paul's dashboard

paul started following the problem "TiVo Transfer won't transfer files: Stuck on 'waiting'" in Roxio.

A comment on the update "A fork in the road (An important announcement about I want Sandy)" in I want Sandy:

hold me, I'm scared . . .

wonder if this commenter has a stockpile of notepads and calendars to survive the coming days of a world without Web 2.0 services . . . . surprised he used so many words to express what was pretty much a grunt. I wonder if he can spell schadenfreude since he expresses it so well.

Time to stop following this thread. The wake is over, Sandy has been laid to rest, and whatever happens will happen without a lot of us taking another chance, I expect. – paul, on November 26, 2008 20:45

paul made a comment on "A fork in the road (An important announcement about I want Sandy)", but it was removed. see the change log

A comment on the update "A fork in the road (An important announcement about I want Sandy)" in I want Sandy:

You allude to a transition, but we have no idea if there is one planned or what will be available. It's weak to complain that it is costing Rael money when there has never been any move to make it pay its way.

If there are some plans for a transition or re-launch of the service, it would be useful to mention that as part of the announcement. But my guess is there are no such plans.

You have to remember that you can't buy this kind of engagement with a service: if it happens, you would do well not to screw it up. One person's passionate outburst is someone else's hysterical rant, after all. – paul, on November 26, 2008 03:55

paul replied on November 25, 2008 22:21 to the update "A fork in the road (An important announcement about I want Sandy)" in I want Sandy:

It gets worse the more I hear. There may be an upgrade or migration path but not until after the lights-out date is announced, allowing users of all stripes just one week to figure out what to do next, in a post-Sandy world?

If I was Twitter, I would be having some buyer's remorse right about now. Buying a big sack of bad karma in the form of alienated former customers is probably not what they had in mind. I just dropped my account there as I never use it and I am going to take a hard look at free services from here on out. If you don't owe them anything, nor do they owe you. A hard lesson, but worth learning.

paul replied on November 25, 2008 18:02 to the update "A fork in the road (An important announcement about I want Sandy)" in I want Sandy:

I just cancelled my Sandy account, as I don't want to get any more Daily Digests. No sense in relying on that anymore.

A comment on the update "A fork in the road (An important announcement about I want Sandy)" in I want Sandy:

Yeah, that about sums it up. Are all the decisionmakers in this completely tone-deaf? – paul, on November 25, 2008 16:57

paul replied on November 25, 2008 16:44 to the update "A fork in the road (An important announcement about I want Sandy)" in I want Sandy:

This information might have been something that Sandy could have sent out. I have only heard about this from other sites who may or may not be chuckling about the demise of One More Big Idea.

Maybe Sandy can start sending reminders to users who aren't immersed in the blogosphere?

paul reported a problem in I want Sandy on July 27, 2008 06:23:

Sandy's parser reads HTML stylings as asterisks and makes lists where none are needed.

Sandy seems to misread a quote mark as a star and then makes a list from the result.

I have sent emails to my tireless assistant and sometimes they come across (via the magic of copy and paste) as HTML with embedded quote marks. When I get them back from Sandy, the quotes have been turned in asterisks (*s) and then the items become list items, rather than just text.

Example (with redacted details):
Context: remember collect golden ticket from *East Main street Concrete, WA *Sunday @errand

The stuff between the *s was an HTML link (if I paste it as plain text, I think it would work as expected).

paul replied on July 03, 2008 22:22 to the question "Can i send sandy an ics file to make an appointment?" in I want Sandy:

Huh. This used to work and now I get just one event, instead of the 8 in the ics file. [yuugh]

If any of Sandy's staff are about, here's the file I sent.

