Driver Safety School

Today (Saturday), instead of staying in bed and sleeping off last nights beverages, I got up at 6:30 to go to traffic school.
And it was totally worth it.
It was four hours long at a local community college with this ex-trooper who had clearly done this dozens, maybe hundreds, of times. He’d memorized all these lines and responses and horror stories and clearly had not actually thought about any of them in years. The few who were paying attention to what he said would ask questions about the inconstencies and he’d just repeat himself or make vague threats of arrest. Plus he mispronounced common words like crazy. I wanted to ask him to say “Internet” just to see how foreign it would seem, but was afraid he’d throw me out of class and I wouldn’t get credit. It really felt like middle school.
Speaking of the Internet, on my way back from class, I found the Internet Chat Room. It’s underneath the Wilson L stop if you ever need to use it.

Parking is worse than driving

Some parts of Chicago are cool.

Other parts of Chicago are so insanely awful that it’s amazing anyone lives here.

One is the weather.

Another is the 400% jump in parking fares.

Seriously, Four…Hundred…Percent…in quarters.

Chicago’s Privatized Parking Meters Are An Epic Failure

Update: Newton’s third law goes into effect – Has The Parking Meter Revolt Begun?

Great Heist Story

Had to share:

The Untold Story of the World’s Biggest Diamond Heist

Getting in Sync (Update)

This is not going well, and the problems are Apple’s.

I’m not used to (or comfortable with) saying that.

First, iPhone does not do IMAP well when connecting to Exchange. Here’s the problem: moving a message (including trashing a message) creates a copy of that message in its destination, but doesn’t delete it from its origin. So if I move or delete a message on my iPhone, it doesn’t get moved or deleted on the server, it gets copied.

Second, you can only have one ActiveSync account. Meaning that because I’m using ActiveSync to sync my calendars with my Gmail account, I can’t use ActiveSync to sync my email with my work account.

I don’t know if these are  totally Apple’s fault, but I know that Apple could make this work correctly.

Because of these problems, I have to totally undo all the work I did and try to figure this out again.

I am really unwilling to use a third party service for this because a major point of doing this was to reduce exposure.

Getting in Sync

I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of information in a lot of places – personal email, personal computer, work email, work computer, iPhone, etc. Today I decided to spend some time figuring out how to connect them all together to keep my information in sync and accurate. Mostly anyway.

While the primary goal was to get all of my data in sync, the secondary goal was to protect my data from loss or exposure.

Here’s what I’ve done:

• Work PC (Outlook) syncs email & work calendar with Work Server (Exchange 2007)
• Work PC (Outlook) syncs work calendar with Google Acct using Google Calendar Sync
• Google Acct syncs all calendars (work, home, holidays) with iPhone using Google Sync for Mobile, (which, stupidly, only does calendars and contacts)
  
• iPhone pulls work email via IMAP and sends work email via work SMTP
• iPhone pulls Gmail via IMAP and sends personal email via Google SMTP
• iPhone syncs with Address Book via iTunes (the only cabled connection)
• Address Book updates iCal’s “Birthdays” calendar
• iCal syncs work, home, and holdiay calendars with Google via CalDAV

The final result is this:

• My personal and work data are visible from home or work and on my iPhone.
• My personal data are on my personal equipment and not my work equipment.
• I can lose my phone without losing any data.
• I can lose my job without losing (or exposing) any personal data or having my data wiped by my employer.
• I can lose my personal computer without losing any data (Time Machine, FTW).
• I can lose my work computer without losing any data (Iron Mountain).

What is lacking

• iPhone does not have my birthdays calendar (so no reminders, sorry everyone).
• Outlook on my work computer has to be running in order for Google to get my work calendar.
• Google contacts does not match Address Book or iPhone.
• I still have to use a cable to sync my iPhone with my Mac when my phone and my computer both have Bluetooth. WTF, Apple!? Fix that.

Google’s contact management still needs some work. I tried sync’ing that at one point and it screwed everything up -  lots of duplicated contacts: Google had their email, iPhone had their phone number, so now I had two contacts. Google has finally given us the ability to merge contacts (and it works well), so I’m going to work on getting that cleaned up. What really needs to happen is that Google updates my contacts automatically when they update their own contact info – like Exchange.

If anyone wants more details about how I accomplished any part of this, post and I’ll fill in the details.