Voicemail Notification

At work, I am not allowed to carry a cell phone on me. This does not bother me in the slightest. In my locker at work, where I keep my cell phone while working, I do not get cell phone coverage. No problem, if I am not there to answer it, the phone may as well be off.

So every evening, at the end of the shift, I take my cell phone out of my locker, turn it on, and walk to the bus station. The walk is about a ten minute walk. Often I keep my cell phone in my hand, to see if I got any voicemails while I was working.

I have never received a voicemail notification on my short walk to the bus ride. Twice, however, I have received notification after I get home from work. This is after the phone has been on for over *an hour*. Last night I got off work at 9:40pm. I turned on the cell phone at about 9:45pm. I received notification at about 11:15pm. The voicemail had been left at about 7pm.

How in the world does it take an hour and a half to notify me of a new voicemail?

The solution, I suppose, it to call and check my voicemail on the way to the bus. I should not have to do that, though.

On iCal vs. Palm Desktop

Non-tech readers: Stick through the first few paragraphs. It is worth it.

So I have been using Palm Desktop for over three years now, and it has worked well. A couple of years ago, Apple released iCal, iSync, and Address Book as part of OS X. I was hesitant to switch over. The Apple programs offered some things that Palm Desktop did not offer, but nothing I really *needed*. I had a few user-interface problems with iCal, as well. Palm Desktop worked, and so I continued to use that.

Recently my situation has changed slightly, and so the added features of iSync + iCal make more sense now. Of course, I have three years worth of events in my old datebook (Palm Desktop). Luckily I can export them into vCal format, which iCal imports.

I get the data imported, and notice a few problems. The problems, in order that I notice them:

1) I find that I have lost all of my categories. Simply put, if I went on vacation somewhere, I put the flight information into the datebook, and was able to label it "vacation". The import to iCal keeps the flight information, but loses that it was of type "Vacation". So I will have to go back through and relabel a lot of events, using iCal's system (which, honestly, works a little better, so I do not mind as much).

2) As I go back through the old data, I realize that iCal has also imported all of the US Holidays that I had set up in Palm Desktop. I found a nice online calendar to subscribe to for iCal that lists all of the holidays, though, so all major holidays are repeated. So while I am relabeling old information, I am also deleting all the holidays from the imported data. A minor hassle.

I get through about a year's worth of data (about one third of what I need to go through). This takes me over an hour. Then I start to notice other problems...

3) iCal and Palm Desktop cannot agree on a time format. Palm Desktop uses absolute time, which is to say that it ignores time zones and daylights savings time - if an event starts at 3pm, it starts at 3pm, period. iCal, on the other hand, is smart enough to recognize time zones and daylights savings times. This means that for half of the year, all the old data is off by one hour. A minor annoyance, since I will not be using the old data that much.

And then...

4) I start to realize that some of the holidays are off by one day. Christmas is showing as December 24th. I look closer, and some people's birthdays are off by one day. While this is quite troublesome, I start realizing that not only is it not limited to just birthdays and holidays, it effects all the data, *but is not universal*.

That is right, about half the stuff is a day off, and the other half is not, and there is no rhyme or reason to what is on the wrong day and what is not.

I have no idea what I am going to do now.