another weblog

But not today. Today is just awesomeness like all the rest.

Good lord. The internet really is a phenomenal waste of time.

28

Have you heard of this phenomenon of getting RickRoll’D?

Here’s the play: you get a link to a video saying it’s something or the other, cute puppies, or your brother falling off the roof or something equally funny. It might come in an email or an online forum or blog comments or whatever. But instead of being a video of what was advertised, you get this, and now you’ve got that song stuck in your head all day.

Not very nice. But kind of funny if you’re on the right end of it.

I have this bad habit recently of leaving Safari windows open to sites with interesting things I want to blog about. And then inevitably for some reason I have to shut down Safari or restart the computer, and I forget to save the pages and it is all gone.

Damn infernal bewitched machine!

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

-Michael Pollan

This guy is a fantastic journalist. He has a remarkable ability to take ridiculous technical information and boil it down to basic advice. I think the advice to shop around the outside of the grocery store (because all of the more processed and less nutritional foods are in the aisles, while the fresh produce and meats tend to be at the perimeter) can be sourced to him. If you haven’t read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, you should.

“Nature, which makes nothing durable, always repeats itself so that nothing which it makes may be lost.”

-Oscar Wilde

Thanks.

The down arrow on my keyboard stopped working in google reader. Anyone else having this problem?

I didn’t think so. Season 4 of what I think is the best Science Fiction ever made for TV starts on April 4. If you think you’re interested at all, here is an 8 minute video that kind of covers the last 3 seasons:

There is big money for a company that can come up with a good solution for this. As we are increasingly syncing more data in more places on the web, we are going to have an increasing need for synchronicity. And not just in calendar items and todo’s. Twitter, myspace, facebook, orkut, rss feeds, etc, etc, etc. How does one tie it all together into some sort of application that can filter the noise (for example by learning that I never read rss feeds about Wilt Chamberlain, but always read ones about Paris Hilton, so don’t bother showing me the ones about Wilt), and offer different noise levels based on the context (when at work, I don’t need to see my social items or rss feeds on international relations)

All I want is to be able to sync my apple iCal, Outlook 2003/exchange calendar, google calendar, and blackberry. And I want to selectively sync these, since there are home calendar items that don’t need to be seen on my work account, but work items i’d like on my calendar at home. I’ll need to do the same for contacts and todo items as well.

I’ve tried several solutions, including the missing sync, spanning sync, and google mobile sync. None of them do quite what I want.

The best way I have to do it now is to sync iCal with google and blackberry, and blackberry with gcal and iCal. A big happy two way sync triangle. The real bitch of it all is that the categories don’t always come across right, so I find myself adjusting things on each calendar. And none of it makes it’s way to work/outlook on the exchange server there.

I want to enter something once, in any media, and have it show up the same way everywhere else (so that an item placed in my ‘work’ calendar will show up on the work calendar on google calendar, and make it’s way to my outlook calendar at work). What I need is some kind of glue to hold it all together. A web app that will pul all of these calendars, compare differences, and update each as necessary, according to rules I have set.

I just read about a new site called fusecal. It offers to combine many calendars into one place, either to publish on the web or to sync those into your personal calendar. I can import that calendar into most major calendar apps (iCal, yahoo, google, outlook, etc) but I can only pull web calendars. For this to work, I’ll need it to get info from my desktop iCal and outlook as well.

I just found another one called ScheduleWorld. It looks pretty promising. Basically what I described: glue. But…no iCal or blackberry support yet. Damn. I might try it using google calendar as intermediary. But then I am lust using ScheduleWorld to sync Outlook/google, and I might as well find something that does it directly.

And wouldn’t you know that this exists as well: Google Calendar Sync

I just added something to do at work tomorrow. It’s funny. that was a very roundabout way to discover an easy solution, but I learned a lot in the process.