Every hour on the hour in any given conference room, some meeting is starting.  Nobody really knows who is invited and who isn't, so if you walk in and look like you belong, you are in.  Sometimes it is even interesting and you certainly get a unique view of what is happening in the company if you make a habit of attending random meetings.

I am not actually conducting any sort of social experiment and I hate meetings with a passion, but this week I have ended up in two random meetings because someone at Apple dumbed iCal down too far.  I am all for simple apps that eliminate all the tedious details, but consider my case.

I travel.  I travel a lot.  I switch my laptop's timezone to whatever timezone I am in, because I need my body to feel it is in the right timezone and I need to show up at the conferences and flights at the right time.  So when I am sitting in Washington D.C. and I get an email asking me to attend a meeting Thursday next week at 1pm, I click on Thursday, 1pm on my iCal calendar, and after my morning run that gets synched up to my Nano.  Then I fly back to California, switch my timezone back, continue my morning runs and synch up every morning to upload my iPod+Nike run data...

Wednesday night I check iCal my meetings for the next day.  Thursday morning after my run I doublecheck the meeting location on my Nano.  Thursday, 10am, blah blah and head to the office.  Meeting starts and there really isn't anything for me to add.  It is interesting enough, but why the heck am I there?  Then I think back to Wednesday where I ended up in a meeting and then got a reminder email for a meeting in the same room 3 hours later which puzzled me at the time since that wasn't on my calendar.  I figured at the time I was lucky they sent out a reminder. 

Anyway, iCal desperately needs some concept of a home timezone, or it should be smart enough to figure it out from the amount of time I spend in one particular timezone.  When I am not in my home timezone and schedule a meeting, it should ask me to verify which timezone I mean when I am clicking on the calendar.  If you go to the advanced preferences in iCal there is a "Turn on timezone support" thing and when you switch timezones it then nags you about switching ical's main view.  I find that annoying and it shouldn't be an advanced option to keep track of timezones.  And because of all this bloody integration where everything talks to everything else, my Nano inherited the switched timezone so the calendar in that showed me the same skewed view.

The interesting part was that I didn't realize until a day later that the extra random meeting I went to on Wednesday wasn't one I was invited to.  They had plenty of relevant questions for me in that meeting.

When I am really really bored I sit and stare at http://pidgets.com

The above image popped up.  Weird coincidence.  It is part of this photostream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/garywang/193213537/

Running around Croatia this week talking about PHP and various Yahoo! Apis.

Grr.. Stop sending me 75k blobs of crappy Microsoftish HTML just to ask me a 1-line question about PHP.  I use Pine and can't see your Hello Kitty theme and the image with your signature anyway.