Tag Archives: calendar

A proposal for improving the calendar

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My wife said she missed me writing about non-tech things. The monkey’s paw curled.

Last night I came up with what can only be described as man’s most brilliant idea in the last century: CalendarFiasco. The Gregorian calendar — while a marked improvement over the Julian calendar — sucks. It makes no sense.

What’s in a name?

Thankfully, there’s precedent for changing the calendar. That’s part of what got us here. There was a time when September was the 7th month, October the 8th, November the 9th, and December the 10th. Those names made sense once upon a time.

Another thing that doesn’t make sense about them: they contain the sound “bər”. What do you say when you’re cold? Brr. But the northern hemisphere mid-latitude weather during many of those months isn’t particularly cold. So let’s start by re-arranging the names such that the “brr” months are the coldest months.

November and December can stay put. But we’ll replace January with September and February with October. Now the cold months are appropriately named. “But, Ben,” you whine, “what about the southern hemisphere?” Well, I guess they should have thought of this first, huh?

“Okay,” you plead, “but the names still don’t make sense from a numerical standpoint.” So what? I’ve improved some parts of it without making anything else worse. The ordinals didn’t make sense before and they don’t make sense now.

But wait! There’s more! You know what’s light and airy? Late spring. Right now, our calendar buries January and February — the “airy” months — in a pile of snow. Tragic. Since we’ve displaced those two months already, let’s move them to a more appropriate place. April and May can shove off to where September and October were. January and February will take their spot.

So my new calendar now has month names that make a lot more sense:

  1. September
  2. October
  3. March
  4. January
  5. February
  6. June
  7. July
  8. August
  9. April
  10. May
  11. November
  12. December

Where it all begins

Earth orbits the sun in a regular path. We could start the year at any arbitrary point. But January 1 is such a silly point. It’s less than two weeks after the winter solstice, which is a meaningful part of the orbit. Why not simply move the start of the year?

It is important to my wife that the winter solstice remain in December, so in the interests of marital harmony, I will make September (formerly January) 1 the first day after the (typical day of the) solstice. To make the transition easier, I put together a handy mapping of Gregorian dates to CalendarFiasco dates for your reference.

Feedback

…is not allowed. This proposal is perfect and I will not tolerate any dissent.

2009: The Year of Linux on the Desktop

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It’s been a joke for nearly a decade (maybe longer) to refer to the current year as “the year of Linux on the desktop.”  For me, it’s been a reality for several years, at least at home.  With my change in jobs last week, I had only a limited equipment budget, and since I needed a new laptop, that didn’t leave much money for a new desktop.  Most of my coworkers have opted for iMacs or Mac Pros, but I opted for a surplus lab machine running Fedora 11.  With the two widescreen monitors and 1 TB RAID 1 that I set up, it clearly makes sense to use it primarily.

Having used Linux in both server and desktop settings over the past 8 years, I’ve grown very comfortable with it, but my first week was not without issues.  The first was that the video card in the machine was made by ATI.  I’m not passing judgment on the quality of ATI’s hardware, but their Linux drivers are problematic.  Fortunately, my officemate had a spare NVIDIA card that I could put in.  A quick run of the NVIDIA setup program, and I had my monitors working perfectly.

The real fun came getting my e-mail set up.  My employer has a Microsoft Exchange server, which I’m required to keep an account on.  I first tried to use the Evolution groupware client, which has some rough support for Exchange.  For the life of me, though, I couldn’t get it connected. So I tried to use IMAP, which also didn’t work.  Of course, that didn’t bother me too much, since an IMAP connection wouldn’t work for calendaring or contacts, just e-mail.

Most of the admins in my group use Google accounts for e-mail and calendaring, so I decided to go down that route.  I set my directory entry to forward my work e-mail to my Google account and set up Google to POP my Exchange e-mail (since mail sent from an Exchange user doesn’t leave the Exchange server).  Evolution has excellent support for Google accounts, including e-mail, calendars, and contacts.  At least, I thought it did.  It turns out Evolution has a fun bug that causes recurring calendar events to not display when the account is added as a Google account.  Apparently, it works if you add it as a CalDAV account, but if the calendar is the primary calendar for an account, the @ symbol in the URL breaks things.

I finally gave up on Evolution and tried Mozilla Thunderbird.  Thunderbird has a calendar extension called Lightning.  With the gContactSync add-in, I can synchronize my contacts as well.  The  account setup was really easy, and I’ve been happy using it.  I just wish I could have arrived at it sooner.

Most of this post has focused on problems I’ve encountered in desktop Linux, but the truth is, most of it has gone pretty well for me.  I’ve used Fedora on my primary desktop at home for years, and most things just work.  Many of the reasons people give for Linux not being ready for the desktop are based on things that have been fixed years ago, or the fact that the problems are different.  All OSes have problems, but when you’re used to the problems of one, the problems of another stand out.

It’s 2009, the year of Linux on the desktop.