Paperless Billing

I was recently paying some bills and realized that I had not received a current invoice for my phone service. I logged into the company's website and found (much to my surprise) that the account had been switched over to "paperless billing". As I do not recall anyone ever asking me to opt-in to this service, I chose to switch it back to paper.

While it does go against my desire to be an early adopter of all things technology, I have to say that I am kind of partial to receiving paper bills. There are a few reasons for this is:

• I am used to being able to open a drawer and find previous invoices instead of having dig around online and try to locate.
• The vendor's website navigation perpetually changes from site tweaks and redesigns.
• Most sites only keep a couple of months of history and going further back than that is challenging to say the least.
• The paper copies always seem to contain more detail about charges.

As I look at the growing mound of paper recycling that I need to shred before sending out to the transfer station, I see that I will soon have to change my opinion on this. I will (hopefully) get over this longing for paper and come to accept that the green option here is to embrace the paperless billing.

Electrical Outlet with a Toggle Switch

A while back, a friend sent me a link to this picture of an Australian electrical outlet with a On/Off switch (have to scroll down past the kangaroos). I need to find a similar outlet that works in the US.

These type of outlets would be helpful in a few different rooms of my house. Particularly in places that a power strip really does not fit. An example of this would be the kitchen. I would like to be able to just shut off the outlet feeding the clocks on the microwave and coffee maker. It would be easier than perpetually unplugging them.

Additionally, I could use a Kill-a-Watt meter to do a energy inventory of the house and then place of few of these outlets around the power wasting devices. Of course, I would still have to remember to flip the switch.

Printing from Acrobat Pro 8.1

I recently purchased and installed a copy of Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.0 (well, 8.1). I have been mostly pleased with this application, but while using it I have discovered that I have a new pet peeve.

When I go to print a document from Acrobat, a Print window is displayed and there are a number of choices that I can make regarding my print job. The vast majority of the time I am just looking to print one copy of the file, so I click the OK button and my file prints out. Every once in a while I need more than one copy, so when the Print window is displayed, I go to the Page Handling area and enter a larger number in the Copies option and click the OK button to have my job print out.

The problem that I have is that the next time I print, the program does not reset the number of copies back to "one". When I print again, I have to remember to actually stop and look at the Print window to see what the number of copies is set at before I print. I find this to be an annoyance because 95% of the time I use the program, I am just clicking the OK button to move through this screen.

If I last used this program to print 10 copies of something a couple of days ago, the odds are pretty good that when I first use the program to print today, I am going find myself printing 10 copies (instead of 1) and throwing out rest of the copies of today's document. And then to reset this counter, I am going to need to print one more copy of a document to actually get the counter reset to 1 for future print jobs.

I run into this problem in many different programs, but for some reason it really aggravates me in Acrobat. This could be because when I print more than one copy of a PDF file, I tend to be MANY more copies, not just two or three. Or it could be because there are a few hundred choices in the Preferences area, but nothing I see fixes my issue.

Realistically, I would like to see a little checkbox on the Print window that actually asks if you want to save the print count for future jobs. No check in the box and the program defaults back to 1 copy for future print jobs. This would be a resource-saving green option for many programs, not just Acrobat.

Having this option would save me a little of my sanity and many reams of paper.