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I am not sure if I have mentioned that I love it when I can sync all of my information. I have my work computer, and home computers, my phone address book and calendar, and on top of that I would like to be able to view them all if I have to access them on the web somewhere without any of those devices. It can be hard to find ways to make everything play nicely together when A) they are all different operating systems, and B) they are different types of devices. I was trying to explain how I had all of this rigged up to Mario and even I got confused when I was telling him how I got things from one place to another. So I drew him a picture, which needs some explaining I figure.

Blue Arrows To sync my contacts i have up to this point been using Plaxo. I started using it because it was the only thing I could find that would sync my contacts from Outlook to Thunerbird. This was nice because I was able to finally get my contacts on both my home and work computers (Figure A).

Then I started to yearn (yes YEARN) for a way to sync my work calendar to my home computer (and someday to my phone). I could get my calendar up to Plaxo from Outlook which at the time supported only a few source of incoming information. And then maybe about a year and a half ago they changed up the way they did things and started to work towards functioning as a hub of all your information.
What they realized was that people have contacts and calendars that are scattered all over the place. And in order to entice people to use their service they started adding Sync Points. These are different sources that you can sync to and from. These include: Google, Hotmail, Yahoo, Windows Mobile, Mac OS X and a few other mail programs.
In addition they added the ability to aggregate alot of the social networking things that poeple are interested in like Myspace, Twitter, Digg, Pownce as well as the ability to add blogs that you follow and have all the recent stuff show up all together. The idea is that they want to become a hub for all of your information. (some say thats good some say not so much, I guess it just depends on your take)

GREEN ARROWS) At the same time that Plaxo is upgrading their services, Lightning for Thunderbird came along. Plaxo never made a way to sync with the Lightning plug in so I had to figure out another way to get my calendar info up to Plaxo. And like an answer to my prayers (if I prayed) Provider for Google Calendar came along (Figure B). This allows a BIDIRECTIONAL sync with Google, and you can add as many of your Google Calendars to your Thunderbird calendar as you might want. Awesome, I love it it works great! (If you are using the latest version of Ubuntu, Google provider .4 doesn’t work with Lightning .7, and Lightning .8 is not yet working on it.)

So the way that I have this set up in Plaxo, is that my main Google calendar syncs to the main Plaxo Calendar, which then syncs with outlook. For other calendars such as Mario’s and my shared home calendar I have that just syncing to the places that I have Thunderbird installed.

Figure C) And then you add in the Phone, because there is always a phone, especially since I am a phone NERD. My syncing life became a whole lot easier when I got my Blackberry Curve (8320 T-Mobile) last October. I was excited because I could at least access Google Calendar from the BB web browser and it would show me all my calendars in the Agenda View. You could also add a quick event. Just type in, “Meet Joe, tomorrow at 5pm” and it would enter it into your default calendar. However things got a much sweeter when Google introduced apps specifically for the Blackberry which included Google Sync. It puts your google calendars INTO the native blackberry calendar so you don’t have to be connected to the web at all times. Additionally when you add an appointment to your calendar it gets added to your default google calendar. (WHo knows though, if enough people complain maybe it will get changed. When this works it works great.Lately I have been getting an error message that it can’t connect to the server, but I sort of think that is my phones fault, or that I messed with something else on my phone that messed with the way this program works. You can set it so that it automatically syncs your calendars which if you have a limited data plan you may not want to do. You can also set it so that you have to start the sync.

As for Contacts to the phone, the only way I know of so far is to connect to the BB software that you get with the phone that will sync between Outlook and blackberry. Its not perfect, but it works. It just means that from time to time I have to make the effort to sync my contacts with my work machine.

So for the moment, that is how I get my information to look similar in all places. When it works it works really great. Google is doing wonderful things with the calendars and access. Now if they could do something about adding tasks to their calendars I would be even happier. But I really appreciate what they have been up to lately. And since I have a blackberry I especially love that they have made sure that several of their most important apps work well on the phone.

I hope that this process could be streamlined soon. Google can now sync calendars to Outlook but I have not yet tried it. If they could do something with the contacts, and make things work with thunderbird and phone address books then holy shit they would totally rock my world.

If anyone has any suggestions on ways to streamline this I would love to hear them. I am always on the lookout for new and exciting ways to get things done in a more streamlined manner. (Oh and free and or Open Source)

We did it. Well I guess it has been three weeks already. Probably all the people that look at this blog and read this post were there. It was one of the best days that seattle had to offer. It was sunny, and dry all day without being too hot. People from out of town who thought it was going to be all doom and gloom were pleasantly surprised.

