Every time I find something buggy, broken, or undesirable about “30boxes”:http://30boxes.com/, I try out “Google Calendar”:http://calendar.google.com/ again. Every time I try out Google Calendar again, I’m so impressed that I consider switching. And Every time I finally make the choice to switch to Google Calendar, it gets slow, buggy, or unavailable. Every time Google Calendar is broken, I decide to stick with 30boxes. Soon enough, however, I’ll find something I don’t like about 30boxes, so I decide to try out Google Calendar again. Every time I try out Google Calendar again, I think about switching.
April, 2006:
reflected trees under blue skies
the taxes are done, man
We finally got our taxes done and even managed to file a few days early. I always arrange to break as close to even as possible as I’d prefer to invest my money throughout the year than to let Uncle Sam hang on to it for me. However, this year was the first year that I claimed business losses, so I wasn’t sure what to expect and had prepared for the worse. While I’m not getting anything close to “Cheney’s $1.9 million refund”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5343060, it’s fun to have this unexpected little chunk of cash sitting around that hasn’t really been budgeted for anything at all. I’m not sure what to do with it, though.
We don’t have any outstanding credit card debt or unpaid bills. So, if I wanted to be really responsible, my only option would be to pay down some principal on our house, but that’s not any fun and it’s not something that’ll really make a difference to us unless we happen to still be in this house 20 years from now. Of course we could also take the low road and blow it on “something really stupid”:http://www.shooshtime.com/clips/video.php?id=8013. I’d prefer to find a middle ground.
Since the refund is largely due to money spent on photography equipment last year, we could compound the situation by buying more photography equipment with it. There is a lens and a few lights that I’ve had my eye on for a while now. Then again, now that things are moving along fairly well, I’d like to let my work pay for itself. (So “buy a print”:http://flickr.com/photos/revjim/tags/forsale/ or “book a session”:http://djamesphoto.com/pages/photosessions/, will ya?)
I’d like to plan a nice vacation, but Jess and I made tentative plans over Christmas break to go to New York City with some friends this spring. Jess was supposed to be planning it all out, but, so far she’s got nothing.
Of course we could spend it on something for the house that we wouldn’t have purchased otherwise. We are already planning on putting in new flooring, so that leaves one of several ideas I have in mind involving home decor, electronics, and various storage solutions. What can I say, I’ve got a mind for design. (I’ve been watching way too much TLC these days. Time to “turn the TV off”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/gadgets/tvbgone-universal-television-remote-155757.php.)
We could rent a large room for an evening, buy mad amounts of Club Crackers, Easy Cheese, and Cadbury Mini-Eggs, invite everyone we know and have the party of the century, but I don’t really want to go to jail again.
I’ve got to do something with it. It’s burning a hole in my pocket.
one tree under yellow sky
obsession: life’s little pleasures
I can let some of the strangest things go by entirely unnoticed until someone points out to me that it would be almost impossible for me to have missed it, and yet I did. However, other times, I can get very caught up in some of the oddest things.
I rather enjoy my small obsessions. They make the rest of the world more bearable. That’s party of why photography is so appealing to me. It helps me loose myself even deeper in the world of those things that fascinate me. I have, many times, found myself deeply fascinated by the angle of a specific tree’s branches, or by the placement of leaves in the gutters of a city street, or by the shape of a girl’s hip.
It actually startles me, from time to time, when I recognize it. Several times I’ve gone to edit the images from a recent photo session and, as the images from the session unfold, there becomes an obvious, unanticipated focal point in the photographs: the neck, perhaps, or the hands, or a hip, or a certain mood, or theme. More often that not, buried deeply in this nonsensical, unplanned study of a particular human feature I’ll find that “wow” shot — that one shot that I keep returning to over and over again.
To me, regardless of how well received that particular image is (if I publish it at all), having a photograph like that from a session brings my appreciation of the results and my value of the experience to an entirely new level. Similarly, models that allow my obsessive nature to take hold and explore aspects of them tend to be those that I yearn to work with again and again.
Some people cannot handle obsessing or being the object of obsession. It’s too close; too intimate; too strange. For me, these moments are when the most incredible thoughts and ideas become crystal clear, even if only for an instant.
30boxes vs. Google Calendar
I guess I was a little quick to mention “30boxes”:http://30boxes.com/ yesterday. That’s not to say that I don’t like 30boxes any more — I do, indeed. However, I’ve learned a few things since then.
First, one of the greatest things about 30boxes, the OneBox where you can use natural language to schedule appointments, is actually a fairly common feature these days in Web 2.0 Calendaring applications.
Secondly, “Google Calendar”:http://calendar.google.com/ has been released today. That’s right, finally, after all the speculation, *Google has released a Web 2.0 calendar*. It’s not perfect, but it’s got lots of nice features too. In fact, if I could create a hybrid of the two, I’d be in heaven.
Here’s what I like more about Google Calendar:
* In Google Calendar, if I allow it, other users can edit my calendar. This is very useful for people who have an assistant scheduling appointments for them, or for a pool of calendar updaters for a team or group calendar. 30boxes doesn’t allow other users to edit my calendar at all.
