Man With One Watch

One of the phrases I used to use at work, which almost no one ever seemed to get, was 'Man with one watch always knows what time it is; man with two watches is never sure". The logic is apparently not as obvious as I liked to think.

My wife and I tended to have the same problem with calendars, as things would get written on my work desk calendar, my work PC electronic calendar, my wife's work desk calendar, her work PC calendar, and our kitchen wall calendar. A recurring complaint (oh, the problems of the idle rich) was that we missed a conflict because event A was written over here and event B was written over there.

I don't have part of that problem now, what with not working, but in the summer I tend to have more events, almost all of them related to my daughter -- pick her up here, bring her there. To that end I've been poking around for a reminder program that I could use to keep track of that stuff. I found two that I like. Both are evaluation copies, so that I can see how they run; both are from a company named Duality Software, which, as it turns out, is a Russian company. I have to admit, this gives me pause --Russian hackers on my PC? -- but it didn't stop me from looking at the software anyway.

The first product is xReminder Pro, which is a basic calendar; you give it the event, time/date, whether it recurs, and any other info. The product will pop up a reminder when needed, as far in advance as you say. It also incorporates a cute little clock with optional chimes or alert sound; the first time it clicked over an hour, and my PC started to kick out Westminster Chimes, I though Cool! After a bit, though, it got a little old, and I changed it to a simple ping!

I would like to integrate events with personal events from my wife's work PC calendar, though, and this doesn't do that, so I looked around some more, and found their Calendarscope product. It incorporates all of the functionality (so far as I can see) of the xReminder Pro product, except the clock, and it can do other things, such as import/export files. You get a display that looks a lot like Outlook's (a little cleaner, I think, but not overwhelmingly so), so the interface is fairly obvious. As with the other, you can categorize the event (appointment, birthday, etc), and you can create your own type of event (I made one called Daughter Event, and another called Library). I'm not sure how easy it will be to do the import/export, but when we have a moment, my wife will create a category Personal event on her work file, and we'll export it (just that, if we can; the whole shooting match, if we can't) and see about getting it into this one, and the reverse.

Oh, and even though Calendarscope doesn't incorporate the clock, they have a freebie called DSClock that sounds like it performs the same function, and says that it integrates with Calendarscope.

So we'll see. No idea how to tackle the wall calendar thing, though. Not only do we have events written all over it, about sixty percent of which relate to my daughter, but we have stickies on there as well. Hmmm....

What time is it?