Escape from Houston

This week I'm out here at the OSAF office in San Francisco. It's a nice change to be someplace where there are open businesses and the gas stations actuallly have gas.

I rode out Rita in a hotel room in northwest Houston, after evacuating from my home in southeast Houston -- a little trip that took 11 hours during the excruciating mass exodus on Thursday. Yeah, and I didn't even leave the city.

The trip home on Saturday took about an hour (yes, exactly the same route) -- and there was no real damage to my house. Better to be safe than sorry, I guess, but part of me wonders if it even makes sense to listen to my local government officials during crises like this.

Did I mention how happy I am that my wife and kids are back in Japan visiting her folks?

Since I have a convenient natural disaster to blame my braindead state on, I'm just going to punt today and post a couple of links I've been meaning to put up here for awhile. These are AJAXey, "Web 2.0" calendar applications. Since I'm working on Scooby, which at this point is essentially a Web-based calendar client, I tend to pay a lot of attention to similar applications.

One I noticed some weeks back was Kiko , which advertises itself as providing "all of the functionality of offline calendar software, and all the convenience of online access." It's pretty impressive for being the work of a couple of guys over a couple of months. The interface is a bit clunky in spots, but it does give you the idea of how a little AJAX-fu can be applied to the problem of organizing calendar events.

The other is Planzo , which bills itself as being "The way web calendar was supposed to be." I got the heads-up on Planzo from Brian Skinner, who is doing some seriously interesting stuff over at OpenRecord.org . Planzo is also the work of just two guys -- and it's apparently so cool that even US presidents and retired presidents use it.