Katy Dickinson

Eeek! 3 calendars (Google Calendar Review)

I admit to never having been attracted to a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant, not the High School version of the acronym: Public Displays of Affection). I have too many friends who check out of real life and start dinking with their PDA every time they need to consider a scheduling question. I still use a small paper calendar. Sometimes I buy it but most years I just use the the calendar my dentist gives away free. However, now that I have teenagers and in particular a girl teen with a very active social life and college applications with complex scheduling requirements, we are moving to an on-line family calendar.

Last weekend, after yet another tiresome "you scheduled what? when?" family discussion, we all agreed to try out Google Calendar. So far, this means I am now updating Google Calendar in addition to maintaining my portable paper calendar and also the electronic calendar I use at work. I may figure out how to merge my 3 calendars if Google Calendar works well enough.

My experiences this week with Google Calendar:

• Problems:
  • We are still unable to make my daughter's calendar entries show up on mine. We have played with and tested the permissions every way we can think of. My husband and I can see each other's entries fine. From the FAQ, this seems to be a known bug with Google Calendar. I am entering her events on my calendar until this gets sorted out.
  • I dislike only scheduling on the 1/2 hour rather than in finer time increments. There may be a way to schedule more finely that I haven't figured out yet.
  • The printed monthly version has such small letters and descriptions are so truncated as to be hardly usable.
  • Entries take too much time and thought (usability needs work) - I have to enter What and then click "edit event details" to enter dates and times. Unlike my electronic calendar at work, "Repeats" means creating a series of events rather than one event that spans more than one day - this was confusing. I am still trying to enter a repeating event on the last Friday of each month, rather than the 4th Friday.

• Working Well:
  • The "Christian Holidays" and "U.S. Holidays" automatic entries are wordy but convenient. It is odd but interesting to see religious holidays from non-Episcopal denominations.
  • I like being able to assign colors to each person sharing calendar entries.
  • Even while we are still entering basic information like birthdays and weekly activities, it is handy for everyone in the family to be able to see one web-based calendar rather than checking in personally.
  • Update response time is good.

Seeing the entire family calendar in one place makes me feel overscheduled. Next Tuesday, for example in addition to regular work meetings, the family calendar already shows:

• It is the Feast of Christ the King (for Catholics).
• My daughter is off school.
• We have conferences with my daughter's teachers, 8-11 a.m.
• My son's Foods class is giving a Thanksgiving party for family members, 2-3 p.m.
• I am holding a SEED phone-in call 5-6 p.m.

Eeek!

Posted at 12:18PM Nov 16, 2006 by katysblog in News & Reviews  |  Comments[1]

23 SEED Applications, 5 Complete

We have received 23 applications so far to Sun's worldwide Engineering mentoring program, SEED. The SEED Established Staff term will run 15 January-16 June 2007. All application materials are due 24 November 2006.

5 of the 23 applications have been completed but 3 others have been disqualified. All three were disqualified for being too junior for an Established Staff term, which requires among other criteria that participants be at Principal level (Sun U.S. grade 9 equivalent) or above.

In addition to Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos sending email to Sun Engineering worldwide announcing this SEED term, I have also sent emails to a variety of subgroups, including GENO (Sun's Global Engineering Org.), and Sun's "Employee Resource Groups". ERG used to be called affinity groups or diversity groups, all of which is HR talk for "a network of Sun employees who share a common identity, characteristic, or set of interests".

A book from which I have learned a great deal is Unlocking the Clubhouse, Women in Computing by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher. In addition to reading the book and keeping it handy for reference, I have been honored to talk with each of the authors several different times. Dr. Allan Fisher is the former Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education at Carnegie Mellon and is now the President, CEO, and co-Founder of iCarnegie. Dr. Jane Margolis is a social scientist now with the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies.

In Unlocking the Clubhouse (ISBN: 0262632691, published in 2001), I have found a number of specific and helpful suggestions. The book is focussed on women in computing but the suggestions seem to work well for a wide variety of groups. The passage I have read most recently is on p.115 (Chapter 7: A Tale of 240 Teachers):

Recruiting Girls
Rule number one, then, is that teachers have to deliberately focus effort on recruiting girls. If teachers issue a generic recruitment call, boys turn out. Girls must know that the teacher is talking to them. Sometimes all it takes is a few minutes of encouragement to fire a girl's interest and to give her confidence to take a class.

...Girls do not want to be the only one in the class, so two mottoes emerged: "Recruit friendship circles" and "Recruit a posse".

Both of these suggestions (sending targeted invitations rather than only generic recruitment calls, and also recruiting groups who can then support each other) have worked very well in the SEED program. Since 2004, SEED has held a number of "pilot" terms focussed on target groups in Engineering. Most of those pilots were for staff in a particular geographic area (India, China, Czech Rep., France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, and Russia) but we also recently had a pilot SEED term for stars and rising stars among the Engineering staff Sun acquired with StorageTek.

Holding pilot terms helps to build interest for later regular worldwide SEED terms also. So far in this SEED application period, we have applications from:

• Central USA: 2 [ 9% ]
• China: 1 [ 4% ]
• Czech Republic: 1 [ 4% ]
• EMEA: 1 [ 4% ]
• Eastern USA: 3 [ 13% ]
• Russia: 1 [ 4% ]
• United Kingdom: 1 [ 4% ]
• Western USA: 12 [ 52% ]
• no response: 1 [ 4% ]

Posted at 11:12AM Nov 16, 2006 by katysblog in Mentoring & Other Business  |