And now, this. Google has created a calendar to expand its family of products. Of course i registered. I’m a google sucker, i suppose.

But again, a word blew across the room and into my mind. Interoperability. Here’s yet another calendar, and i’ve already got more than i can think of. Or put more technically, can synchronize. If i had calendars that just automagically cross-synched without my thinking of it, it would be great.

Now i have Outlook on my Windows laptop, which is the only thing that synchronizes with my phone. We (at work) are a Linux shop, so we don’t have the MS Exchange server which would synch the Outlook calendar upstream. Neither do we have any Open Source server software to make Outlook think it’s speaking with Exchange (none of which i’ve seen actually work). I have a Linux laptop, but since i can’t synch the calendar with my Outlook calendar, i don’t use the calendar in Kontact (Outlook for KDE) even though it’s the suite i do most of my other PIM functionality with.

Then i’ve a Communicator. It’s a really spiffy piece of hardware, but since it doesn’t synch, i don’t use its calendar. And that’s a shame really. And i’ve a PDA which i used to synch with Outlook before, but the PDA and my phone can’t seem to live together.

But hey, there’s more. We have a calendar server at work which nobody seems to use, because nobody can figure out even if one can get it to synch with any other calendar. And i have a paper calendar of the semester as an overview on when we have teaching periods, exam periods, and stuff like that.

And then there’s the nice dolphin calendar at the door back home, which needs to be manually synched.

I tried doodling a bit with the Google calendar. Tried creating a second calendar with it (it’s based on the iCal paradthought that you create one calendar for work, one for your real life (if you have one), one for the project, etc, and then you stack these calendars on each other to see what your consolidated life looks like). Didn’t work. Hey, they have free/busy! Didn’t work. Wanted to export my Outlook data so i could try importing it to GCal. Didn’t work either, but this time it was Outlook that was jealous and refused to start.
Computers don’t make living easier.