Alison Young

Who doesn’t love a calendar? They’ve been hanging on our walls for years and now they’re in our phones, laptops and websites. Never before have I been able to be so very accountable of my time. My calendar is very indicative of the sort of lifestyle I lead, where I travel to and how often, even how much in advance I plan things.

There are any number of calendar applications which suit various peoples needs and lifestyles. My calendar of choice is Google Calendar for reasons of flexibility, expansion and accessibility. Please feel free to comment with the calendars you use and why you love them. The things I love about Gcal may or may not be able to be done on something else better, who knows. This isn’t a Gcal push post, it’s a calendar love post.

So what calendars do you have?

I have a few calendars which I have feeding into my central calendar repository. I have my personal, health, rent and work calendars that I update. I also have subscriptions to my Facebook events, Sydney Linux User Group and selected friends calendars. Sharing of calendars among friends can be very useful if you all have very busy schedules but like to catch up often. When being a social organiser as I often find myself doing it’s wonderful to know at a glance who is free on what days.

There are quite a number of calendars I have for good reason, all are important and useful t me but I don’t need to see all of them all of the time. The thing I love is the ability to select which calendars I have in the current view. I only need to see the rent calendar once a week for approximately 30seconds to know who, if anybody, I need to be chasing for rent that week and who’s paid up for the next few weeks.

Wait, did you say health?

This was only a recent idea of mine to create a health calendar for myself. You know those ideas that as soon as you have them and then start to create and use it you wonder why you didn’t do it years ago? This is one of those.

In my years of moving around Brisbane and then to Sydney and in the age of doctors that are increasingly apathetic I’ve had some difficulty finding one that I like. Hence why it’s been quite rare for me to return to the same doctor or even practice. My medical history records kept on the other end are spread far and wide. It made more sense to me to keep a record of my medical history on my end which I can give to a doctor quickly and easily if needed.

The sorts of ways this can be useful is amazingly broad. Been struck down by the flu this year, how about keeping track of the number of days. Even better, you can remind yourself t get a flu shot next year. It’s not unusual for me to suffer from 2-3 throat infection during winter at various stages. This is a useful way to keep track of when I got them and how long they stuck around for. I can detail the doctors I have seen and for what. How about all those times you’ve been on a course of antibiotics an forgotten to take them on time. Using a calendar you can set yourself reminders. GCal can even send your reminders as sms so no matter where you are, provided you have your phone you’ll get the message. As a woman there are some evil but necessary things it’s useful to keep a track of and set reminders for. Similar sort of things apply to you men as well. No more excuses.

The more I use it the more I can see the value of a health calendar. It’s totally private and most likely more secure than any medical records kept anywhere else. The more I think about it the more it makes sense.

I don’t think it’s unusual for people to have a number of calendars. I daresay most would be in a similar position to myself. Maybe not all the same but there are no shortage of ideas for things that you want a separate calendar for.

Why I love Google Calendar

So I may have changed my mind and am going to pimp GCal a bit here. I love a few things about it which may inspire you to use a calendar, whether GCal or not, find tha suits your needs. The big things I love about it are:

• ease of use, stupidly easy to create new calendars and only a little more difficult to subscribe to calendars. Drag and type to add events and there’s an additional screen to add more details, reminders and invite others.
• Reminders. I love the reminders so much I should have listed them first. I can set notification, email or sms reminders from anywhere to 5mins to weeks. The best part of the sms reminders is that GCal was written for the US to use where over there they pay to receive sms messages. Here in Australia we don’t pay but GCal still sends them to us. So many Aussies don’t realise we can use the sms reminder service. We can, so do! I often set an sms reminder between 1-2hrs before an event and it has saved me a number of times. Especially if you put address or phone number details in the field that’s sent. Perfect example is the Girl Geek Dinner I’m attending tonight. I had it in my mind that it was at number 70 but in fact it’s 51. There’s a potentially big dilemma avoided.
• Sharing and subscribing. I found this wonderful little application named FBCal that lets me share my facebook events with my GCal, more often than not I wind up putting those events in my personal calendar but it saves so much time avoiding having to flick backwards and forwards through tabs to copy details. It’s also simple for me to share my calendar with frinds who depending on my settings default settings and also for each event can see either the details of my events and appointments or only that I’m unavailable or free at a certain date and time.
• Flexibility. I can access my GCal from either of my laptops, I can view appointments from my phone and I can receive reminders to anywhere. The only caveat to this incredible flexibility is that I need an internet or data connection in order to access the calendars however if this isn’t possible then the sms reminders pick up any slack for me.

I like being organised, often I have to budget my time as carefully as I budget my finances, I also don’t like to disappoint people and try to make sure that I have adequate time for myself, work and socialising. I’m very fortunate in that at present my work hours are very flexible so that if needed I can work during the night, on weekends and from anywhere I have an internet connection. This leaves my time very open to events and also travel which can happen on very short notice or be planned months in advance.

My life is great fun and I’d like it to stay that way for a while yet. Planning and scheduling is often I do well naturally but sometimes it’s good to have calendars to pick up where I may forget things. Don’t forget the other basic things that everybody uses calendars for, remembering birthdays, anniversaries, holidays.

Have fun with your calendars and find the one, or selection of many, that works best for you.

