I manage my emails and calendar etc with Google’s Gmail/Calendar/Contacts. But I use Apple devices (MacBook, iPhone, iPad). This works really well, but very occasionally I found I would miss a calendar invitation. The organiser would apologise profusely for missing me off the circulation, and then check and find out that they hadn’t made a mistake at all. I was on the recipient list, but I hadn’t received the email.

It turns out that Apple is trying to be helpful. The sender is sending the invitation from their iCloud calendar, and Apple’s system sees that I have a an iCloud account so it sends it directly to the iCloud calendar application. The event is visible in the Apple Calendar which I, of course, don’t use on my MacBook and don’t have visible on my devices.

The fix is to login to iCloud, go to the Calendar, and delve deep into the preferences to tell Apple to send you invitations by email. See the images below for a step-by-step guide.

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I use an Excel file which has simple settings and can be updated each year. It prints out each month across two A4 pages. There are columns for five people, plus some extra space on the left for general notes and birthdays.

The settings are simple – you choose the year and then add in the names you want to appear at the top of each column. The year setting is used in the first column to work out the day of month and the names appear on each month. There is also some conditional formatting which finds the rows that are weekends and makes them tinted.

To print, you set the printer to output pages 1-25. This allows for a blank top sheet and then the remaining 12 months display in the correct order. You print this out double sided and then hole punch across the middle of the months.

I use some small carabiners to link up the pages. Depending on the thickness of the paper used you may find that you need four holes.

The calendar is finished with a bulldog clip at the top. This allows you to choose the appropriate month for display and hangs onto a nail or screw in the wall.

We started using this calendar six years ago. I didn’t create it from scratch, but I can’t remember now how I first made it. It has been developed over the years but some credit needs to go to whoever it was who started this – for example, they worked out the formula for the changing days.

Here’s a look at how it works in practice. (Excuse the lack of fidelity in the pic).

I thought this might be useful for more than just our family. If it helps you, please link to the page and add a comment.

Happy New Year!

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When a plane crashes in west Wales, a dark mystery begins to unfold. A major conspiracy thriller, starring Romola Garai. Written by Matthew Broughton.

“The story of a brittle doctor attending to a mysterious plane crash is instantly compelling” – Guardian review of episode 1: Tracks: The Nervus Vagus – Romola Garai radio thriller channels JJ Abrams | Television & radio | The Guardian

Download the nine episodes from the BBC site or grab as a Podcast (RSS).

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Beethoven went for a vigorous walk after lunch, and he always carried a pencil and a couple of sheets of paper in his pocket, to record chance musical thoughts.

Gustav Mahler followed much the same routine—he would take a three- or four-hour walk after lunch, stopping to jot down ideas in his notebook. Benjamin Britten said that his afternoon walks were “where I plan out what I’m going to write in the next period at my desk.”

Beethoven’s Surprisingly Simple Habit for Creative Breakthroughs.

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The Eisenhower Decision Matrix: How to Distinguish Between Urgent and Important Tasks | The Art of Manliness.

Thanks to Nick for suggesting this article to me. I like the idea, I enjoyed reading the other Eisenhower articles, and the site generally looks really interesting.

Of specific interest to me at the moment is the list of suggested examples for ‘important but not urgent’ items. For the last few years I’ve not been making sufficient time for this sort of thing; instead allowing the rest of life to get in the way. It’s important to get the ‘important’ things right!

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Please could you check the domain mapping for pennysomerville.wordpress.com. It should be showing up on http://www.pennysomerville.co.uk. I set this up yesterday but I now seem to have a redirect loop going on. I have tried clearing cookies and cache. (I use OpenDNS as my provider in case that helps).

thanks

The blog I need help with is pennysomerville.co.uk.

This morning at work, it worked, so I added to my wordpress.com support post:

From, a different location today I can see that the site is working fine. So it must be deep cached in my home setup somewhere….

OK to close.

However, this evening, and back at home – it still isn’t working on the home setup. My “client” (hi Mum!) reports it working OK for her at her location. I’m figuring that DNS propagation has happened just about everywhere around the world apart from in my home. (I have tried all the cache and cookie clearing recommended and also different devices with no luck).

I tried getting to the bottom of it, but it’s late and I couldn’t quite be bothered. In case it helps anyone – here’s what I think has happened and my temporary fix.

My home setup seems to have ‘deep-cached’ the DNS setup somewhere. I have the wifi network setup to use OpenDNS, and this is set in the main router connection to the internet. I’ve decided to leave that alone as I want their filtering to help make  the kid’s internet usage safer. But I have switched out of this DNS service on my laptop (by using the Google public DNS service) and this has solved the problem in the short term. That means I can carry on doing the work on the site for my client (hi again Mum!) and I’ll set the laptop back to using the default home network DNS service after the full 72 hours recommended for DNS propagation has expired.

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Ray Kurzweil:

Online education is where we were in ebooks 4 years ago – people saying they still want printed books, that the ebook reading experience isn’t very good… Well, today most books are ebooks. You see the same complaints about online education. Well, just wait. Four years from now, you’ll have everything online.

This is from Wired’s May edition (I’m reading the printed version though!)

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I started using Runkeeper to help me track progress – this has been really beneficial. I’ve loaded up a (gentle) training schedule and its made things much more fun because it adds variety in the types of run and I can track my progress.

An added, and unexpected benefit is that the running is making time for me to listen to podcasts. I’ve got a mix across business, productivity, and technical. Sources vary from TED, the Guardian, the BBC, Harvard Business Review, and some smaller startups. I’m fairly ruthless when it comes to tone – unsubscribing from those podcasts that feature too much informal chat and laughing at their own jokes.

So, perhaps as part of a series, I’m making a note of the podcasts that have a resonance. A colleague at work often talks of the ‘personal MBA’ and I think that the podcasts that chime are part of my own personal MBA.

To start the ball rolling, I enjoyed a podcast from the Harvard Business Review Ideacast series entitled ‘Building a Company Everybody Loves’.
http://blogs.hbr.org/ideacast/2013/04/building-a-company-everyone-lo.html

At about 3 minutes in, the conversation turns to the gender issues at work, and describes a situation that I think is common – one in which men are playing a role at work rather than being themselves:

“…many men have said they role play their way through the week in the hope that they can rediscover their humanity at the weekend.
Well, guess what? You can’t rediscover your humanity in 48 hours at the weekend. Whether you like it or not, you will spend the bulk of your adult waking life at work. It better be a place where you can be yourself.”

A simple lesson; be yourself at work rather than pretending to be someone else…

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This Emoticon-A-Day Calendar Lets You Creatively Catalog Your Mood | via Co.Design: business + innovation + design.

I wonder whether this, or a version of this, could be used within projects in order to gauge the confidence of those involved in the project? Over time, the change in the smileys would be interesting to observe…

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21280943

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