How are spell checkers supposed to be effective when things like “calender” are real words?

I dug out my USB-serial adapter, installed Palm Desktop 4.0 on my iMac, and set up iSync. A little more complicated then it needed to be, but eventually I got it to work—by the way, why isn’t there a USB device class for serial adapters? It seems a pretty glaring omission. Luckily, mine has a driver for Mac OS X. Overall, iSync works pretty well, although it’s rather slow (this is probably due to my datebook having an average of at least one entry per day, dating back to the purchase of my first PalmPilot in 1997) and doesn’t synchronize some Address Book fields with my Palm.

I was very disappointed with iCal, though. Whoever designed it doesn’t appear to have had me in mind; that is, someone who doesn’t work regular days and for whom one-word calendar descriptions aren’t enough. I sent feedback to Apple; maybe a future version will be usable for me. It’s a very pretty application.

In the meantime, I could turn off iCal synchronization, but unchecking “Calendars” in iSync doesn’t make things any quicker, and as long as the iSync conduit is active in HotSync Manager, Palm Desktop’s datebook doesn’t get synced (is there any way to do both? I’d like to use its address book and Mac OS X’s, also), so I guess I’ll leave it on for now. Maybe I’ll go sign up for .Mac and publish my calendar on the Web.