All this week, I’ve been working on getting annual training ready to present at work. Our vendor has been…shall we say, less than satisfactory. Part of the issue is that our company, and the level of service we expect, is too much for this small local mom and pop shop to handle. Next year, we’ll either be doing the program in house, or getting a new vendor entirely. This one has had too many hassles and headaches.

One of the things that will be changed next year are three videos contained in the program. The problem with using video in a program like this is that there’s a high cost to creating and producing video, so once it’s made, you use it for years. That results in people seeing the same tired videos year after year, and the content is easily tuned out. We need to update the videos next year, and I’m researching ways that it can be done in house if we go with an off the shelf video that requires minor changes or edits.

One solution might be Blaze Media Pro software, which is an all in one application that acts as an MOV converter, video encoder, and DVD software all in one, offering you a tool that can rip, convert, record, burn, and playback in one package. The piece I’m specifically interested in are the video editing tools, which let you apply filters and effects, edit, and offers multiple video platform support. (Great for us since I probably won’t get a choice in the file type I’m given to work with!) You can even create videos from still images and other videos, which will be very helpful for us.

Aside from work, this is a tool I’d like to use a home too. When you use Blaze Media Pro to convert from an audio CD, you can download the track information and use it to automatically name the new song files - how handy is that? (Much better than having multiple files named “Track 01″ and so on and so forth.)

Geeks are among the busiest people I know.

When we’re not blogging, or working a 10-12 hour day fixing problems other people create, or playing World of Warcraft, you may find us at Comic-Con, or dissing the CGI work done in the latest summer blockbuster in an online forum. We’re BUSY people! Most geeks I know can’t find time to do anything…well, non geeky. Call it a matter of priorities, but when time is a hot commodity, who wants to spend it driving around town to get things done? That’s where ServeMeHere comes in handy - you can book online mobile services with just a few clicks of your mouse. (And we all know how much geeky people love to do things online. Give us a phone book and a landline and we’ll just give you a blank stare in return.)

With ServeMeHere you can find professionals in your area who will come right to your house (or your meeting place of choice) to do almost anything for you. Get a massage or have someone tutor your child in Spanish. Have a lawyer stop by to draft your will (who are you going to leave all of that WoW gold to?) or have the pet groomer come to your pooch. In addition to having professionals come to YOU, ServeMeHere also lets you rate the pros you work with so that others can benefit from your good experiences…or bad! Scheduling is free, and you’ll love the convenience!

Or, maybe you’re a geek with services to offer? You can advertise your local business for free on ServeMeHere.com, and get referred new clients free of charge. Build your new or established business with local word of mouth and happy customers. Lots of people pay big bucks for things like PC setup and configuration, or setting up a home network, or even just transferring data from one PC to another - why couldn’t you reap those rewards for yourself?

Earlier this week my boss gave me a present in the form of Adobe Acrobat Professional 9. It’s mine, ALL mine so that I can convert existing Word docs into “type-able” PDF forms. Basically, by extending certain rights in Pro, you can enable the form to be “type-able” in Adobe Reader, which almost everyone has. After sending one of the forms to a coworker, we discovered a big issue. She was able to input data and save the form - once. She is unable to edit any of the data she saved or add to any of the fields she didn’t fill out. Great!

When I view the security settings for the form Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 it states “filling of form fields - allowed”. When you initially open the form in Reader it states the same. If you input data and save the form, and then reopen it, a popup message appears:

This document contained certain rights to enable special features in Adobe Reader. The document has been changed since it was created and these rights are no longer valid. Please contact the author for the original version of this document.

Additionally, the security now states “filling of form fields - NOT allowed”. Users completing these forms won’t always have all of the data they need at their disposal, so the form is quite simply useless if you can only enter and save it once. We can’t even save it with a different file name.

Guess who gets to troubleshoot? Yes, that would be me.