This Technology Review article accurately describes the problem facing mobile device users. We are running out of frequencies and physical cell towers to provide the services that people want. It doesn’t really make sense for 100 million people to watch the Super Bowl on their cell phones, using astronomical amounds of bandwidth, when they could be watching it on a broadcast station that uses about one billionth of that bandwidth. You could similarly listen to a radio station that plays music you like, rather than having a million people downloading their own mix.

Work on my taxes, I have found the IRS tax forms are formated to allow you to fill them out and save them, but Colorado tax forms are just flat PDF documents that do now allow you to fill them out using Adobe PDF reader.  I happened to have an old version of Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Professional, which I thought should allow me to work on the flat form, but I could not figure out how to do it, and I couldn’t find any help on the web, particularly there was nothing on the Adobe web site.  So for anyone else who happens to be in the same situation, here’s what I found.

Open the flat PDF document in Adobe Professional.  Go to a field that needs to be filled in.  Use the Text Field Tool (Tools>Advanced Editing>Forms>Text Field Tool) to create a text box within the field that needs to be filled in.  Then use the Select Text Tool (Tools>Basic>Selection>Select Text) to fill in the box you just created.  When you save the document, it will save the new form field with the entered date on top of the fake one in the flat PDF document.

I tried Apple’s MobileMe for the second time, with the same disappointing results.  I tried it first when I received an iPad as a gift.  I tried using it to synchronize my calendar, etc.  I ended up with an iPad calendar that looked like a checkerboard.  It double stored events from my iPad, Google, and my home desktop computer.  However, I liked the iPad so much that I decided to try an Apple Mac laptop.  I got a MacBook Air.  I like the hardware a lot, but so far am underwhelmed with the software, like MobileMe.

I have found that the various Google sync options work much better for me than MobileMe, and they are free, while MobileMe costs $100 per year.  If it were free, or even cheap, I would try to get it to work, but for the price, there is no comparison to Google.  Y0u can store documents in the Google cloud, just as you can in the MobileMe cloud.  Every time you do something on the Mac, it asks you about using MobileMe, which is distracting, but I can resist.  Apple could learn a lot from Google about the cloud.  I have ended up syncing two Apple devices, an iPad and a MacBook through Google.

When I try to sync or backup my iPad through iTunes on my Windows Vista computer, iTunes freezes up everything. According to the Windows sidebar, it take up almost all the processing usage and disk drive usage for a while, and then it just quits, but the little line showing iTunes process is only about 1/4 inch long. I’ve uninstalled and re-installed iTunes, but it does the same thing.

After wasting much time and effort trying to sync my PC and iPad calendars and contacts with Apple’s iTunes and MobileMe, which just made a mess of my iPad and computer, I tried Google, which appears to work flawlessly.  Google has a function that syncs between Outlook and the Google calendar and between the iPad calendar and the Google calendar.  Things are still messed up because the Apple programs deleted a lot of stuff and duplicated a lot of stuff, but that’s not Google’s fault. 

I just added Calendar events in Outlook and on the iPad.  Each came through accurately on the other in the primary calendar, just as if the event had been created on the second device.  That’s how it should work.  There might be people who like having a multiplicity of calendars, but not me.  I want one that is the same everywhere I look, and Google provides that.

Apple can thank Google for making me happier with my iPad, but I’m sure Steve Jobs would hate to do that.

Because syncing over a cable with iTunes proved so frustrating, I thought I would try MobileMe when iTunes pressed it on me.  The idea of syncing over WiFi, rather than cable was appealing.  However, when I tried it, it made a mess of my calendars and maybe my contacts.  I ended up with many duplicate calendar entries on all of the devices, the desktop, the iPad and the laptops.  Plus, afterwards, Outlook would not start.  It showed that there were files for half a dozen calendars, but none of them would display. 

