This was definitely a smart move as I landed my next three jobs because I knew about Section 508. Then something more happened. As I began working on sites to make them accessible to all, I began meeting and interviewing people with different needs and asking them how they use the web and what they’d like to see improved. This led to epiphany number 1: These people were just like me.

I know that doesn’t sound good, but I grew up in a primarily white, upper middle class, east coast community. I went to an expensive art school in college, that despite being in NYC had very few minorities I was exposed to because it was so expensive and offered few scholarships at the time. I thought “disabled” meant “couldn’t do something”. But it didn’t. In fact it’s a horrid word to use.

One person I know can’t see. But he can navigate most of his world through hearing. Can you do that? I can’t. His ear for music justifies headphones and speakers worth hundreds of dollars. Mine can’t justify $50 headphones. He types at least twice as fast as I can because I rely too much on seeing the keyboard. Which one of us is “disabled”? I think we are differently abled.

So with this in mind, I began to reach out to people of this marginalized community to get to know them more. And then I had epiphany number 2: These people are brilliant and amazing. Actually that doesn’t encompass it well enough, the are BRILLIANT and AMAZING. Yes, all caps is needed here.

The people I met are super intelligent, creative, patient, passionate and compassionate. They have discovered methods and tools to accomplish many of their goals, which are usually the same as yours and mine. Yet, despite being able to prove the desire and skill to do what drives them for a living, they are denied employment.

That’s the dream: To build a design and development agency comprised primarily of people that have the skills but are denied the opportunity because something allows the government to call them “disabled”, because they are not. Now I know this is easier said than done. First, it would be a virtual agency as these folks are spread across the country. It would take significant investment to make sure the team would have all the tools needed to do the job and some of those adaptive tools will get expensive. It will take understanding clients because the speed of delivery will be vastly different than that of traditional agency. It will take account managers and project managers that can keep it all on track. But there isn’t a reason why these people can’t work, they just need the tools and the opportunity. If you are interested in helping me build this, contact me, I know developers, designers, and security people I’d like to give jobs to.

*Comments are off due to the amount of trolling and spam I see. Please connect with me on twitter or by email on this post.

1. It only syncs Outlook events I schedule, so all the meetings that people set up that I need to attend I still have to manually sync.
2. It only syncs the primary Google calendar.

Well it looks like issue number one no longer exists. I am not really clear if this an update or just a case of poor documentation, but looking around today I found out how to make this work. Item number two on this page explains it in detail but the short is this:

1. You must first associate your Outlook email address (this is my corporate address) with your Google account.
2. When setting up the syncing program on your Windows machine, enter this address as the one to sync AND NOT your Google Gmail address as you would think.
3. Run sync. This will add all of your Outlook appointments that you either organized or are a guest on to your Google Calendar. It will also pull down all your appointments on your Google Calendar primary calendar and place them in your Outlook calendar.

While still lacking in the ability to sync multiple calendars from Google to Outlook or to add to Google those meetings set up on a distribution group, this is much closer to the holy grail and accomplishes what I was trying to do. I now have the ability to automatically sync my work calendar (in Outlook) to Google which I then use the iCal subscription URL to import to my Mac’s calendar and sync to my iPhone. Now I have my complete calendar (with a few minor exceptions) on my phone (my true goal) and accessible via the web if I don’t have my phone (Google Calendar).

UPDATE:

It looks like Apple is struggling with keeping their servers up. I was able to get to the SDK page a little while ago, but a lot of the links were broken and I didn’t try downloading it (I am away from my Mac at the moment). Sporadic attempts to get through to the proper page may occur.

You also need to have an Intel Mac in order to proceed, so if you are like me and waiting to buy a new Mac, now is the time.

This tool should allow me to no longer manually sync work to Google, but it has two major drawbacks:

1. It only syncs Outlook events I schedule, so all the meetings that people set up that I need to attend I still have to manually sync.
2. It only syncs the primary Google calendar. I have 11 calendars I use. One for home events, like kids activities. One each for bills, birthdays, weekly menus, paydays (I can separate income from expense this way), work (now), work sync, and several public calendars including Christian, Jewish and US holidays. While I wouldn’t mind if the public calendars don’t get synced, I should at least be able to sync calendars I make like my Home one.

I am rather disappointed with this first release as it really doesn’t achieve much in the way of getting things done and staying organized. I still don’t know how the Google accepting other calendar invitations piece works which of course could alleviate this whole mess as well.

Adding email addresses helps Google associate useful information with your Google Account. For example, Google Calendar can show invitations sent to any of your addresses.

I thought this was genius. I am constantly having syncing issues with my calendars. I bought the iPhone in September because I thought it would be the solution, however the solution is to export my work calendar (from Outlook) and import it to Google Calendars which I have a feed imported into my Mac iCal. The loop hole here is that I don’t like exporting my work calendar daily.

This new feature could answer that. I associated my work email address with my Google account but when people sent me meeting invites, nothing happened. So I tried my Yahoo! email address and sent an invite to myself. Still nothing happened.

Has anybody gotten this to work yet? Is the invites thing something “coming soon”?

I have found that if it comes in via email life is grand because I have it in Outlook. Outlook allows me to flag items with various color flags. I keep my inbox sorted by flags unless I need to search in it. I place all my high priority items as red flags. Medium priority items get yellow flags, then blue and finally purple are placed there for reference. I have been able to to sort through a couple hundred emails this way in a short while and then work on completing the tasks associated with each email.

I would like to use one application for everything, but Outlook, even with its notes and tasks, doesn’t allow me to look in one place for all my tasks. Subsequently I end up using some old school methods combined with some web 2.0 magic to handle with non-email items.
I have begun making voicemail my number one priority. I use a notepad to record every message and so far this month alone I have nearly filled one 70 page pad. I focus on phone calls first in everything because while I am on the phone call I can answer usually one or two emails (thank goodness for handsfree headsets).

If a co-worker comes to my desk and I am on the phone with a customer, another co-worker, or a supervisor I will mute the phone and ask them to email me. If I am not on the phone, I deal with the situation right then as it usually only takes one to two minutes.

I have started using Google Notebook for my outside projects. I have installed the Firefox extension on all my computers (work pc and home mac). Inside Notebook I have created an inbox, next actions, projects, and someday (yes, my home life has a someday). This has really helped focus these items. Combine this with Google Calendar and I can plan out projects for my freelance customers and make the calendar public. They can see where their project is at on a given date and schedule a meeting with me when they need it.

Ideally I would like to use just one application that allows for tracking of all of this data even while on the go, but alas I have not found it yet. The good thing is I have a set of tools that is working in conjunction together to get me to the end of the day with a clear and organized plate.