Enemy of Entropy
Archive for Geekery
Airset for iPhone!
Current Mood:
Happy
I’m so excited! We (our family) have been using Airset as our “groupware” for the past few years — a way to coordinate our calendar and contacts easily. Our criteria included something that would be available wherever we happened to be that would sync with Palm PDAs.
Well, Palm hasn’t really been burning up the world in terms of innovation. In fact, they moved away from PalmOS in their own most recent smartphone! Last year Sam got an iTouch, and while I resisted, he finally converted me to the dark side last fall.
The process of getting the current Airset data into the iTouch, though, has been a little annoying. I used Airset’s Desktop Sync utility to synchronize between Airset and Outlook (even though I don’t use Outlook for anything any more), then iTunes synchronized contacts and calendar to the iTouch. The only real advantage was that if I did happen to use the PDA for something, I had only to sync it to the PC, and since its software also synchronized with Outlook, it was ready to go.
Now I’ll just have the data in two places: Airset and my iTouch. I can excise Outlook from my PCs! Unless I want to keep using the PDA for some reason, of course. There’s just one program for the PDA that I have not yet replaced satisfactorily on the iTouch, Wakefield Software’s HealthFile. That’s for another post, though.
Sam just realized that he can’t use Airset for iPhone, though — bah. The way it works is by pretending to be an Exchange account, and the iTouch only allows one such account. His work email account takes up that slot. Boo 
It would be better if they’d developed an app. I think that if his employer wants him constantly available, they should give him a Blackberry. They do expect him to support the things, after all!
Now to begin the Evil Outlook Excision!
Whoops!
I’ve discovered that my blog posts stopped cross-posting over to my LiveJournal acccount at some point in September. Many of my more vocal friends actually read my posts over there, so anything I’ve said since then might as well have been tossed into the bit bucket. I’m going to rework those posts and re-do them. Some were rather time-sensitive, like some important birthday wishes! Sorry James, Dean, Michelle, Jeff, and Will! (Not that my nephew actually reads my blog, but it’s the thought that counts, right?)
At least I wasn’t the only person having the problem. It seems that everybody using the Live+Press Plugin had the same issue as soon as they upgraded to WordPress 2.8.x. I’m sure Live+Press will be fixed soon, but I’m not a coder and I have all the patience of a two-year-old, so I’m trying a new plugin now, JournalPress. If you see this on LJ, it worked!
ETA: Well, it didn’t work. Grrr. I’ll cross-post manually.
Victory!
Current Mood: Happy
On with the quotations obsession project. I swear, it’ll be useful for something other than keeping me busy. Someday!
Anybody know php/MySQL well enough to help me do that?
Anyway, one reason that I keep going is little successes like the one I just experienced.
I love research, and I’m attempting to find information on every single author (8,353 at this very moment) and some kind citation, preferably original, for every quotation (34,444 of them). Yes, that will keep me busy for awhile. The fact that many people cut-and-paste bits of text from all manner of sources, then lump them all together with little or no attribution, makes me crazy — especially since it seems that vast numbers of people conflate Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior and Senior, or Alexandre Dumas père et fils.
Anyway, there’s one quotation credited to “Milton Acorda” all over the internet and in many books: “Without freedom, no one really has a name.”
Other than the one sentence, the man doesn’t exist. I’ve looked for him several times, to no avail.
I don’t know if the book I found in Google Books wasn’t there before or what, but tonight I happened to search on the quotation itself again, and voilà ! It’s the last line of a poem, “Proposed Dedication for a Monument to Lount and Matthews,” published in the book More Poems for People by Milton Acorn.
No, my work isn’t going to end world hunger or anything like that, but I find it satisfying. And every little win helps my overall attitude, which isn’t really positive most of the time lately. Now if only someone would pay me to do this sort of thing!
I missed what?
It was National Grammar Day AND Gamemaster’s Day, and I didn’t realize either until the day was almost over!
It was date night, though, and my favorite GM and I did play, so at least there’s that. I’ll have to get him a make-up present, though.
You know all those different click-to-give sites? I very geekily gathered up all the ones that I know about and stuck the links on one page so I don’t have to try to remember them, or install shortcuts or toolbars or what-have-you. It isn’t gorgeous, but it is convenient.
I finally got started on Season 1 of Shadow Unit, now that Season 2 has started. Good stuff!
And finally, just so I can close the tab that’s been open for a couple of days, a new wrinkle in that whole nature/nurture debate: Child Abuse Alters Stress-Fighting Gene.
Nerd Joy!
We’ve been scanner-deprived for many months now, because the multifunction printer gave up the ghost. We acquired an older model HP scanner via Freecycle a while back, but it wouldn’t work. The moving bit inside had been locked down for transport, and just wouldn’t unlock. It is never a good thing when you get a burning smell out of a piece of computer equipment.
But Sam attacked it with screwdrivers and pliers and brute force tonight, and made it work! Squee!
