Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

This posting is for other victims of Oracle Calendaring (an enterprise calendaring system) who are trying to get it to work on the Mac and their Treo (or Palm) synchronization.

Mac:

• I was unable to get it to play nice with iCal, so no more iCal.
• So you have to use their 1987 quality calendaring application on the desk top.

Treo:

• You need use Mark/Space’s Missing Sync because iSync won’t allow you to disable the calendar only; so switch to that before the following steps.
• The task and address book synching are said to be lousy.
• You need the Oracle conduits.
• After they are installed remove the address book and task conduits and restore the Mark/Space conduits.
• Don’t try to run both the Oracle calendar conduit and the Mark/Space event conduit; since they are both trying to sync the same data.
• If you get this error: “Out of storage space during update of database CTimeSetupPrefsDB” in the log on the treo then you need to upgrade your Treo’s firmware.

There may, or may not, be a Mac release of the Treo firmware updater for the Mac. If there isn’t on then you need to a window’s box. Virtual PC will work, but you need to manually kill the Mac processes running in the background listing for the Hot Synch request that comes in from the Treo; you can find those using the application known as the Activity Monitor.

That said this thing is junk.

I am assured by other users that it does not consistently move appointments created on the palm onto your main calendar. Those users then give you the sardonic smile of a fellow traveler and report that they have been trained to enter appointments only into Oracle calendar.

There is no work around for that problem on the Mac. I gather on the PC you can force a “full” syncronization and their conduit will then, very slowly, get the right answer.

It is a documented bug with the Mac conduit. Repeating events move over only the first instance of the repeating events.

We are about to have a big storm here in Boston. My favorite part of the forecast discussion:

“Cross sections show potential for tropopause fold and gravity wave formation SE of i-95 midday Sun, as conditions appear favorable for stratospheric intrusion in this region.”

Sounds like that pseudo-science they toss about in sci-fi TV shows.

I found this posting just fascinating. Recall that displacement is an economist’s word for that moment when you wake up and discover that your job, community, culture, etc. have been displaced by some alternative; typically through no fault of your own.  Some examples. The hurricane floods your neighborhood; Home Depot sucks the life out of your family’s hardware store. The landlord decides to displace tenant farmers off lands they have occupied for generations.  That was this original example, he was make way for more profitable sheep.

The victims of displacement react with rage.  “The rage of the small property holder - the peasant, the artisan, the stall-keeper - against his inexorable ruin by the competition of bigger capital is given a face … to hate: a physical particularity that stands in thought for the abstractions of ‘finance’ and ‘the market’ and ‘the banks’.”

This rage can be a powerful tool for shaping group solidarity.  What the posting illuminates is how the rage often lacks a focus.  If your neighborhood has been flooded by the hurricane you can quickly to organize the citizens into a posse, but you can’t get a rope around Mother Nature’s neck.  Potent rage versus a diffuse unnamed other makes for a, ah, interesting situation.

Clever social activists will work to assure the group’s rage is dissipated.  They directing the rage toward an available target.  Consider some pairs:

Tragic suicide at the high school?   Focus the rage to invigorate the after school activities?

Traditional society finds it is being displaced by more modern and economically vibrant societies.  Focus the rage on first world nations and their citizens?
‘The Jew’ has often become the focus of this rage, as the quote above goes on to say. Rage seeks a concrete focus. Displacement rage often grows and festers until it finds a focus.  Political actors know this. The rage is an opportunity to solve problems.  But the rage is also dangerous, since it might turn on them.  You can’t hang Mother Nature, but you can hang the Mayor.

Bush et. al. refocused the rage against terrorism (a very diffuse threat) onto Iraq.  They were acting as perfectly rational political actors.  They believed was a constructive goal.  But they also saw the risk the rage would focus on something they cared for, say Saudi Arabia.

The posting goes on to suggest that the displacement rage of the Left has yet to find it’s focus. Personally I think Republicans are a fine focus. Republicans are the new Jew.

I’d not seen this before.

JWZ’s essay on RSI, or typing injury. “… it terrified me. … my career being over”

I have one of my own written years and years ago. “… a friend who lost the ability to pick up a piece of paper …”

And I see that Bill Clementson recently joined this miserable club.

It’s a puzzle how until it happens one isn’t particularly interested; and even if you were interested getting advise isn’t straight forward. The advice is largely the wisdom of crowds. I.e. it’s hearsay, rumor, and stories like the ones above. The best you can hope for is to pick out the better of the old wive’s tails. It’s not often you get to refer to JWZ as an old wife! There is very little hard science and what exists seems to me to be very lame and often self serving.

It amazes me that an industry that has generated so much wealth hasn’t found a way to fund some substantial research into the affliction that forces the retirement of it’s most productive labor. Of course all minority groups have trouble getting attention for their problems. But in this case the minority group has actually got money. Still, it says something about who captures the wealth.