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
X-WR-CALNAME:Untitled
PRODID:-//Apple Computer\, Inc//iCal 2.0//EN
X-WR-RELCALID:0BE74E07-9004-4BA1-B06E-06C70BC751CC
X-WR-TIMEZONE:US/Pacific
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:US/Pacific
LAST-MODIFIED:20080703T221626Z
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
DTSTART:20080309T100000
TZOFFSETTO:-0700
TZOFFSETFROM:+0000
TZNAME:PDT
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
DTSTART:20081102T020000
TZOFFSETTO:-0800
TZOFFSETFROM:-0700
TZNAME:PST
END:STANDARD
END:VTIMEZONE
BEGIN:VEVENT
DURATION:PT2H15M
LOCATION:Laurelhurst
DTSTAMP:20080703T221548Z
UID:4E9B1D46-0F5C-4ABA-BF0E-73E693990268
SEQUENCE:4
DTSTART;TZID=US/Pacific:20080707T183000
SUMMARY:Summer baseball
RRULE:FREQ=WEEKLY;INTERVAL=1;UNTIL=20080801T065959Z;BYDAY=MO,TH;WKST=SU
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

paul replied on February 28, 2008 15:32 to the discussion "NEW! Google Calendar Gadget" in I want Sandy:

Yay, Kevin1 gets a gold star. Works like a thing-that-works-really-well.

paul marked one of kevin1's replies in I want Sandy as useful. kevin1 replied to the discussion "NEW! Google Calendar Gadget".

paul started following the problem "Google Calendar Gadget suddenly stopped working" in Google.

paul replied on February 26, 2008 15:47 to the discussion "NEW! Google Calendar Gadget" in I want Sandy:

Well, the copy of the gadget has gone buh-bye, it seems.

I'm not going to say I'm glad you're seeing the same problem, but it's good to know it's not just me.

Are there different ways to drop things into the calendar? For instance the weather forecast gadget works without fail. But I have the NetFlix release calendar and it seems to suffer Sandy's problem as well.

And I also have been accusations of being on a slow link (as if). Maybe it's time to drop into the Google area of GetSatisfaction ;-) Oh, I see you're ahead of me there.

paul replied on February 26, 2008 04:51 to the discussion "NEW! Google Calendar Gadget" in I want Sandy:

(for some reason, I keep getting signed in and out, so I can't edit my reply above. I have to add a new one.)

Anyway, for reasons I can't quite make out, I imported the gcal-gadget file and now I do once again have Sandy's perky little face on my calendar and can get my agenda for any day. Obviously, this won't update so it's not all that useful. Any idea why the gadget stopped working for me? And how to get it back?

paul replied on February 26, 2008 03:11 to the question "How does Sandy make it easier for me to schedule things on Google calendar?" in I want Sandy:

well, if you can send an iCal/ics file to Sandy and she can parse it for events and appointments (as seems to be working), that's pretty close to integration if you subscribe to your Sandy calendar in gCalendar. The bit I am hoping for is not to have to make changes in multiple places, but to be able to. So if I update the calendar in iCal I can send that to Sandy, and the changes are incorporated. Likewise, I send her an update (forget #2, or remind me tomorrow) and those changes are visible everywhere I look.

Is that what's meant by synchronization in this thread?

paul replied on February 26, 2008 03:00 to the discussion "NEW! Google Calendar Gadget" in I want Sandy:

for some reason, my Sandy calendar has no events. It used to have my daily digest but now? blank. I just removed and re-installed/added it and it's still making me feel like I am missing something.

help?

paul replied on February 26, 2008 02:42 to the question "Can i send sandy an ics file to make an appointment?" in I want Sandy:

you can do this? I have a lot of problems getting ics files from Sandy into google's calendar. If this works, i'll be, ahem, very satisfied.

OK, it almost works. I get the repeating events with an end date but the time gets missed. The reminder time is in there, so that's close enough. Seems like an extra step but it's covers a lot of ground.

So the ics files I get from Sandy I can't use in google calendar but these will let me feed Sandy with the right information and she can put it on the Google calendar. But at the moment, I am not seeing any event from I Want Sandy in the Google. I'll poke around in here and see what I missed.

paul replied on February 24, 2008 05:55 to the idea "I want recurring reminders" in I want Sandy:

What I ended up doing is opening the event as Sandy stores it and downloading the calendar to iCal, where I can apply an end date and add a location (two hints/RFEs for later releases there). Not sure how to sync it back up to Sandy's magic book, though.

paul replied on February 24, 2008 05:34 to the idea "pgp" in I want Sandy:

I was thinking the same thing as an option: right now, I'd be more please if Sandy didn't remember my key each as it if it was a todo item ;-)

So yes, adding support for public keys would be good: learning to ignore them would be better for now.