Anglican Prayer Beads  Prayer Beads  Anglican Rosary Rosaries  Natural Soap  Handmade Soap

Any questions as to whether or not I'm a computer nerd will be answered after this post.

How to synchronize your PDA with Google Calendar.

The whole Google "let us help you organize your life" thing is cool, as far as I'm concerned. I'm pretty much all in with Google. I have a number of calendars going there. The church calendar is at Google now, as is my own and one for my family. I can see them all (and modify any of them) when logged into my primary Google account. I use Gmail for all my email needs. I don't use my @gmail.com account, but I use Gmail as my mail client, letting it check various pop accounts for me. This way I get the Gmail grouping by conversation feature (which I love) for all my email accounts - and I have several. Tim Heavin and I share a number of church documents through Google. That's pretty handy too. We also use Google groups for emails to everyone in the church.

Sounds perfect huh? It's close, but the one thing that was lacking was the ability to synch all this with my Treo phone/PDA. I'm often not in a central location with my computer. I jot down a lot of appointments using my Treo. And when I'm out, I check my Treo to see what I have to do on any given day. The advantage of the Treo over other phones with calendars is that I can synch it with Outlook on my desktop. That was great in the past when I used Outlook for the church calendar, but as I said, it's all Google now. And at this point, Google has not provided a way to synch its calendars with your desktop or PDA.

But I've discovered a way to get that done. I'm assuming there may be some others would like to synch Google with a desktop or PDA but haven't figured out how. It's a little work setting this up, but once you do, it's easy to maintain. Here's one way to do this. I'm sure there are others:

First, I'm assuming you have a Google calendar. That's why you're reading. But if not, setting one up is ridiculously easy. Notice that your Google calendar has an ICAL feed button found under "calendar settings." That's an important part of this.

Next, go to Airset.com. This is a public calendar program on the Internet. It has two shining features that make this work. First, it synchs with Outlook or other desktop calendars (including the Palm calendar) using a little application that you download for free. Second, you can create calendar groups and "subscribe" to the ICAL feed from your Google calendar. Once you do that, anything you enter into Google's calendar will be pulled into your Airset calendar without you having to do anything.

This system is particularly advantageous if you have several people editing and using a Google calendar. In my case, Jeanene can edit our Google family calendar and Tim edits the church Google calendar.

Most of you probably see where this is going. Simply run the Airset desktop synch to synch Outlook or the Palm calendar with your Airset calendar (which now includes all of your Google calendar information). Then synch with your PDA as usual. I know this sounds complicated, but here's how it works in real life:

A couple of times I week I synch Outlook with Airset. And I synch my PDA with the desktop as I have been doing for years as a backup. That probably means once a week or so.

The bottom line: everything new added to any of my Google Calendars by me or Jeanene or Tim ends up on my Treo. New items that I enter in the Treo make it to my desktop and then to Airset via Outlook. But they won't end up on the Google calendars. Google does not import like that. But that's okay. That's got an advantage for me. There is no way some personal calendar item will end up on our Google church calendar. The main thing is, I get the latest calendar from the church and our family on my treo so I don't overbook myself.

rlp

I saw a sign that said, “Far Would 4 Sail.”

At first I didn’t know what it meant, but then I figured it out and laughed. It was the good kind of laugh, like when you finally get a joke.

The sign brought to mind many things I have known that seemed good and were good, only they were spelled wrong. But perhaps they weren’t wrong at all, at least not in the important ways of being wrong. Perhaps in some other place or time, they would have been right.

Me? I loved that sign from the moment I saw it. I get the sign. There is a gentleness to the word Far – so much nicer than fire. And Would looks like a little reclining couch. You could rest your head on the W and your feet on the LD. The 4 is delightfully playful, isn’t it? Like a little girl winking at you. And Sail tells you all you need to know. You could take that sign, hold it tightly to your chest, and leap off a mountain, couldn’t you? Wouldn’t you, if you could?

