I get the occasional prod to update this thing. I blame a combination of apathy, secretiveness and a shortage of time. I won’t say I’m sorry for two reasons 1. It’s a cliché, 2. I’m not.
Back to business.
Lately lots of things have been happening; so much so that I decided to get organised in my personal life as much as I am in my professional one. I’ve tried written diaries before but I often forget them or fail to update them (usually both). The mobile phone is an obvious solution used by many but being generally against that whole mobile upgrade gravy-train (vile unmoderated consumerism at it’s worst) my mobile sucks at calendaring and I’m not going to upgrade the thing until it truly drops dead (not long now).
My last option was to replicate what I have at work in my Outlook calendar – at home – which I did, however, not running Windows at home, I don’t use Outlook so needed an alternative. I started using Mozilla Lightning, a plug-in for the Thunderbird mail client from the same people who bring you the brilliant Firefox Web Browser. Quite quickly I found a few of it’s flaws and to be fair it’s not at version 1 yet, but it’s still mostly usable. One good thing about Thunderbird/Lightning is that’s it’s cross-platform which is often handy in mixed environments (i.e. works on Windows, Linux and others for the non-techies reading this) like my home, but synchronising the calendar between my desktop and my laptop and ideally my work PC was going to be a pain-in-the-proverbial or impossible as in the case of my deliberately crippled Windows XP work PC.
I found a solution to this was creating a CalDAV server, a piece of software that hosts the calendar for access across a network, such as the Internet. There’s a few server packages available though not nearly as many as I usually expect in the FLOSS world, many were monolithic groupware suites weighing in at several hundred Megabytes which I thought was colossal over-kill when all I wanted to do was host a single-user calendar! Fortunately I found a nice piece of software called Davical. Davical is very lightweight and has many of the functions you’d expect including a permissions system that’ll give you an aneurysm. Ignoring that I’ve managed to get it working so I can now view it from everywhere except for work’s crippled Outlook client (boo!).
Since I set all this up I’ve been scheduling all my appointments and holidays and birthdays and “pencilled-in” plans and I discovered the source of much of my stress over the last 6 months, it was that I have a ridiculously busy schedule! So that’s why I’ve not updated this blog in a while and why I suck at keeping my promises to keep in touch with people and other such personal failures. Fortunately my newly organised self is able to spread things out at appropriate times and find the time to live a little. Well, that’s the plan anyway, it won’t happen for a good few weeks for various reasons and events that I’ll no doubt be writing about in the near future.
Keep your feed-reader peeled!
