CalDAV, you wicked, wicked mistress

I thought I had it all figured out. Problem solved. Games over. I win.

For as long as we have had OS X in the newsroom at work, I have struggled with how to implement the awesome power of iCal and its support of CalDAV — the open-source calendar protocol that iCal Server uses. ICal Server itself was a bit out of the question, the company seemed to be rather attached to its three Windows-based servers, and did not want to spend thousands of dollars just so I could have calendars that weren’t text files.

Then Google, in all their infinite wisdom and glory, opened up Google Calendar to CalDAV. Rejoice! Answer at hand. But no. You see, when you have an account with Google Calendar, you have one calendar. You can create more, but Google does some backend trickery here, and hosts the calendar with an impossibly long string of characters.

What this all boils down to is, if I want to subscribe to a group of ten calendars I’ve created in Google Calendar, I have to make a “group” in iCal for each and every one. And that, as the screenshot to your left will show you, can get very tedious.

I hope Google will fix this one day. One day. For now, I will continue to work on getting this up and running.

Hours

The news business is not for those whose sole aspiration is a quiet cubicle or a 9-5 job.

In fact, there may be a total of three people here at the paper that come in at the same time from day to day. Until a few weeks ago, the news editor would come in at 4 a.m. And work until noon, followed (on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday) by me working 6-2, the community and opinion editors and the editor-in-chief working 6:30-2:30, the features and business editors and the day cops reporter working 7-3, the courts reporter and managing editor working 8-4, and any reporters without municipal meetings that day would come in from 10 to 6. Reporters with a meeting work 2-10, and the night city editor comes in from 4 to midnight.

Do not web ask about the sports department, I have no clue what they do.

Now, with the printing change some of those times have altered, but it largely remains that none of us ever work 9-5.

Sometimes I wish I could have a 9-5 job. I would wake at 6, exercise, shower and eat a real breakfast (my defacto morning meal is a large glass of orange juice. Simply Orange, mind you, because Donald Sutherland said I should) while looking over the morning paper, or at least Times.app, my news-feed RSS reader.

But that whole business of getting home at 5 seems rather icky. I mean, where’s the day gone, old boy? Time for dinner! Sun is setting!

No thank you. Maybe I am stuck in a foreverland of Academia (true, my hopes-and-dreams of becoming a college professor and never being too far from a tweed jacket have not yet been dashed), but I will gladly reveille at 5 if it affords me the prospect of getting out of work a mere two hours after lunch, which I sometimes do not take, and sometimes take at 11. Because, honestly, I have been up since five, and a glass of Simplyunfooledaroundwith goes only so far).

For, as I sit here basking in the short time between deadline and when tomorrow’s dummies appear, my stomach seems to remind me Mr. Sutherland is not all he is cracked up to be.