So, I did it. Today I purchased the FON social router. I figure, if nothing else, I get a cheap WRT54GL router. If it works out to be a cool service then that's great.

I've been using Google Calendar for a while now and there are a couple of problems that I have noticed and a couple that friends have pointed out.

Event Parser

Generally, Google has yet again made a great product. The new event parser works really well. If you don't know, it basically allows you to type in events the way that you think about them (e.g. " ") and then it parses those into the fields where they go. This cuts the time of adding events down to a few seconds instead of a minute. Very handy.

Public Calendars

Another thing that they got right is public calendars. There are currently thousands of public calendars that you can add into your Google calendar like a calendar of holidays. But you can also subscribe to iCalendar feeds (as I have demonstrated icalendar importing of Drupal events in the past). This is the kind of thing that will take a geeky technology (iCalendar) and hopefully make it easy enough for "my mom" to use. She can just use the "search" box for the term in an iCalendar feed and there she has it without knowing about iCalendar protocol at all.

Shared Calendars

In that same vein, you can have multiple calendars in your google calendar - e.g. work and personal - and share your calendar with different permission levels. So, the wife can see and edit my personal calendar but not my work calendar. You could allow coworkers to view (bot not edit) your work calendar and only let your coworker friend see your personal calendar as well. Pretty cool.

At work I have to use ASP.NET. As if that weren't bad enough, I have decided to use Visual Web Developer to help me because I don't want to pollute my limited PHP parts of my brain with .NET. VWD sucks. Here are my favorite reasons why it sucks. (I've only been using it for a few weeks - more may come)

1. If you want to show the data from a table on a screen you can just drag/drop the table to the page, edit some things in some wizards and it works. Great! Now, the formatting of the columns is all stupid, but I'm sure the developers said "Well, how should we know how to format the columns". How about using the data type from the datasource? VWD is aware of that because it throws in things like Type="Int32" to some of the items that it magically inserts for me. So when it sees a "money" datatype, why not format that puppy as a freaking currency string.
2. If you want to format a BoundField you use a DataFormatString to set it. That's fine and well documented. Only problem is, that it doesn't work. Seems that within the first few months of public release, many other people have stumbled upon this problem. So, not only do I have to set the format string I want to use, but I have to set HTMLEncoding to false. It's like walking into a Chipotle, ordering a veggie burrito with black beans, and being asked if you want a hot dog. Dumb.