Tiny Tech Triumph

For years, actually decades, Chuck and I relied on various Day-Timer calendars and planners to help keep us organized and sane. While Day-Timer continually adds new products and features, they maintain their core product line. Which, for creatures of habit like us, is a really wonderful corporate policy! But as our lives and routines have changed and as our technology usage has evolved, we’ve been moving away from paper calendars and planners to software based ones.

When we bought our first Apple laptop four years ago, it came with Address Book, exactly what it sounds like and iCal, the calendar application. We used them intermittently at first, but then the first round of holiday cards were ready to be printed and their envelopes addressed and we suddenly had a big motivation to learn Address Book. When we got our second Apple laptop two years ago, iCal moved onto our radar. Chuck and I had long coordinated our calendars on a monthly and weekly basis. We would flip through to make sure we had each other’s appointments jotted down to avoid scheduling snafus. But we soon realized that if either of us noted a birthday or a dentist appointment in iCal, we could have it show up automatically in iCal on the other computer. Sweet!

For quite awhile we’ve been syncing our iCal calendars and it has been an absolute breeze. But for some reason we had problems syncing our Address Books from one computer to the other. Recently, we slogged through a manual sort of all our Address Book “cards” - so called because when you import or export the .vcf vCards individually, they look like traditional Rolodex cards. But even after we had checked all 180 cards, we still couldn’t sync automatically. So Chuck called Apple tech support tonight and after much backing and forthing, our Address Books are syncing up a storm!

Next stop: something portable to handle such nifty software. Oh please Apple, send the iPhone over to Verizon Wireless and soooon!