My wife and I are in constant struggle to keep track of each other's schedules.  We both have to make family plans, appointments, doctor visits, etc. and so it is important for us to know each other's schedule.  In the past we would go through a series of phone calls while someone is waiting on us to schedule an appointment and it was a pain in the butt.  I was growing sick and tired of this process and I needed to figure out a way to keep our calendars in sync.

The first problem was getting my wife to switch from using a paper based system of keeping her appointments to an electronic one.  One of her issues was being able to enter her appointments on her mobile phone.  So I solved that by buying her an iPhone that she could use to enter her appointments when she is on the go.  I went with the iPhone because its the greatest invention during my lifetime (yes, I'm a fan) as well as it has a more simple interface to entering calendar items than a Windows Mobile calendar interface.  There are a lot less fields that are available to work with which means a simpiler interface.  She is having a hard time with the onscreen keyboard so it may not be a keeper for her but at least she is now using her iPhone to enter appointments on the go and she has gone to an electronic system.

The next issue was the fact that my wife uses iCal on her MacBook and I use Outlook/Exchange on a tablet PC running Vista.  I needed to be able to show her calendar details within Outlook and she needed to see my calendar details within iCal. 

The main piece of glue for all this is Plaxo.

Plaxo has what they call connectors within anyone's account which allows you to sync your calendar, address book information, and your tasks between many different PIM applications.  I have written about the service before when I was trying to sync my tasks with my iPhone.

Here are the steps I took for my wife's calendar data to be available for me:

1. Create a Plaxo account for my wife
2. Create a Yahoo! connection point within Plaxo which sync's her Yahoo! address book and calendar with Plaxo
3. Download the Plaxo Mac syncing program which syncs data within the MacBook's iCal and Address Book applications with Plaxo
4. Create a Google account for my wife
5. Create a Google connection point within Plaxo which sync's her Google Calendar with Plaxo

With those steps above my wife's PIM information is now synced between her Mac, Yahoo!, and Google accounts with Plaxo.  She can add, edit, or delete any information from within any of those applications and they will all be in sync.  Since she syncs her iPhone with her Mac, her mobile phone will be synced as well.  She can add, edit, or delete appointments on her iPhone which will sync with her Mac, which will in turn sync with Plaxo and all of the connectors.

Here are the steps I took for my calendar data to be available for my wife:

1. I already had a Plaxo account so I logged in
2. I downloaded the Outlook connector add-in which will sync my Exchange information with Plaxo through my Outlook client
3. I added a Google connector so that my Google calendar is synced with Plaxo

Now my calendar data and my wife's calendar data is available and synced with Google.  The next step is for both of us to consume it.  I wanted to have all the calendar data and the details available to both my wife and I and vice versa.  There are options available here so that you can only show free/busy information but I thought it would be valuable for us to see details of our calendar data so I went with that route.

Google allows you to expose your Google calendar via a cryptic iCalendar file over an HTTP address.  This is good because both iCal on the Mac and Outlook 2007 on Vista can consume the iCalendar format and subscribe to data stream.  This is updated when your calendar changes on Google.  In order to see the cryptic iCalendar data path, you must log onto your Google account, click on Manage Calendars, click on the name of your calendar, go to the Private Address section, and click on the ICAL button.  You can then jott down the address that Google gives you there.

In order to subscribe to my wife's calendar data stream, I can go into Outlook 2007, click on Tools->Account Settings, click on Internet Calendars, click on New, enter the address of the calendar data stream, and click Add.  Voila, my wife's calendar was listed in my Outlook available calendars.  I can then use the calendar overlay to help me schedule meetings, etc.

In order to have my wife subscribe to my calendar data stream, I went into iCal, click on the Calendar->Subscribe menu item, enter the address of my calendar data stream, and click Add.  My calendar data shows up in my wife's iCal in a seperate color.  She can now run my life....wait a sec, what have I done.

So I ordered and recieved a new Dell 30" monitor and completed my triple headed monster as seen here.  I am really excited about having this much screen real estate.  I have been working with 2 monitors for quite some time and I have been wanting this set-up for a while.  Since I am now a lot less mobile, I thought that now would be a great time to do this now.  It will allow me to be a lot more productive.

The problem was trying to find a video card that supported a dual link DVI cable and resolution that the Dell monitor required.  My motherboard only had one PCI-Express card slot and my current video card that I was using was a Radeon X700.  I found a video card that supported Radeon X1550 technology and supported Vista.  This worked well because I was able to just plug in the card and the Radeon drivers that I already installed for my PCI-Express card worked.  I have to go and watch my porn write code in all it's glory.

I have taken on a new main client and I am now working from home almost full time.  I was using my Lenovo X60 as my main development machine.  It has kept up nicely but the power of my desktop is just sitting there.  I have decided to make my desktop machine, my main development machine.  It was not before because I was always on the run.  Since I am mostly at home during the day when I am not meeting with other clients, I can afford to move my development work to my main desktop machine and keep my files in sync.  I will document what tools I plan on using to make that happen at some point.

I have also been experiencing a lot of issues when undocking and docking my tablet because of Vista.  I have to restart my machine if I want to listen to iTunes because all of my music is on an external drive that Vista can not reconnect to after I redock.  This is a pain in the butt and I plan on moving my iTunes library over to my main machine.

Also, I will be able to enjoy a three monitor setup for the first time in a while.  I already have 2 identical 20" Dell monitors and I plan on adding a third 30" to my desktop machine.  I could not of done this will my tablet and it will be very nice.

If my desktop is not as fast and powerful as I would like it to be (it is about 2 years old), I am going to get a new desktop machine.  I am either going to build one myself (like Scott, Dustin, and Miguel) or buy a new 8-core Mac Pro.  I would like to go with the Mac off the bat but they are quite expensive and I am unsure if I will be able to use all of the tools I need to use in virtualization mode on the Mac.  I am going to test this first on my wife's Mac to see if it is plausible.  I need to be able to run IIS, Visual Studio, SVN Tourtoise, and SQL Server.  I am kinda wishin that my current desktop does not work out :)