What I wanted was to be able to add a calendar event in my iPad and have it show up in Outlook.  I did show up, but in a separate calendar which did not appear on the opening desktop of Outlook.  You had to go searching for iPad updates.  Maybe there’s some way to merge the calendars, but it’s too complicated.  So, I just canceled MobileMe. 

In addition, I thought I could back up to the iDisk in the cloud, but backing up from Windows looked too complicated.  It sounds like there are settings in the Apple OS that let you back up to iDisk, but in Windows, the only way I could figure to do it was to copy stuff file by file.  I couldn’t even get it to transfer a folder.  That’s not an efficient way to backup.

Sometimes my iPad syncs successfully with my Windows PC through iTunes, and sometimes not.  The worst problem has been that at some point during backup and/or sync, which occurs automatically when you plug in the iPad to the PC, iTunes will suddenly say the iPad has only 4 GB of storage, rather than 16 GB, and then it will display an error message saying that there has been a problem and that it cannot continue.  Then, when you plug the iPad back in, it will say it will have to restore the iPad.  This is worrisome, since it did not successfully finish the backup the last time the iPad was connected, so that something could be lost.  The last time this happened, I only lost a few contacts from my iPad contact list, and all the books that I had downloaded to to the iBooks app.  Fortunately, I had only downloaded free books, and when I redownloaded them, the iTunes store remembered that I had downloaded them before and didn’t give me a hard time.

Another problem with iTunes is that it is slow.  Every time I plug in my iPad, iTunes backs it up and syncs it.  Sometimes after this, the iPad icon disappears from the left column, so that you can’t do anything with it, and if you unplug it and plug it in again, it backs up and syncs again, until eventually you get an error.

After three or four backups and syncs today, all my downloaded books are missing from my iPad iBooks app.  Re-syncing one more time restored the books again.

I have a new iPad, thanks to my stepson, who is trying to keep me up to date. It is really beautiful and slick. It’s the first Apple computer I’ve had since an Apple II about 30 years ago. Many of the apps that I have tried (almost all free) work well. My main complaint so far is the Apple interface with my Windows PCs. I’ve had trouble with both iTunes and MobileMe. It could be that I’m a Windows guy who doesn’t understand how Apple stuff works. It might also be that Apple purposely doesn’t make the iPad interface well with Windows PCs so that you’ll go out and buy an Apple PC.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has a great article on Holocaust remembrance day. It says that all the talk Israelis do about the Holocaust will not help Israel, unless it conducts itself in a more moral manner. It says the big Holocaust publicity push is to offset the UN Goldstone report condemning Israel for its conduct of the last war. It says that Netanyahu and his “racist” interior minister ranted against “migrants” in Israel. The article says:

No remembrance speech will obliterate the xenophobia that has reared its head in Israel, not only on the extreme right, as in Europe, but throughout government.

It concludes:

A thousand speeches against anti-Semitism will not extinguish the flames ignited by Operation Cast Lead, flames that threaten not only Israel but the entire Jewish world. As long as Gaza is under blockade and Israel sinks into its institutionalized xenophobia, Holocaust speeches will remain hollow. As long as evil is rampant here at home, neither the world nor we will be able to accept our preaching to others, even if they deserve it.

If only more American Jews were as perceptive as some Jews in Israel are.

The main people responsible for Bernanke’s problems with approval for another term at the Fed are the Wall Street bankers. They were so arrogant and disdainful of the the US Government, the Congress, President Obama, and the American people that there is a strong reaction against Bernanke’s decision to bail them out. People ask, why should be have bailed out such ungrateful people, who brought themselves to the brink of disaster, and who probably did as much economic damage to the US as Osama bin Laden did when he destroyed the twin towers?

Bernanke deserves some credit for saving us from another depression, but he’s sullied by the company he keeps. Wall Street bankers come across as some of the most morally despicable people in the US or even the world.

On Bernanke’s behalf, he could go to work for these sleazeballs in New York and probably increase his income by 10 to 100 times. He could easily be making over $10 million on Wall Street. We should be grateful that he’s willing to stay on as Fed Chairman.