t even get me started on dealing with Designer that is used to create the forms. It is an unfriendly piece of junk with many problems.
We have tried to find a program that can convert a MSWord file to PDF. But they are lacking in many elements that we need, such as drop down boxes and the ability to use check boxes, and more importantly, edit certain fields. We also need to control the tab order for moving to the next field. Adobe Acrobat is the only application that we have found to do such things.
As usual, she stripped down and got in the downstairs shower and then I brought Colin into the bathroom. The last time, he was pretty good about getting into the shower with her and seemed resigned to being bathed. This time, he simply refused to get in the shower. He was terrified. He actually snapped at Barbara. I could feel him shivering in terror.
We all become less attractive as we get older. I hope Barbara doesn’t feel too bad about it…
What Ray says is true so far as it goes, but it’s not the whole story. Adobe makes a variety of products for producing PDF, and a variety of licenses for the tools. As of the last time that I did this, a couple of years ago, Designer out of the box would create a “form” PDF which could be printed or emailed to a fixed address — this was available for free. (Or for the non-negligible cost of Designer.) If you want your users to be able to save the filled-out form, you have to buy licenses. For a government agency, which may need to allow thousands or millions of users to save the forms, the license would be hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Note that if the form creator did not pay the extra money, there is approximately nothing that you, the user, can do about it. You can “print” to a variety of disk files but (as of a few years ago on Windows XP) this didn’t always work.
I am a little surprised that no one has tackled doing PDF’s better than Adobe, which is pretty awful. It is also a pretty nasty format for quality, as reading and converting to other formats causes significant quality degradation. I am even more surprised that no one has come up with a better format for PDF. In my work, PDF has replaced the fax machine, and nearly everything I receive that used to be paper, is now PDF. If I have to modify it before passing it on, that becomes a very difficult process that degrades the document immeasurably–and it shouldn’t. Lawyers will not use Word documents anymore, as they believe PDF’s are more secure from tampering–and they are right!
(Or for the non-negligible cost of Designer.) If you want your users to be able to save the filled-out form, you have to buy licenses.
We create many forms that can be filled in and saved and we pay no licenses to Adobe other than the cost of purchasing Adobe Acrobat X. Included within that is the ability to create PDF’s using the builtin in Designer which I should have clarified is the LiveCycle Designer. And that is not the same a the full blown Designer which we use for desktop magazine publishing. We don’t use the full blown Designer to create form PDF’s but instead use Acrobat X.
But to create forms that can be saved, Adobe puts that stupid Submit button on the PDF, and that does indeed email the form data to the email address I am forced to provide. All so that forms can be saved to a users disk to be filled in at the users convenience.
Pricing of Adobe products has never been a real problem as we get academic pricing which is a substantial discount over retail and online. Even then the products are still priced too damned high.
(Or for the non-negligible cost of Designer.) If you want your users to be able to save the filled-out form, you have to buy licenses.
We create many forms that can be filled in and saved and we pay no licenses to Adobe other than the cost of purchasing Adobe Acrobat X. Included within that is the ability to create PDF’s using the builtin in Designer which I should have clarified is the LiveCycle Designer. And that is not the same a the full blown Designer which we use for desktop magazine publishing. We don’t use the full blown Designer to create form PDF’s but instead use Acrobat X.
But to create forms that can be saved, Adobe puts that stupid Submit button on the PDF, and that does indeed email the form data to the email address I am forced to provide. All so that forms can be saved to a users disk to be filled in at the users convenience.
Pricing of Adobe products has never been a real problem as we get academic pricing which is a substantial discount over retail and online. Even then the products are still priced too damned high in my opinion.
Darned, posted twice. I hit some magic key combination in IE that posted when I did not want.
Lawyers will not use Word documents anymore, as they believe PDF’s are more secure from tampering–and they are right!
You can create protected forms in MSWord quite easily. Only fields that you allow to be modified can be modified. We looked at using MSWord but it fell short as there was no facility for drop down select lists. When we found that shortcoming we stopped looking further so there may be other faults. Straight text boxes worked great and kept the word wrapping and formatting intact. Results were much better than Adobe when printing and viewing.
I am surprised that MS has not tackled Adobe in the PDF arena. It would seem that MSWord could be extended to include some missing features. MS is big enough to trample Adobe in the document market. Maybe MS is a fraid of DOJ intervention.
We have always had the European-style shower head, that has a handle and comes off the wall, so it can be directed anywhere. That seemed to work with our dogs (when we had them). They never got sprayed in the eyes that way. Our dogs did not like getting washed, but they tolerated it. And the first thing they did after the wash, was to go outside and roll around in the grass.
