Yes, it’s true, I’ve got an iPhone 3G. But wait, “You’re unemployed,” you say! I’ve got several reasons for switching to an iPhone from my business Treo 700w. The first is, I’m no longer with the company. That alone means I need to purchase a new phone and choose a provider. Secondly, fifty percent of my calls were to my family, who uses AT&T as their provider. Thirdly, I can’t use a Treo to synchronize my personal email, calendars, and contacts to my Mac or to the cloud. Fourthly, I want a new iPod. And lastly, I can pay for it. It’s called savings.
“But what about your plan to get to Japan on missions within that two year contract period?”
It’s call porting. I can port my father’s number to this cell and he can continue the contract with his number, in my name. No problem by me, after all, I trust him to pay bills on time. Secondly, unlike Verizon, AT&T does use sim cards. Theoretically, I could get a Japanese sim card and switch providers with a nominal cancellation fee, but retain use of the hardware for which I’ve paid. Which reminds me, I ordered white, not black! I need to call for some compensation for that inconvenience.
Speaking of inconvenience, this post is mostly to articulate my issues with iCal.
I have no problem manually transferring my contacts from an Exchange 2000 database into Address Book. I tried CSV imports and exports, but Address Book just doesn’t like the format Outlook 2007 puts the information in. I have patience and enough time to type numbers, not a problem. But what is a problem is subscribing to multiple calenders from Google in iCal. iCal protests my subscription to both US Holidays and Japanese Holidays! It complains that I’ve already subscribed to that calendar, and refuses to add it.
To avoid complications, I thought I’d dig through Apple’s catalog of calendars and add both calendars there. At one point I had one Google subscription, and two Apple subscriptions, and iCal had no problem. It’s when I attempt to have two Google subscriptions that there’s an issue. The biggest difference between the two repositories is that Apple uses the webcal protocol, while Google chooses to implement subscriptions over http.
Aside from dropping to a bash terminal and attempting to peruse the sqlite3 back-end of iCal’s data stores, I’m at a loss. Has anyone else suffered so?
