Calendar Update
Since I posted my shoutout about calendars online, I've had the chance to try out a few more.
I started with Spongecell. There's a lot to like about it, including the ability to use my cell phone to "sponge" my appointments for the day or week via SMS. I also liked how easy it was to enter events, and that they could be done via my cellphone or the internet. However, the RSS feed didn't work for me — it would give me a feed but didn't have my entries on it, so each day was blank. To me, getting this stuff via RSS is one of the major reasons to use a web-based calendar rather than Outlook. I played around with the feed from www.jasminelive.online but ultimately just wasn't getting enough joy to keep going with it. I also really need a way to color-code entries which wasn't available to me.
Sneadwoman suggested 30Boxes the other day and I vaguely remember reading about it on Techcrunch and Robert Scoble's blog not long ago. We'd had a discussion about it at work too, but in the context of the discussion it didn't strike me as something I'd like much.
I WAS WRONG. MEA CULPA. This app is the equivalent of Flickr for calendars. It's very Ajaxy and Web 2.0, but if this is Web 2.0 then I want more. It is everything I love about Flickr and blogging rolled up into something that seems like it was made for me.
Starting with the data entry: I can enter an appointment in one line and tell it that it's recurrent. I can tag it and color code it in that same line, so that if I wanted to set a reminder to take dancergirl to class every thursday and have my entry appear in green AND tag it so that I could look at all similarly tagged entries, I would type in
"3/2 3:30pm dancergirl class thursday repeat tag dancergirl tag green"
30Boxes would know that I want that entry to repeat every thursday at 3:30 pm and the entry would be green.
Syndication: Dancergirl could subscribe to the ‘dancergirl' tag via RSS and/or email so that she was able to see the calendar as well. She can have her own calendar that can be mashed up with mine, too, or she can just enter her own stuff into mine. They have code snippets so you can include your info on your Ajax home page if you use one (and I may now have to consider using one to bring together my feeds, gmail and calendar).
This is slick stuff. Anything you want to put on any day (to-dos, memos, notes, whatever) can be there.
You can bring in your Flickr and blog feeds so that one day's journal entry has everything you might've posted to those along with your calendar all in one place.
The only thing that is missing from my wish list (and this is in development) is the SMS capability. It looks like they're getting close with it — there are preferences to set cellphone number and provider so it's probably not too far away from reality.
I would pay for this, for the same reasons that I have a paid jasminlive account. A great product deserves to be supported. If the price is reasonable (and I'd assume this would fall somewhere in the Flickr price range), it's worth paying purely to support the developers. They're publishing an API so that other cool inventions can be made with it.
I don't often rave about web apps, but this one gets five stars from me as it is, and if other cool uses come out of it the way the Flickr world has evolved, it will be one of my killer apps for the year. I highly recommend it.
Calendars: Getting Organized 101
I love GMail, but I hate not having my calendar at my fingertips like I did with Outlook. Since I've made the switch to GMail for all of my different email accounts I've been really disorganized about appointments and schedules, and it's all slamming together.
We just discovered this week that Sticks has two gigs at the same time on the same day — one in Goleta and one in San Diego. Obviously this is a problem for him. Now I know he should be managing his own calendar but since one of us still has to drive him it needs to be a group effort. Oh, and did I mention that Dancergirl also has a competition in Glendale on the same day?
This calendaring thing (or lack thereof) is out of control. I've been playing with some of the so-called Web 2.0 stuff, thinking that the group aspects would be handy. I started with Planzo calendar and it's okay. I like getting my calendar via email and/or RSS for sure. What I don't like is that there's no way for me to color-code what ‘event' belongs to who. It's limited at this point to a "work" category.
Verizon recently partnered up with Yahoo!, so I figured maybe I'd try the Yahoo! calendar, too. It's also okay, but no RSS feed which is really convenient to have. Still, I can get notices via SMS to my cell phone as well as email and if I used yahoo! messenger it would send it to that as well.
The thing is, none of them have all of what I want. Some are almost there, but are still missing key features. Outlook was the closest I ever got, but I'm trying to use a web-based app so that: 1) I can access it from the chaturbate rooms without synching; and 2) I can get automatic notifications.
My ideal calendar would include being able to drag and drop emails onto it to link up email with appointments, being able to easily enter lots of dates and times — I could make an Excel spreadsheet or a text file in half the time it takes to enter everything separately (and these aren't recurring, so I can't use that feature), having color-coding for categories or people, have an RSS feed as well as SMS notifications and the ability to post appointments via email, like I can blog entries or Flickr photos from my cell phone.
Is there such a thing? If Google could invent that for GMail I'd be hooked. I'd PAY. If you have a favorite online calendar app, post a comment so I can give it a try.
Underachievers in our own mind
Douglas Cootey stopped by to leave a comment about on my post about meds and ADHD. He and I disagree on meds, but we agree on all sorts of other things, including the idea of celebrating the positives of ADHD.
The thing I like about the splintered mind is that he's got a great sense of humor and is approaching his ADHD with an informed, educated and level-headed (albeit funny as hell) approach. I like that. He's an artist with an awesome Flickr badge on his page that is a great representation of ‘a splintered mind'.
Through a glass, darkly
Of all the pictures I have taken this year I consider this one to be the finest example of what I have learned. Out of 160+ gigabytes worth of digital images, this one brought together all of the creative, composition and camera lessons I've been learning into one image. It's worth looking at large, on black.
The glass was sitting on the beach, abandoned. T pointed at it and said, "Maybe you can do something with it." I shrugged, started to pick up my stuff and happened to see him walking away, through the glass. The sun was almost down, but there was still enough light to get some interesting shots (as it turned out, the glass became a subject of about 50 shots…) This shot is completely in real time, not set up, not posed (but composed), just off the cuff.
Yet I don't consider it to be a lucky shot, because I did think about framing it when I was looking through the viewfinder and setting the exposure and shutter speed to settings that optimized the image of T through the glass. I have pictures that are probably technically better, but this one is still the one that I consider my biggest triumph.
Dancergirl, the camera, and I are heading south to San Diego later this morning for Nationals. Think good thoughts — solos are 8AM Friday morning.
Digg: Do Girls Exist on the Internet?
Digg just launched a bunch of new features and channels, broadening their scope out from tech news into health, science, videos, entertainment and world/business news. I've been a fan of digg for almost a year and the new channels are definitely a welcome sight.
The one thing that has bugged me about digg is the assumption that the target audience is male and young enough to be my eldest son, so when I found this: "A girl on the Internet? No way!" I howled. Yes, she's younger than my demographic, but she's still nailed it. Work your way past the chatspeak to the text…she's an intelligent and thoughtful voice.
Intertwined with this is Diggnation, one of the funniest podcasts around with one notable exception: When Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht launch into their "frat boys do shots and get drunk" routine it not only gets stupid and boring, it's dangerous. Even their bit with the beers at the beginning of each podcast gets old after awhile. It might be cool for the frat boys, but for me it just seems silly and not very funny, especially since people close to me have struggled with the alcohol beast and they are dying from alcohol poisoning.
It would be really nice if the top tech sites and podcasts started figuring out that girls really ARE on the Internet, that we really do read the tech sites, can be as geeky as boys, and don't need to be drunk to have fun.