* In Google Calendar I can view my calendar as a list, or by day, week, month, or any of several custom formats. 30boxes only allows me… well… 30 boxes. If I hover over a box I can see a listing for the day, but it’s not quite the same.
* Google Calendar’s day view shows appointments in a time grid. 30boxes just shows a daily list. A list is good for a quick glance, but a time grid is good when comparing multiple calendars or trying to get a glance of your day’s appointments in order to find a place to schedule another.
* Google Calendar appointments can be categorized into calendars, and each calendar is color coded which is very useful for determining which appointments are which at a quick glance. 30boxes allows you to manually color code appointments, but the colors are not based on the appointments classification.
* Google Calendar inputs appointments into the currently selected category. 30boxes requires you to explicitly set categories on each new appointment made.
* Google Calendar’s human language parser seems to be more flexible and more intelligent than 30boxes’s.
* Google Calendar has a view that allows a user to see only Free/Busy information. 30boxes doesn’t have this at all.
Here’s what I like more about 30boxes:
* Google Calendar only allows an appointment to be in one category. However, with 30boxes, any appointment can have as many categories as you’d like.
* 30boxes has a large array of syndication options. This includes displaying RSS data inline on the calendar, and subscribing to iCal calendars as well as providing an iCal and RSS view of your appointments by tag.
* It’s really annoying that every time I click in the Google Calendar window (just to bring it to the foreground) it pops up the “Add an Event” screen.
So, if Google Calendar would take these features from 30boxes, I’d have a perfect solution:
* Allow appointments to be in multiple Categories.
* Allow many more incoming syndication options.
* Allow other public and private views of the calendar.
* Stop being annoying.
Or, if 30boxes would take these features from Google Calendar, I’d be set:
* Allow other users to edit my calendar.
* Allow categories to be color coded.
* Allow other calendar views (2 weeks, 1 week, 1 day, etc).
* Implement a Time Grid
* Beef up the human language parser.
* Implement Free/Busy Information.
On the surface it may look like Google Calendar has won this war, but the areas in which Google Calendar is deficient are much more useful than the areas in which 30boxes is deficient. Therefore, it’s not as clear cut as counting the items in the lists.
Additionally, it should be noted that both services are quite useful as is. I have “very high demands”:http://revjim.net/2005/08/19/online-calendaring-solution/ when it comes to Calendaring, so, the fact that these services even come close to what I’m looking for means they must be doing pretty damn good.
bashfully captivating
30boxes: it’s your life
“30boxes”:http://30boxes.com/ is to online Calendaring what “GMail”:http://gmail.com/ is to EMail and “Flickr”:http://flickr.com/ is to Photographs. It’s the very social, uber-smart, snappy-interfaced, innovative calendaring application for Web 2.0.
Long gone are the days of tedious entry box widgets and slow kludgy interfaces. Do you have a Doctor’s Appointment on Thursday at 3pm? If so, just type “Doctor’s Appointment on Thursday at 3pm” into the _OneBox_ and press enter. That’s it!
You can import data with RSS. This means you can view your calendar, your friends’ calendars, your weblog entries, and the upcoming Maverick’s games all from the same simple interface. And these features reach much deeper than you can imagine. You’ll have to try it to see what I mean.
You can also export your calendar with great flexibility. Export your entire calendar, or only appointments tagged with a certain tag. Choose to show your private entries or keep them a secret. For instance, you can view “my public calendar”:http://30boxes.com/public/52339/JimReverend/17bbd0fd2d0d97692c8b16eff00356ef/0/public to see what I’m up to. Look at “my photography calendar”:http://30boxes.com/public/52339/JimReverend/06ba35c21411e0e7832b321f53915e7a/0/photography to see who I’ll be photographing and where I’ll be headed. Or, if you really want to keep up with me, visit “my profile”:http://30boxes.com/user/52339/JimReverend and add me to your own 30boxes.
The doors for new users have only been open since the beginning of February and, since then, the developers have been adding new features like mad. If 30boxes doesn’t have everything you’ve been looking for in an online calendaring application (and even a few things you didn’t know you couldn’t live without until you had them), just drop them a line with your idea and see what happens.
gettin’ Milky Spore on your ass
During our “yard work this past weekend”:http://revjim.net/2006/04/10/a-very-landscaping-weekend/ I noticed some more of the same gross looking, red butt-ed, thumb length grubs that I saw in the soil last year. While pondering the vast array of “Weed and Feed” products at Lowes later that day, I figured out what they are: “Japanese Beetle”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_beetle Larvae (which look “very gross”:http://www.pueblo.gsa.gov/cic_text/housing/japanese-beetle/jblarva.gif if you ask me).
These little grubs may be the reason my lawn is brown, and the adults that these things turn into may be responsible for the holes in the leaves of my holly bushes. Apparently, these beetles are such a pest that the USDA created a special variant of Bacteria called “Milky Spore” designed specifically to kill these things. Based on the number of grubs we saw and the holes in our plant leaves, it looks like I’m going to be getting all “Milky Spore”:http://www.epa.gov/oppbppd1/biopesticides/ingredients/factsheets/factsheet_054502.htm on my lawn next weekend. I’ll probably need some pesticides too.
Stupid beetles.