There is a reality to Far Would 4 Sail that feels very old to me. Older than standardized spelling and silly rules. Because the person who made that sign chopped all that would. Every blessed stick of it. Every piece of that farwould came from life and work. Every stroke of the axe was a real labor of muscle and flesh. Real living. Real life. Real work. Real love. Dammit, this person wrote it as it sounds and said it as it is. The far would person feels the reality of chopping would and stacking it in the bed of a delightfully old pickup and sailing it on the side of the road.

And what am I doing that’s so damn important? Driving by at 70 mph in my fancy car? Running a spell check on my latest essay?

This is a secret: sometimes, when I'm alone at night, and the church feels far away, and there are no nice people around, and the rules and obligations are out of my mind, I wish that I could write like the far would sign. Misspelled and brave and the hell with anything except for what is clear and obvious and right in front of my face. The stuff my body and my heart tells me is real and good.

Sometimes I imagine myself stripped to the waist, chopping away, living straight and full and with muscles flexing and straining. Laughing away the ghostly unrealities of religion and syntax and every other thing that denies the flesh. I would live only for the beauty of the moment, and I would know the eternal that lives at the cutting edge of the present. There would be no time for spelling. Hell, it wouldn’t even be on my radar screen. It wouldn’t exist.

But that is too ancient and good a way for me to live. And it would cost me too much. I sold my soul long ago, left the garden, and moved on. I live in a world where everything must be spelled correctly or no one will read it or even try to understand it. That is my world, and there is no escaping it now.

But I see the Far Would sign. I look at it shyly, like a little boy who is afraid to get too close. I see the sign and I can read it. I understand it. And I love it.

I wish for Far Would - sort of - maybe - from a safe distance.

rlp

This posting was a journal entry for September 9th. It has been combined with September 8th's posting into one entry. I left this entry here to preserve the comments.

There is an opossum on the road today. A car must have hit it and burst it open. The slick, red viscera is spilt all over the asphalt. Whenever something wet and sticky lands in dirt or grit, I don’t like it. I don’t like thinking about the dirt sticking to it.

Still, I can’t help but stare in wonder at the soft technology that is an opossum and is readily apparent in this particular one. Various tubes and sacks lay around. There are no screws or fasteners that I can see. Everything seems highly lubricated, though it’s not apparent why. I see no hard edges that would rub together. The inner workings are soft and squishy, unlike the insides of human gadgets.  And all the operational parts seem to have been stuffed into a hairy casing like socks and shirts into a laundry bag.

This particular opossum will not be repaired, I’m afraid. The service technicians we have are very limited. They can fix broken appendages and do other minor repairs, but really, when the casing is broken open and the insides spill out, that’s pretty much it. Even now the sun and the atmosphere are sucking the moisture from what’s left of the opossum, drying it into something that looks disturbingly like beef jerky. This drying process makes me think that water is a significant part of the design, though I can’t imagine why one would use such an unstable substance as a primary building material.

I have been told, though I haven’t seen it myself, that opossums are very small at the time they are activated. According to the story, they pop out of the chassis of a larger opossum. I find something like that hard to believe, but that’s what I hear. Take it for what it’s worth.

Once they are activated, they move around on their own, sucking smaller animals and plants into a hole in the front. Some engine inside converts this matter into opossum stuff, and it gets bigger. At some point it stops growing but continues collecting matter to be burned internally to sustain the warmth that is required to keep its inner parts in good working order.

A certain percentage of opossums are involved in the further production of their kind using the method I described before. They will produce a number of new units before they finally break down for good and are incorporated by other small, furry machines, or if left alone, slowly turn into dirt by some process that I have yet to divine. No fuss and no muss, as they say.

I suppose all of this is why I have a hard time not looking at dead animals, though the experience isn’t exactly pleasant.

They are a wondrous piece of work, are they not?

rlp