Posted on 9 Comments on Real easy question — so where’s the answer?

Real easy question — so where’s the answer?

Here’s the situation: I have a Palm running Palm OS 4.1.4. I sync it with my desktop at home. However, I also have the Palm desktop running at work, just for the calendar (I hate the Lotus Notes calendar, which is what I’m supposed to be using at work).

I would like to have a three-way sync, so anything I add to the work version of the calendar makes it onto the Palm device and my home desktop, and vice-versa-versa. I don’t think I can simply sync it at work and at home (and besides, I don’t want all my OTHER Palm stuff — like my address book and notes — to be on my work computer).

The Palm desktop allows you to "export" your calendar to a file, and to "import" calendar files. Now we’re getting somewhere. It’s not as clean as syncing, but that’s OK. But what I need to know is this:

If I import a Palm calendar file into my existing desktop, does it replace (overwrite) the existing calendar, or does it merge with it?

From a usability point of view, it would be brilliant if it merged. However, after nearly 14 years in the software business, I am under no illusion that any software works the way you want or expect it to. Software designers — brilliant as they may be — often have a really bad habit of designing for what they expect, not what the customer expects.

I should think that a company like Palm is so user-oriented that they would not fall into that trap, but I’ve been fooled like that before. The fact that neither their on-line help nor their Web-based support address this very basic question does not reassure me. Sure, it’s easy to find out how to export and import a calendar file (any idiot can figure that out), but there is nothing, that I can see, that addresses the real user issues of "why" and "what are the ramifications?"

So I appeal to my thousands of readers. Has anyone done this before? If so, what happened?

(Yes, I know that in the time it took me to write this I could have run a test, but hey, then I wouldn’t get to rant.)

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Nova Scotia photo album

It’s a month since we’ve returned from our trip to Nova Scotia and I finally got around to putting together a small photo album. You can see it over there on the right, or you can just click here.

If you’ve seen Martine’s photo album of the trip you already have some idea of where we went and what we did, but I tried to avoid repeating the same pictures as you’ll find in hers (even though we were standing next to each other most of the time). For one thing, my album has pictures of her (while hers has pictures of me).

I know you’re all just falling over your chairs to get to it so I won’t say anything more — except to note that the first few images have long captions, but rest assured they get shorter as you go along.

Enjoy!

Posted on 14 Comments on Return of the scooter

Return of the scooter

I finally got my scooter back this weekend. It’s been at the cop shop ever since it was stolen (and recovered) back in July.

Below are "before" and "after" pictures:

Most of the orange body parts will be returned to me in a few weeks, but I don’t know what kind of shape they’ll be in. The raison d’etre for the theft was to sell the body parts to some kid in the area who wanted to do a makeover — his scooter’s body parts had gotten busted up and he wanted to replace them. His father gave him money for a legitimate repair shop, but the kid decided to go for cheap hot parts instead, and to pocket the difference. Or so goes the story.

As well as the missing body parts, the helmet carrier is gone, the ignition keyhole is wrecked, the seat lock is busted, and the steering is crooked. Oh yeah, and the tail light assembly is gone.

I’ve half a mind to patch it together with duct tape and trailer blinkers from Canadian Tire, since none of this is covered by insurance and it will be difficult and expensive to get it back into its original condition. It would be my Mad Max scooter. All I’d need is a sawed-off 12-gauge and I’d be all set.

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