Pretty much everything went as planned with only a few minor hitches.

Hitch 1) Shannon called on her way to my moms house and the first thing she said was “I don’t want to stress you out on your big day, but I got a flat tire. We need to save the food I made!” luckily we had some extra people around that were able to bring her to the house and help her change her tire.

We ended up getting to Golden Gardens on time. THere were so many people there helping out that it was sometimes hard to have something for people to do at all times. I really am glad that we had things planned out to some extent, and then just let things happen as they had to. I can’t imagine how hard it would have been to have been a bride who had to have everything exactly a certain way. Of course if that were the case I probably would have hired a wedding planner.

The inside looked so wonderful. We purposefully planned it very simply for two reasons. One We were the ones decorating it and it had to be done in the span of about 3 hours. 2, we wanted to try for a simple elegant (and not debt causing) set up. I think we did a pretty good job.

My mom did all the floral arranging which brings us to Hitch 2) My mom cracked her head open. There was some blood and people were thinking she should go to the hospital because it may need stitches, but she was NOT having any of that. My sister made her a mimosa, and arranged her bangs over the bandage and we were off and running once again. An inspection of the wound the next day revealed that she would live without stitches.

She and Cousin Angela did alot of work in the days before the wedding so that on the wedding day it would be less prep work and more about putting things on tables, and then being able to work on the arch.

Hitch 3) a bridesmaids dress would not zip up. Some creative jeryrigging of another dress to cover the zipper that would not budge ended up working out just fine. Had the other bridesmaides just been wearing the dress by itself it would have been noticable, but my sister was wearing a shrug to minimize that tattooed lady look, and Martha was wearing a leapord print shall to cover a partially unzipped zipper (it did zip up all the way but gave her terrible pancake boob) so Ana’s just looked sort of like it was her touch.

Hitch 4 ) we had to start late. The day was so nice, so I think all of seattle decided that Golden Gardens was really the best place to be. People were having trouble finding parking so the people outside decided to wait until more people showed up. We were all ready on time and the girls ad various other people kept asking me if I was nervvouse, but I was just antsy to get things started. I wanted to get to the party!

Finally we got under way. Walking out to the cerimony area was pretty cool. Mario looked so handsome up at the front, and it was so cool to see so many of my friends and family who had come from far away just to see us be married. My heels were wonderful, except for the part where they kept sinking into the ground. At one point I just took my shoes off because it was either sink into the ground and fall, or go barefoot. Stephanie was so wonderful as our officiant. I am so glad that we went that way instead of asking someone we didn’t know to do it. She was able to put some personal things in that someone else would not have known about. When it came to our vows, I got a little choked up. And then when Mario said his vows, it was like a comedy show at the point where he said, I promise to be patient with you… MY maid of honor started to giggle and then there was a general giggling from the peanut gallery. Har Har Har really funny guys. The mothers did their readings, there was some nice hardcore rap from one of the cars in the parking lot as my mom read hers. All in all it was perfect, warts and all.

The Reception was WOnderful! there was so much food, and it just so great to get to see people, and to get to finally introduce Mario to my people. The cake that my cousin made was just what we wanted. Simple, and modern. And it tasted good too! One of my favorite parts of the reception was the Photobooth. Iwill do a more detailed post later, but it was just so cool. IT worked! Then there was dancing, and people were up having fun, and then unfortunately it got to be 10 pm and we had to start the clean up. Mario and I didn’t end up driving off into the sunset, we just got wrapped up in the clean up. We forgot to do the garter toss and the bouque toss and everything. But everything was cleared out by 11 amazingly enough, and that is when I started to feel little sprinkles of rain. It was perfect. The weather must have gotten the memo that we needed it to stay dry until 11 pm.

Mario and I went home and then we decided we were still hungry so we switched cars and went to jack in the crack (still in our wedding attire). The woman at the window was all congratulating us and stuff, and they gave us a couple of free pieces of cheese cake just to celebrate, which we forgot to eat.

The next day we hung out at our house and some of my friends from college came over for some bbq, and we opened our presents. Getting things off our registry that I know we picked out, but had forgotten is the coolest thing. Ok well its cool even if you hadn’t forgotten about it. Its like the read your mind, when really they read the list that you provided them Of course every thing was apprecieated.

Ok, enough for now, that pretty much covers the wedding day. THe honeymoon I will document another day. I have to go to dinner with my husband.

more cat pictures

Just so you know I am not dead, I just couldn’t pass up this gem…seeing as I myself was a thundercat also I will post the pic when I can get my hands on it