Plurk-friend Rori sent me this recipe via email after I commented about having come down with yet another pesky throat infection. This makes my second this year, I usually average about 2.5/pa. After some quick searching I found a version on a website too but the original came in an email. Find it here under the Staying Healthy this winter sub-heading.

It sounded rather dangerous and I excitedly gathered all in the ingredients today after work. Skipped the onion as they don’t like me a terrible lot and despite my initial reservations did include 2 chillis. I’m something of a wimp when it comes to facing down with anything chilli.

As the whole idea of making soup came from my Plurk community I decided to post pictures to BrightKite of the process and crosspost the same pictures back to Plurk. It was a bit of fun for me and I got to combine two things which I find a lot of fun, being a geek and cooking. The results were spectacular, all the garlic was either softened to the ‘melt in your mouth’ point or had been absorbed into the broth, chilli was flavoursome but only very minor burn inducing. Anticipating it burning a lot more I made toast which wasn’t needed at all.

For all you people who are too busy to get sick, I can highly recommend spending 1.5hrs making this up. It’s delicious, potent, and will make 4-6 meals depending on portion size. I’m not sure who Becky-Lee Reed is but I’m thankful for her recipe and Rori for sending it to me.

Maybe Schnubbs can give it a try next time one of his housemates is unwell or starting to feel that way.

Update (June 2009): as I mentioned pictures I should probably add some or at least links. So here are the BrightKite links to my photos I took and posted as I prepared. I haz a flava; It’s got chicken legs; Stocking up and Soup-erficial success story.

I’ve been asked by the lovely Catherine whether I’d like to take part in the upcoming Geek Girl Blogs Podcast on Recruitment and Women in IT. As I’m presently looking for industry-relevant work after spending around 18 months in the workforce but not doing jobs directly derived from my degree, Catherine thought I would be a good addition to the group. I’m being joined by 2 others so it should make for a great discussion though I’m as yet a little uncertain where the discussion will go. I will post links when the recording is up.

Recording will be taking place on Tuesday evening after weeks of trying to co-ordinate the hectic schedules of the 4 people presenting. I’m pleased to be doing something again that raises awareness of women involved in IT.

We need to get more girls involved with technology and I’ve enjoyed being involved in things like Girls and IT days and the WIT Regional Tour which I went on in early 2006 just before I started Honours.

This event occurred quite some time ago and due to delays with getting internet connected and the sporadic ways I’ve been accessing the net while in the churn process I haven’t been able to post this until now. Thus it won’t be an overly comprehensive entry as there are other entries about the highlights of PubCamp and various presentations already published by Kate, Stephen and Michael.

I attended both the Sydney and Melbourne PubCamp events which were organised by Jed White of itechne. Sydney was a very polarising experience, the room was even physically divided between Old and New Media. There was lively debate, and plenty of unspoken communication going on in the room as the two seemingly different worlds and views faced off against each other.

My Sydney presentation was quite structured, I presented a modified version of the widely recognised Twitter talk from BarCamp Sydney and Canberra. Instead this time I added more about social networking in general to spark discussion about not only the tools, applications and sites that integrate with Twitter but other social networks too and the different ways we all use them. Slides for the Sydney talk can be found on my slideshare.

Melbourne was an entirely different story, the debate between Old and New Media was significantly muted compared to Sydney. However there were very valid points raised and discussed which was good to see. People in Melbourne were quieter but no less passionate.

For my unconference presentation in Melbourne I took a different approach. The laptop wouldn’t work with the projector so I decided to do away with the slides and just talking about Twitter. We talked a bit about Twitter but also about other social networks, how we all use them and the place they have in our lives. I had an audience of approximately 30 and the room buzzed with discussion. It was pretty great as I’ve never had anything like that happen before and I really liked it. This time it wasn’t about me talking and them discussing later, the discussion was now and I can thank a few key people who started speaking up and then that inspired the others. There were a few new people who’d never heard of Twitter or considered using social networks before. I hope they took something away from the talk. It was my absolute pleasure to be involved in something like PubCamp.

There is a big post about social networks which I will write and publish in the very near future. I’ve been using them for long enough now that I feel I can articulate the motivation and effects that using them has had on my life to date and potentially what the future may hold.

Huge thank-you must again go to itechne and Jed who very generously sponsored my travel and accomodation in Melbourne. It would not have been possible without their support and I had a such a good time meeting all the Melbourne Twitter people who came out and ran amok with us who travelled down for PubCamp. I look forward to going back there soon and catching up again.

Mozilla is launching Firefox 3 and they’re doing so in style, by attempting to set a record for the most number of downloads during a 24hour period. This is a great idea to spread awareness and love of a browser that has gained quite a significant amount of awareness over time. The thing us Australians should pay attention to is the date, while stated everywhere on the website as June 17. The official launch time of 10am on June 17, Pacific Daylight Time is actually 3am on the 18th of June here in New South Wales. You can check the official start time for wherever you are here.

To get involved you can pledge your bandwidth by clicking the banner below.

I’ve been using the Firefox 3 beta release candidate since I upgraded to Hardy Heron and it’s grown on me. I’ll like it even more when they start supporting more of the extensions I used to use with FF2. On the other hand, it’s been good to clean out the extension collection to determine what I really use and what I can live without.