Curious Creature

I’ve been mucking around with adding my Remember the Milk lists as iCal event feeds to my Google Calendar account.  The idea of having tasks with due dates show up like “local” GCal events is great but it doesn’t work as I’d hoped.

Apparently I’m not the only one noticing this either based on this post on the GCal Google group.  That post notes that it takes hours for the feed to refresh and that there is no way to manually refresh it (you can in with a  30boxes.com calendar but that one leaves a lot to be desired).  Quite frankly it’s ridiculous that it takes hours.  At that point I can’t be sure that anything I entered actually shows up in GCal.   It would appear this behavior just isn’t an RTM issue as I see the same behavior with a feed from iWantSandy.com.

RTM does have two other options available, one for GCal, and if you’re using Firefox, one for GMail.  The GMail Firefox plugin is quite nice but I don’t want my tasks there…I want them in my calendar.  The option for GCal itself is OK but I’m picky and don’t want to have to click that checkmark to see what I have for the day.

I suppose that GCal is like so many other pieces of software, it gets you most of the way there but then dumps you off about a mile away from your intended destination.  This is a real disappointment. I know GCal is free but adding a manual refresh link for the external feeds can’t be that difficult.  The Google Group link above notes that “they’re looking into it”.  I hope it happens sometime soon.

Not surprisingly this works flawlessly on iCal on the Mac.  I can even see tasks with no due date set in the To-Do list part of iCal.   But I can’t use my Mac at work anymore where I really need to see these lists

Ever since posting links on Twitter to things I’ve written here the amount of comment/trackback spam I’m receiving has exploded.   Luckily WordPress has great spam filtering.

While messing with a Google Apps setup I have created for my volunteer group I found some interesting things about entering events. Not sure they’re features given the circumstances but they’re interesting nonetheless.

First of all, I selected 1pm to 3pm on a Thursday and entered the term “Kayak Thursday” (no quotes). The calendar application then entered an event for me for the Thursday after the Thursday I had selected.

Then I tried entering “Kayak-Thursday” (again no quotes) and it then scheduled the event for the Thursday prior to the Thursday I had selected.

Putting the title in quotes makes it work the way I want.

I’m not sure this is a feature I really like. When I select a specific day put the event on that day. Don’t try to guess what I want. The behavior with the “-Thursday” was even more odd even though it sort of makes sense. Well, it makes sense now. It certainly didn’t make sense then.

I can understand these things for the quick event feature but not given the context I was in while entering events.

I keep coming across people using “learnings” as a word in documents. Here is an example (scroll down to the bottom and you’ll spot it). Just a note for the incompetent: “learnings” is not a word. Go look it up in the dictionary…I dare you. See what comes up? “Learning”.

If you want to sound like Borat then keep using “learnings”. If you want to sound competent try “lessons learned”.