Recently active topics in I want Sandy

Hi there. Seems to be some serious JavaScript errors when trying to delete recurring reminders. The "are you sure" page pops up which I have to confirm again the deletion. That in itself is kind of a pain since Sandy's performance hasn't been that great lately, i.e. server overload possibly? So now we're having to confirm the deletion twice instead of just one.

Image follows:

Because I don't understand what's going on here, I'm just going to reproduce my email and Sandy's response verbatim. Here's what I sent (yes, it's one long email; the long separator lines mark the beginning and end of my email and of Sandy's response):

--------------------------------------------
r Faculty meeting @meeting @campus 12-1:30pm +
* September 3, 2008
* October 8, 2008
* November 5, 2008
* December 3, 2008

r Faculty meeting in Olin 1-2:30 pm on January 8, 2009 @meeting @campus

r Academic Council meeting 4-5:30 pm @"academic council" @meeting @campus +
* September 17, 2008
* October 22, 2008
* November 12, 2008

r Academic Council meeting PDR 4-5:30 pm @"academic council" @meeting @campus December 10, 2008 5:30-7:30 p.m.
--------------------------------------------

And here was Sandy's response:

--------------------------------------------
#1
Wed, 9/3 Faculty meeting
* email and sms reminders at 8:00am
* tagged with campus and meeting

#2
Wed, 10/8 Faculty meeting
* email and sms reminders at 8:00am
* tagged with campus and meeting

#3
Wed, 11/5 Faculty meeting
* email and sms reminders at 8:00am
* tagged with campus and meeting

#4
Wed, 12/3 Faculty meeting
* email and sms reminders at 8:00am
* tagged with campus and meeting

#5
Thu, 1/8/2009 1:00 - 2:30pm Faculty meeting in Olin
* email and sms reminders at 12:45pm
* tagged with campus and meeting

#6
Wed, 9/17 Academic Council meeting
* email and sms reminders at 8:00am
* tagged with academic council, campus, and meeting

#7
Wed, 10/22 Academic Council meeting
* email and sms reminders at 8:00am
* tagged with academic council, campus, and meeting

#8
Wed, 11/12 Academic Council meeting
* email and sms reminders at 8:00am
* tagged with academic council, campus, and meeting

#9
Wed, 12/10 4:00 - 5:30pm Academic Council meeting PDR 5:30-7:30 p.m.
* email and sms reminders at 3:45pm
* tagged with academic council, campus, and meeting

#10
Wed, 9/17 5:30pm - Tue, 9/16 7:30pm Academic Council meeting PDR
* email and sms reminders at 5:15pm
* tagged with academic council, campus, and meeting

--------------------------------------------

As you can see, there was a mistake in what i sent -- the very last item had two times, which confused Sandy for obvious reasons (see items #9 and #10). But otherwise, what did I do wrong? Let's take a quick look:

I wanted Sandy to add nine items to my calendar.

The first component of my email was a list. It was supposed to add four items titled "Faculty meeting" to my calendar, each one scheduled for 12pm-1:30 pm, tagged with "meeting" and "campus" -- that part was in the line introducing the list -- and then the bulleted list included four dates. Like so:
r Faculty meeting @meeting @campus 12-1:30pm +
* September 3, 2008
* October 8, 2008
* November 5, 2008
* December 3, 2008

As you can see from my copy of Sandy's reply, Sandy got the basic structure right -- four appointments, with correct title, tags, and dates right -- but ignored the time, so I got four all-day appointments on the appropriate dates (#1-#4 above).

In formulating my email, I thought I was following the instructions given here:
http://iwantsandy.com/help/lists#crea...

What did I miss?

The second component of my email was a single-line appointment command, which worked fine.
I wrote:
r Faculty meeting in Olin 1-2:30 pm on January 8, 2009 @meeting @campus

And Sandy gave me:
Thu, 1/8/2009 1:00 - 2:30pm Faculty meeting in Olin
* email and sms reminders at 12:45pm
* tagged with campus and meeting

That's #5 above. No problem there.

The third component of my email was another list, similar to the first. It was supposed to create three appointments, all called "Academic Council meeting and tagged with "academic council," "meeting," and "campus," set for 4 pm to 5:30 pm, on five different dates. Here's what I wrote:
r Academic Council meeting 4-5:30 pm @"academic council" @meeting @campus +
* September 17, 2008
* October 22, 2008
* November 12, 2008
The first line specified a title, a time, and tags, and the following three lines specified dates. Sandy replied, again, by creating three all-day appointments, titling, tagging, and dating them correctly but ignoring the times. That's #6 through #8 above.

And then finally, there was one last line, the one with a mistake on my part:
r Academic Council meeting PDR 4-5:30 pm @"academic council" @meeting @campus December 10, 2008 5:30-7:30 p.m.
(As you can probably guess, I wanted to create an appointment just like the ones on the list above, but at a different time. So I copied it from the list above, and meant to delete the first time reference, but I forgot. Oops.)
Based on this, Sandy created two appointments, as follows:
#9
Wed, 12/10 4:00 - 5:30pm Academic Council meeting PDR 5:30-7:30 p.m.
* email and sms reminders at 3:45pm
* tagged with academic council, campus, and meeting

and

#10
Wed, 9/17 5:30pm - Tue, 9/16 7:30pm Academic Council meeting PDR
* email and sms reminders at 5:15pm
* tagged with academic council, campus, and meeting

The first of the two (#9) is just what one would expect, similar to #5 above. The second seems like a strange way to interpret my mistake, but whatever.

Anyhow, I've had lots of problems with Sandy over the past few months. I use Sandy almost exclusively for to-do's and appointments, most of which are tied to specific times and dates. About 70% of the time she seems to understand just what I want. But other times she makes unpredictable mistakes, like -- in this example -- simply ignoring the times I requested and making my appointments into all-day appointments. Sometimes I'll supply a date and she'll interpret the date as part of the appointment title, and schedule the appointment for tomorrow.

I sometimes send appointments or other information to Sandy via Twitter (not lists; just one at a time) and have similar problems crop up at more or less the same rate.

I can supply other examples as they come up in the future, but so far I have seen no real response from employees of the company to previous reports of similar problems posted to this forum by myself and others. If someone from the company gets back to me and tells me that my posting additional information would be helpful and that the company would act on it somehow, I would be happy to take the trouble.

In the meanwhile, though, I'm not going to use Sandy for anything too important. Correcting seven appointments one at a time, as indicated above, takes a lot of time. Once Sandy ends up costing me time rather than saving me time, it's not worth it.

Sorry for such a long post, but I wanted to be thorough.

Nathan

not getting texts or emails. Help... I love Sandy!

I've tried changing the default time on the settings page with no success. Please help.

Stop the "Time for a tweet?" message! I set up Twitter, follow Sandy and she follows me, and I get my messages without any problem. But every time I log in, I get this message:

"Time for a tweet? Twitter private text/SMS messages to me from your cellphone or instant message me from your desktop. Have reminder tweets delivered through Twitter to your mobile, desktop, or anywhere else you're tweet-able! Click here to introduce your Twitter self to the Twitter me."

How can I make this stop?