Rich Seymour's stochastic statements.

Taking North Korea off the axis of evil was pretty great news this past week… but check this breaking story:
ATF raids Blackwater armory, seizes automatic weapons

Perhaps a sign that the Feds will start to reign in the beast they’ve created in the soldier of fortune corporations. In case you don’t know, when you leave the marines they come on like campus recruiters to universities, offering great pay and benefits which are hard to pass up. I know a guy who did pass it up, and he still isn’t sure he made the right choice for his future, especially financially.

For those of you wishing to sync Microsoft Outlook and iCal with Google Calendar I wish this were a complete how-to, but it’s more like a yes you can. Plus Jott… Basically this post is a big post on how to get your life organized around some sort of schedule. In as far as scheduling goes, I tend to follow the anti-schedule/no-schedule ideas espoused in the self-help classic The Now Habit. Written by some paratrooper psych-grad or something… It’s a bit wacky, but good. He comes up with the idea to reverse schedule things that you need to do working back from the deadline with a set of mini-deadlines.

But I digress.

The main idea here is that I have one Google Calendar that is my main Calendar for all things. That calendar can be seen by the public here. I can make any item on there private as I see fit. Google Calendar is great because it can actually TXT message my phone with a reminder about a given appointment. This has saved my butt a couple times.

So, face that you want Google Calendar to be your master calendar. Yes it would be nicer if Google was a 501(c)(3) in some cases instead of a public international corporation, but we have to make compromises sometimes.

Once making peace with that decision, sign up for Google calendar account at calendar.google.com, which should be easy if you already have a gmail account.

If you have an Outlook Calendar that you’d like to sync up, it’s relatively easy, just use the Outlook/Google Calendar sync that google has written.

If you have an iCal calendar (Mac OS X), you have 2 options
costly: Spanning Sync $25 one year subscription $65 license

or techie: GCalDaemon Free!

I chose free, but it took some doing to make it work.

Finally, let me introduce you to my new favorite web 2.0 pal: Jott. Jott lets you call their number and leave yourself reminders. It also plugs right into Google Calendar so you can tell your Google Calendar that you have an appointment and it will show up. And if you’ve done all the stuff I’ve done, it will automagically show up in your iCal and Outlook calendar too. Also you can txt Jott too! Also look into 1800 Goog 411 and TellMe for more cool apps you can call toll free.

Fantabulous.

Also, finally, since this is one of the longest posts ever, I should point out that Google Calendar still doesn’t work with Google Gears. Google Gears looks to make a lot of this somewhat obsolete in the future. That is, it would allow you to edit your Google Calendar offline from your PC within your browser. Google Docs does work with Google Gears for sure though.

And you all thought I gave up geeking out.

Just don’t get me started on trying to install the IBM Cell SDK 3.0 on a PS3 without a direct internet connection.

Every person I’ve told that I moved from LA to Houston for the summer has said the same thing. You’re gonna hate it.

What the heck?

I mean seriously. This place ain’t bad, you just have to look around a bit. Admittedly I haven’t tasted the nightlife or the worst of the heat, but I know there’s stuff going on. I just got a great single speed bike for riding around.

A lot of sad/bad things have happened as a consequence of my moving out here, but oh well such is life. My girlfriend Heather is doing well in the SFV.

Let’s see… where else have I been on the internet… I finally got Twitter:
http://twitter.com/rseymour

I’ve also been using Jott a lot to make notes to myself.

I may try to update this blog to have my twitter feed into it somehow.

I’m working at Chevron doing research into speed optimization for the latest chips.

That’s about it.

Oh yes, clark 8 is obviously kind of on hiatus, but I’m writing new stuff and we have 8 new songs needing just vocals and mixing “in the can”. So, hopefully this summer I can record the vox and guitar overdubs here in Houston and send them back to producer/engineer Kasey for mixing.

Final note, all my old tags busted… oh well. It’s hard to maintain a blog with non-default plugins.