Sync Schmink

In a previous life I was a FORTRAN jock. Yes, it's supposed to be spelled in all capital letters.

Round about the mid '80's the big deal in the number crunching world was the so-called device independent graphics library. This meant that you could display your graph on a graphics terminal, work out all the kinks, and then re-run your program to print on a pen plotter, all without having to re-write, let alone re-compile, your program.

My boss at the time (who was Bard from everywhere he'd ever been) never passed up the opportunity to ask about the blackboard driver, pointing out that until these libraries could display on a blackboard they weren't truly device independent.

The blackboard driver popped onto my stack — er — popped into my brain — this morning as I entered an appointment on the calendar hanging in the kitchen. It was my third entry of this appointment in as many devices.

I am stuck in this duplicate entry purgatory because of the twin sins of being in a mixed marriage (my wife is not a geek) and of not running a Microsoft™ operating system on my computer. Well, and my employer doesn't use Exchange™.

So I write things down on the wall calendar, and in my PDA, and finally in my corporate calendar. Scheduling the dentist is almost as unpleasant as going to the dentist. By the way, it's on Monday, the 21st.