Providence and ScheduleWorld

I am temporarily in Providence, but November 1st I go back to Italy for one more month. Although I was finally able to spend some time with Ines, after 6 months in Italy, this hasn't been really downtime - we have a proposal for a new experiment (a larger Dark Matter detector), so I have been working like crazy. My schedule for the last week has been pretty much wake up, go to work, eat if you can, go to sleep for a few hours, repeat - very similar to the intense time we had in Italy when the detector first became operational.

In spite of the simplicity of my schedule, I find it very important to keep track of it, because I have been missing a lot of birthdays and I am to start to feel guilty about it. Having 3 computers makes things more complicated - sometimes I go days working with just one, so if I have my schedule in just one PC, I might go weeks without looking at my calendar. Synchronizing them is a pain - there is no program that will sync everything (contacts, schedules, to-do lists, etc..) seamlessly and automatically. I sync my files with FolderShare, and use IMAP (with Thunderbird) for my email, so I wanted something that would work just as well for the calendars and contacts. I tried various solution for Outlook, and even Mozilla Sunbird, but none worked very well. Using FolderShare to sync the Outlook files didn't work because the files involved can get large, and if I make a change in one computer before everything is synchronized (sync'ing slows down for large files), conflicts occur. Mozilla Sunbird doesn't work if I am not connect to the net. Sync'ing programs for Outlook ultimately all failed to do what I wanted (and I spent a lot of time on this).

Enter ScheduleWorld. With no single program capable of helping me, I opted to a multiple pronged attack; ScheduleWorld makes it all happen. ScheduleWorld is a website, that allows for synchronization with pretty much anything - with Outlook, Mozilla, iPod, Cell Phones, Google Calendar, etc... It's pretty cool - you can check it at http://www.scheduleworld.com.

So I use Outlook in all 3 computers for my calendars/contacts, and Thunderbird for email/contacts (ScheduleWorld can keep the contacts synchronized - I am not doing this yet, but I will try it). From my desktop PC at home, I use iTunes to synchronize my iPod and whatever Motorola program I got to synchronize my phone with Outlook. Then I use ScheduleWorld to synchronize all 3 Outlooks, plus my Google Calendar, so I can check and edit it even if I am not at one of my computers. Plus, Google Calendar is pretty cool. Finally, I use Active Desktop Calendar, synchronized to Google Calendars, to display my schedule on the desktop, so I never miss anything. After everything is installed and configured, it all just works automatically - I don't even have to press a "Sync" button to make it all happen!

All is not perfect yet, though - the Outlook plugin is still a bit buggy, and has "lost" the "relationship" with ScheduleWorld a couple of times, so that I had to delete the calendar from the site and recover it from Outlook. Also, Google doesn't have a To-Do list. However, these are minor issues to me, and I am very happy with my calendar solution.