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I’ve been successfully using GTD with my Treo for 2 years now. This project/action management system served me well throughout downsizing and selling Mom’s house, transitioning from full-time employment to freelance, and moving to Los Osos from Los Angeles. Yet, I’ve always felt a niggling dissatisfaction due to having to use Palm Desktop to successfully sync my Calendar, Memos, Addresses and To-Do List with my Treo. And with the increasing number of mysterious application errors and lack of active development, the Palm Desktop problem has been coming to a head for a while now.

Answer: Missing Sync.

Missing Sync is a reliable, simple sync solution between Treo and the Mac OS apps: iCal (events and to-dos) and Address Book. It also includes Notebook, an application that handles Memos seamlessly. Instead of using a dated, buggy Palm Desktop to manage these buckets I can use the snazzy Mac OS apps.

• iCal lists calendar search results line-by-line. Since I track my working hours in the calendar, this makes invoicing easy. No more paging through weeks, searching for project numbers/names visually to count up my hours worked.
• Address Book integrates nicely with Pages and Numbers, meaning I can generate mailing labels without having to export/import from Palm Desktop to Address Book first.
• Missing Sync’s Notebook application behaves well, like any Mac app should, and not like Palm Desktop’s 1997 weirdness.
• iCal can subscribe to public calendars, keeping me updated on US Holidays and Basecamp projects. This feature has been around forever but I’ve never been able to use it with Palm Desktop.

Upon reflection, all this seems rather DUH! But I could never figure out how to make it work before Missing Sync. Well worth the $39.95!

I took my Canon SD 870 IS to Burning Man and a couple uses after I came back, the lens wouldn’t retract anymore. Since the cost to repair these cameras is usually around $200 (close to the cost), I thought I would try to repair it at home.

Before I cracked the case open and attacked it with Dust Off, though, I Googled a solution! Banging the side of the camera hard against the palm of my hand was successful. Whoo!

I think I’m done traveling to LA for quite a while. Between Sushi Decompression, the Long Beach marathon, business meetings and seeing family I have already been down to LA 4 times this month and I. Am. Done.

Sushi Decompression on the 4th was a ton of fun, though. Seeing everybody wearing clothes, clean and with hair was quite a treat (as was the after-party at Robert’s house - thank you for hosting!) Here are some pics:

On the 18th, Rick and I celebrated Oktoberfest at The Old Vienna Inn with a couple friends. It’s a huge party, everyone eats family style and we met a very cool couple from Riverside who were celebrating their 1st wedding anniversary. Rick forced everybody to have Jager shots and a good time was had by all. The food was amazing, too (from what I can remember)

By the way, History class is going quite well. We had a test recently and I scored 60 out of 60. w00t! Who would have thought I’d do so well at a subject I always said I’d hated?

No plans for Halloween as of yet. The thought of relaxing, watching movies and passing out candy is quite appealing, though.

And for your viewing pleasure, here’s a picture of Rick’s cat, (Fat Man) Puddin’: