Bunk and Rambling

After missing an important meeting on Friday I have come to the realisation that maintaining multiple calendars on multiple machines may be problematic. Come to think of it, this issue has been lurking in the dark recesses of my mind for a while now. The root of this problem is tied to my work as a development consultant and the need to maintain ThoughtWorks, customer and personal schedule items in multiple systems. The development consultant aspect of my job affects me as I am not guaranteed to be working in front of any of my machines to receive meeting reminders in a timely fashion, if at all. The only thing that seems to be always near by is my mobile phone. So I am turning to it to solve my meeting notification needs.

While I look to my mobile for notifications of meetings, I realise that this is not the right tool to manage my calendar items. This is simply due to the screen size and speed of data entry that the device permits me. For a while now I have been maintaining my contacts in Outlook and synchronising with the phone regularly on my home computer. This gets around the input issues on the device, as I obviously have a full keyboard hooked up to my desktop PC. Unfortunately, I have limited access to updating this information while I am at work, meaning that this is not the ideal solution for my maintaining my calendar.

To that end, I need an Internet-accessible calendar for managing its content from multiple locations. For this I am planning on using Google Calendar. After having moved across some appointments I can understand why it is getting so many good reviews. Being able to extract calendar information in iCalendar format is also a great feature.

Now I have a tool to manage my calendar from multiple locations, another tool to remind me of meetings while I am on the go, but there is still a missing link, some way of getting the data from Google Calendar to my Samsung D600. While I initially looked at SyncML support on the D600 (which is supported) I was unable to get this working in the hour or so that I was willing to spend on it. In the interim I have opted to go with the RemoteCalendars plug-in for Outlook. What this allows me to do is to download my iCalendar data from Google and have it added to my Outlook calendar at home. From here I can synchronise it with my phone, which has proven successful to this point. My next project will be to remove Outlook as the middle man in the synchronisation process if possible.

For the time being this appears to solve my immediate problems of not being notified of meetings in a timely fashion. I know I still have to maintain multiple calendars (in fact I now have one more to edit). If it doesn’t turn out to be a silver bullet in this instance, I think I will just write my daily appointments on index cards and discard my Google Calendar.