The Calendar Saga

OK, so I’ve got this shiny new Palm and shiny new Powerbook. Right now my entire life schedule lives on UMBC’s Oracle Calendar server (barf). In a perfect world, I would like to be able to view and interact with the same calendar on my Palm, my Mac, my Linux desktop at work, my wife’s doze box at home, etc. etc. So, how do I do it?

Oracle Calendar, obfuscated beast that it is, actually handles this task pretty well for everything except the Palm, as long as I’m connected to the internet. That’s because everything in Oracle Calendar lives on a central server at UMBC, and I can pull the info up with an Oracle Calendar client, and there are clients available for every desktop OS I use (XP, OSX and Linux). There’s even a web interface for places where I don’t have access to the calendar client. All in all, it works pretty well despite being a big, archaic, bloated, closed-source monster. And I’m stuck with using it in some capacity anyhow, as long as it’s UMBC’s enterprise calendar of choice, which figures to be the case for the next couple years at least.

Enter…… the Palm. This is my first Palm in a year or so (when I punted my old hand-me-down M105). I used to synchronize the old M105 with Oracle Calendar using Oracle’s suppled Palm-sync client on a Windows box at work. That worked pretty well, with one major annoyance: It screwed up my “To Do” list categories on a regular basis. But, it provided me with a synchronized, up-to-date calendar on my Palm, so I put up with it.

I hated the M105, though, because the battery gauge was inaccurate and I was constantly losing data when the batteries ran down unexpectedly. I think it had a bad capacitor too. When I pulled the batteries out, it instantly erased all my data. All in all, it was a bloody pain.

The new Palm is a Tungsten E2. It has flash memory. It supposedly won’t lose its mind if the battery runs down. Which is going to take me awhile to test, because the battery seems to last forever. But anyhow, it seems pretty cool so far. Honestly I wouldn’t have bought another Palm if they hadn’t done something about the memory-loss issue. Of course, as I soon learned, nothing is perfect……..