Paper address books and calendars...

I think I may have already posted some entries advocating for paper versions of address books and calendars before. But today was another fine example of why it's quite useful to have stuff on the paper. At work I tried to switch to a new push email/synchronization software. We shall call it software product Foo, which is shipped by a major hardware company Bar.

So, first of all I can't install Foo onto my phone, because my phone was shipped with a previous version of Foo, which is integrated with the phone's software so well that it's impossible to remove the previous version of Foo. It takes quite a while to figure this out. Fine, I think I'll just update the phone's firmware, then. For that I need a cable. Luckily I own a cable and hook up the phone with my PC. The phone notices that it's hooked up, but the PC for some reason decides that it doesn't want to see the phone. What's the problem? Yeah, the cable is of a wrong type and I have to use another cable with the exact same plugs but which for some odd reason actually works whereas my cable didn't.

Ok, so I was able to update the phone's software and I had my calendar stuff and address book backed up on Outlook. You can see where this is going, of course. Anyway, after the update, I restore my backups from the phone memory card (which don't include my contacts as the installation procedure for product Foo advised me to nuke my address book and calendar before installing the software; fortunately the stuff is still in Outlook). Lo and behold, the previous version of Foo is now gone and I can install the new version! Yay! So I install it and it actually works. I fill in the server and user information. It starts to synchronize. It fetches my inbox. And it works! I can access my emails. But then I notice that it didn't fetch my contacts. Ok, maybe there's some checkbox I haven't checked and it won't fetch it because of that. Well, turns out that that wasn't the case. But instead at some point the synchronization features of product Foo decided that I don't need the contacts that I have in Outlook. Nor do I need the calendar entries either.

To sum it up, I now have a spiffy piece of shi*cough*software that can do stuff, but I no longer have any of my contacts in any digital form anywhere. Same goes for calendar entries. And to add to the insult, Foo stopped working for me and will no longer even boot up.