Calendar Apps, "screen sucking" and a question for the djs...

Posted By: Shagz
Date:

One of the services that seem to be flying around lately in these heady, Web 2.0 days (I hate buzz words) are Calendar applications, both offline (iCal, Yagoon Time, Outlook, Sunbird calendar extensions for both Thunderbird and Firefox) and online (Yahoo Calendar, 30 Boxes and the newly beta'd Google Calendar).

You're thinking "Calendars, big deal". Well, the big deal comes in the form of:

1. synchronization: using open standards, you can synchronize your calendar with offline applications and devices (PDAs, iPods and the like) as well as remote locations (publish changes to your Firefox Sunbird calendar to a remote location to synch up with the company calendar app, etc.). At least in theory.
2. sharing: like any good Web 2.0 service, it's all about community and collaboration, so you can share your calendar with your friends (more on this is a sec...) and they'll know when you're available, etc. These services also allow you to invite your friends as well, a la Evite.
3. subscribing: you can subscribe to a calendar, have it's events show up in your calendar, but when something changes in the original calendar, all your dates are, uh, updated. Great for groups and organizations and fans. (there's that "social" thing again)

All, if not most of these apps all support an open standard called ICalendar, which in turn is based on the original vCalendar. So if your app/web service allows it, you can export all your dates as an ICalendar file(s) and import them into other applications to stay up to date.

I'm totally fascinated by all this open source(-ish), productivity, organization stuff. It scratches the geek pleasure centres of my brain.

My problem is that my personal organization system revolves heavily around my ancient Handspring Visor Deluxe, which deals in an older, propietary binary format called the Palm Datebook Archive. I've spent most of this evening (more on that, too) looking around for some conversion tools, but haven't had much luck. The ones I've found either don't work with my version of the Palm Desktop OS (limited to v4.01 because of my Visor), or just don't work at all 'cuz they're still being tested.

I'd like to take advantage of some of these services (Google's, as always, is pretty slick, but Yahoo's is perhaps more mature), just to play around with 'em a bit - being to click "add this to my Google calendar" on Upcoming also scratches those geek pleasure centres, and don't get me started on colour coding things (drool) - but entering in everything twice is just a non-starter.

I could upgrade my Palm, but the new ones...the colour high-res screens kill the one thing I love about my old Visor: battery life. My Visor can go 2-3 weeks on one set up rechargable AAAs while the Zire's that I've inspected need a recharge at least once a day. I digress...

Too many options...I've got my Palm, I've got a Google calendar, I've got Sunbird running in Thunderbird...running too many systems is anathema to being organized. :P

Ok, so now that everybody's creating calendars and stuff, they want to share their calendars with their friends, synchornize everybody's schedules, etc. You know what that means, right? MORE E-MAILS INVITING YOU TO JOIN YET ANOTHER SOCIAL NETWORK!!! :(

At least with something of a standard going on here, we're all at an advantage because you can (usually) export stuff from an online/offline calendar and import it into another app, so staying in synch across multiple services won't be TOO much of a hassle. You can just send an *.ics file by e-mail to whoever and they'll be up to date.

Now, about that "whole evening" thing...it's called Screen Sucking and it's when you lose track of time starting at a monitor, surfing endless through the vast reaches of the internet. You're not really accomplishing anything, and the things you want to get done aren't getting done because you're saying "oh, just one more link" or "hey, that article sounds interesting". I think I've been doing a lot of it lately, and I have to figure out a way to stop it. I just downloaded a little Egg Timer application that might do the trick. Just have to set the alarm to something really annoying that will get my attention. :)

Now, for the DJs...thanks for being patient and hanging in there so long. I've been thinking long and hard about how and what to upgrade to with regards to digital music solutions. I'm a big fan of the Denon S-3500 and I was thinking about getting two of those until I started to learn how to scratch. Now that I've actually got a handle on this whole scratching thing on a turntable, I'm not sure I wanna muck that up by trying to do the same thing on a CD deck with a much smaller wheel. Additionally, I'm really trying to get the footprint of my set up down a bit. Lugging all that gear from gig to gig can get *really* tiresome.

The obvious solutions: Serrato Scratch Live or Stanton Final Scratch. I've already downloaded the manuals for both systems, and I have to give them a read through, but the two main things I'm concerned about is a) ease of creating loops (Final Scratch seems to have a special kind of "loop library" you can create ahead of time that looks very useful) and b) range of pitch control. I'm still confused as to whether the system is locked to the pitch range of your turntable (in the case of your traditional Tech 1200, that's +/-8%) or whether you can get whacked out ranges like you can on CD players (+/-80%).

Both systems have their boosters, and it seems to me that Final Scratch has the widest range of features, but I saw DJ Jazzy Jeff last summer cutting it up big time on Serrato and the Hop Fu guys use it too. Talking with DJ Teelo last night, he even recommended Serrato, even though he uses Final Scratch at the moment for some of his stuff.

So anybody have experience with one or the other or both? I'd appreciate your thoughts and opinions.

Annnnnnnnnd I'm out...

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