Kim Flournoy

(Can’t believe I spelled that right on the first try…)

My jaw dropped while reading these excerpts from the Ayn Rand fan dating site user profiles. Although I must admit that I love the description “short, stark, and mansome”…

[from Salon.com]

Missouri still hasn’t finalized their presidential results yet. I know it doesn’t matter to the outcome, and yes of course they should take as much time as they need to get it right, especially for a race this close. But it still seems very odd…

I doubt he’s going to change anyone’s mind, but it’s nice to see this issue still getting airtime outside of San Francisco:

I understand his reason for not voting in presidential or other big races (like mayor or governor), but I can’t believe that there’s never a local race or proposition on his ballot that he wouldn’t be covering on his show but could still vote for or against - he could leave the more important races blank if necessary. It just kind of seems like a cop-out to me.

How Keith Olbermann Stays Objective (No, Really)

Imagine if Al Bundy, while going through an acrimonious divorce from Peg, decided to conduct a series of bitter Photoshop tutorials - you’d have something akin to “You Suck at Photoshop”.

This morning I learned to use paths, and I feel great about my marriage!

For the first time in my life, I voted for a Democrat for President. About time they ran someone that was worthy of my vote.

(Of course, for all of those presidential elections I safely resided in a non-swing state, so I had the luxury of voting with my principles instead of worrying about the lesser of two evils…)

It’s a good thing that I have an extra hour in the day today, because I spent that entire hour trying to figure out why all my calendar items were off this morning. Items on my Palm’s calendar were moved an hour earlier with a notation. For example, my 5pm book group meeting today was in my Palm as 4:00pm (5:00pm PST). Being an hour early isn’t as horrifying as it would (will) be when Daylight Saving time starts and I’m suddenly an hour late for everything.

There only appears to be a problem when creating calendar items in iCal and then synchronizing. For items created on the Palm device, you can change the Calendar application preferences and uncheck “New events use time zones”. But I create calendar items using both methods, and I need to know that my calendar and alerts are totally reliable.

After some trial and error, and sorting through numerous discussion threads, I figured out that there were multiple problems involved:

• iCal does allow for “floating” time zones, which theoretically don’t have any time zone information attached. However, there is not a way to set the default time zone for new events as “floating” (or anything else) so you’d need to change this manually for each new (and preexisting) event.
• Even if an event is set at “floating” in iCal, when synchronized with the Palm’s calendar, the Palm sets a time zone based (I think) on the synchronizing computer’s time zone. So even if you’ve set items as “floating” in iCal, the Palm still adds a time zone to them. I’m not sure which application’s fault this is, although I exported a calendar from iCal to a text editor and it seemed to correctly remove the time zone information for “floating” events, so I’m suspecting it’s Palm’s problem.
• Palm’s date and time server for the Centro does not appear to understand Daylight Saving Time, so while the time automatically updated last night, the device still thinks we are in PDT and not PST.

I read a few blog posts which advocated manually editing your iCal text files (which seems risky and annoying if you have to do it twice a year), or turning off automatic time updating for the device entirely (frustrating if you travel or rely on your phone for correct time). There was a Palm update last year for older devices to alert them to the new DST rules, but according to Palm newer devices including the Centro did not require this update (and I would hope not, since the DST rules changed last year, and I bought this phone just a few months ago), and I don’t think that would have addressed this anyway.

I finally discovered that the fix (at least for me) was to change the Palm’s Date and Time preferences from automatically setting “Date, time and time zone” to just “Date and time”.

So now my phone doesn’t care what time zone it’s in - I’ll need to check it the next time we travel across time zones to make sure it’s not messing things up again, but this seems to correct the issue for now. Based on this discussion thread, I’m also going to be very cautious about changing my laptop’s time zone when we travel - maybe I’ll just leave it alone.