An issue I’ve long had is finding an easy way of coming events across all my varied systems. Actually the big issue is getting round to resolving it effectively :-) Mostly I keep track of things in my head, afterall my social calendar tends to be fairly light though occasionally populated with periods of intense activity. In my old job on vendor side, I had an iphone and laptop that went with me everywhere which made keeping track of things a little easier. Outlook on the work machine had the ability to maintain multiple calendars ie one for work and one for personal and I could sync it with the iphone.

However I changed jobs and have been back to relying on my head. Since mum died, it’s been hard to remember things, and stuff falls out of my head all the time ie I’m very forgetful at the moment. I no longer have a work laptop, nor access to work stuff and calendars outside of the physical office. This was intentional though it hurts a little :) At work, I have a desktop machine running XP, plus my Transformer Prime hybrid laptop/tablet running Android. At home I have a Mac Pro running MacOS and an Android phone.

For many years on XP, I’ve been using a calendar called Rainlendar, as it sits on the desktop barely visible unless needed. That was great for estimating dates and checking weeks ahead. I’ve since discovered there’s a mac version and have it installed at home too. I finally set up syncing for google’s calendar for my android devices but to feed that into Rainlendar required spending actual money (about AUD$12) and buying the licensed version. That license covers personal use on both my machines.

There’s probably many ways of doing all this but this has worked for me, and once I finally pulled my finger out and tried setting it up, it proved to be easy and took less than 20 minutes. A couple of hiccups as I’d had syncing turned off on the phone to conserve battery life but easily resolved. I can now enter info on any device and get reminders via any device. I’ve got one of the home screens on my phone devoted entirely to displaying the calendar.

All good so far :-)