Are you sure it was the grass they were rolling around in?
It sounds to me like the problem with PDF is that it has succeeded beyond Adobe’s wildest dreams. Years ago, I used to remark that PDF was a better format for online viewing than Postscript, and a better format for printing than HTML. Now it’s the default format not just for distributing printable electronic documents, but it has supplanted paper as the format of choice.
“As usual, she stripped down…”
Where are the usual panty shots?
She would kill me while I slept.
She would kill me while I slept.
I don’t think she would have waited that long.
I can’t believe she hasn’t done it already…
George wrote:
“We all become less attractive as we get older”
Speak for yourself, I’m still the handsome Adonis I was in 1980 🙂
I don’t think I’m any less attractive than I was twenty or thirty years ago. It’s all about setting your starting point sufficiently low.
Greg, that isn’t a mirror you’re looking at, it’s just a picture of you from 1980!
We looked at using MSWord but it fell short as there was no facility for drop down select lists.
I think this is available if you use VBA in the form, but it’s been a while since I looked at it.
Bought a couple of these lights to use when working on computer innards at work.
http://www.amazon.com/Nebo-Larry-Light-light-Magnetic/dp/B007M0JSTA
Cheap so if someone steals one I will not be too upset.
I think this is available if you use VBA in the form, but it’s been a while since I looked at it.
You are correct, or used to be correct. I have no idea about the latest versions. But we rejected that idea as VBA is not always available and without it the form would not work. We have this problem with a spreadsheet that we create on the server and then send to the client. The client has to enable the stuff to make the spreadsheet work properly. Client side security requires the client specifically enable the macros. And these are engineering students. They could design a reactor but mastering a tube of toothpaste is beyond their grasp.
Your small business must be a lot simpler than my electronic kit effort. My wife handles the accounting and she started in January and it took 3 months to get everything together to ship off to the accountants. Depreciation schedules for my test equipment and machinery, computing the cost of goods sold (several hundred different parts go into my kits) beginning inventory, ending inventory, etc. The total tax form (federal) is about half an inch thick.
I had around 450 individual sales transactions, ranging from $5 to a few thousand dollars (a whole lot more $5 transactions than big ones, though) and the cost of goods sold includes counts down to the individual numbers and prices for lockwashers and screws. She did not insist on counting the numbers of screws and lockwashers, though, but did count all the printed circuit board inventory.
In Windoze I use CutePDF to print anything to a PDF. If there’s a similar tool for Linux, as perverse as it sounds, you could print the PDF to a dummy printer with the output being a PDF file.
RBT wrote:
“He actually snapped at Barbara.”
Do you think he intended to connect or deliberately missed as a warning?
Oh, Colin connected, but not hard enough to break the skin. He was horrified when he realized what he’d done. A dog snapping isn’t a conscious decision, so we didn’t even yell at him. He’d never intentionally bite either of us, or indeed any other person, unless he was defending Barbara.
Incidentally, for those who haven’t lived with dogs, there are snaps, nips, and bites, all distinct. A snap is completely unintentional on the dog’s part, and can vary in severity. A nip is intentional, and serves as a warning with no intention to do actual harm. A bite is intentional and is intended to do harm.
This is the first time that Colin has snapped, but all of other dogs have done so at one time or another. It happens when they’re terrified or in pain. People do the same thing.
All of them have also nipped. Colin did that to me just the other day. I was walking down the hall and he was in herding mode. He nipped the back of my leg, trying to steer me the way he wanted me to go. It’s not painful, but it is intentional, so I yelled at him, as we always do when one of our BCs nips.
None of our dogs has ever bitten anyone. A bite is a serious attack. If one of our BCs ever bit, other than in defense of us or itself, I’d shoot it immediately. Their jaws are extremely powerful. While he’s playing, Colin routinely bites through branches from thumb-size to broomstick-size with a single casual chomp. Like any dog his size, he could easily do the same to an arm or leg bone.
There are also what I call “mouths”.
My Golden Retriever will sometimes come and very gingerly hold my hand with her mouth, very similar to someone holding your hand.
True, and Colin is a consummate “mouther”. Every night when we turn off the lights to go to sleep, he has to have a couple minutes worth of mouthing my hand before he settles down. He also mouths it every chance he gets during waking hours.
Under Linux, Okular allows me to save filled-in PDF forms. It’s a bit weird about it, though: if you don’t do anything to save the entries, they still appear the next time you open the document, but they’re not saved in the document itself, but rather in some private place that Okular manages. You have to click on “Save As” for it to actually save them permanently in the document so that other programs can see them.