Dev Imperium

I’ve been trying to get a bit more organized and one element of that is an organized calendar so I can track the things I am supposed to be doing, but can never seem to remember.  At work we have an implementation of Oracle Calendar (which I’ve never been very impressed with, though it does work) and I don’t want to have to reference two different calendars.

Google Calendar to the rescue.  Your calendar is composed of several sub-calendars, each of which represents a different individual context or group.  With this framework you can assign different permission sets to each calendar.  Additionally you can subscribe to group or general calendars or outside resources.  Currently I have 6 calendars:

1) my personal calendar

2) my friend’s birthdays (that I can share with all of them, so we don’t have to maintain separate lists)
3) my family birthdays (again sharable)

4) my work calendar (subscribed via the Oracle Calendar iCAL feed)

5) US Holidays (a public calendar provided by Google — there are holidays for numerous nations)

6) Phases of the Moon (another Google public calendar)

The Google Calendar interface is pretty slick, but you can now use Thunderbird as a rich calendar client by using Lightning. So I decided to give it a try. After upgrading to the current alpha version of Thunderbird (which finally has a visual notification popup for Linux) and installing the necessary extensions, I was able to easily work with my Google Calendar calendars (1-3 above) though some quick tests easily demonstrated that this is still early alpha technology.

When I tried to subscribe to my work calendar, I had significantly less success.  First, only meetings that I scheduled would show up — and those are the meetings that I generally don’t need reminders for.  Second, having the work calendar active seemed to greatly affect the stability of the application — other calendars would regularly disappear only to reappear by deactivating all the calendars and then reactivating them.

Despite my disappointment with using Thunderbird, I am very impressed with Google Calendar and will continue to expand my use of the application.  Thanks, Google!