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My Macs And Treo Hate Me

I've been having a terrible time getting my iCal calendars moved from the colossal iMac to the wee-small PowerBook and getting them to sync with my Palm Treo 650. I was eventually able to move the calendars, but syncing still has me stumped.

Last week I visited my company's home offices in New York, where I got my new, company-issued PowerBook and attempted to sync the Treo to it. The Treo got stuck while syncing the calendar and restarted every time.

After working on the problem for a while, I put it aside until I got the PowerBook and Treo home this week, where I attempted to sync the Treo to my main computer, an iMac. I'd successfully synced the Treo to the iMac dozens of times before, but this time, it didn't work. It would hang for a time, then I'd lose the connection.

Worse: After my failed sync attempts, my calendars were missing. I could see my appointments, but not the calendars themselves, and I couldn't make any changes to the appointments.

ICal is a fussy application, and I've had problems syncing it with the Treo before. I Googled for answers and got lots of conflicting advice:

• Reset the sync history

• Delete three files from the preference folder

• Delete the caches folder from the library

and so forth. Google turns up many more possible fixes to this problem, and none of them worked for me.

I finally resorted to calling AppleCare, and someone gave me the solution that got me up and running again: Delete the iCal folder from ~/Library/Application Support (where ~ is the symbol for the home directory -- the one with the house icon next to it in the Finder). The next time I started iCal, it restored the calendar from a previous version.

I'm fortunate in all this because my workday isn't really calendar driven. I have three standing meetings every week, and usually schedule one or two additional appointments. If I were the kind of person who had back-to-back appointments all day, every day, and who changed them around with great frequency, I'd be in big trouble.

I'm not still able to sync the Treo with either my PowerBook or iMac.

I think this problem has something to do with the fact that I dropped the Treo while I was at the Telepresence World conference at the University of San Diego campus. USD has a beautiful campus -- it's a Catholic college about 30 miles from the Mexican border, and it looks it, with lots of Spanish-influenced architecture, including hard, hard clay tile floors, which do a lot of damage when you drop a Palm Treo on them. The screen cracked, rendering the bottom 15% or so unusable as a touch screen. I would not have thought hardware damage could cause a software problem, but I think perhaps it did, although the Treo does seem to be working normally otherwise.

This is the most frustrating experience I've had with the Mac since I switched in February. I'm reminded of a comment my friend Ken made back then, as I burbled enthusiastically about my new passion for the Mac. He's been using the Mac for more than a decade. "They're still computers," he says. "They're evil. You can't turn your back on them."

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