[GRLUG] Linux pim - recurring schedule

[John-Thomas Richards]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 09:53:24AM -0400, Roger Roelofs wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 1:36 PM, John-Thomas Richards <jtr at jrichards.org> wrote:
> > On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 11:42:10AM -0400, Patrick Goupell wrote:
> >> If you use a pim and have recurring events / tasks, what kind of
> >> recurring schedules do you use?
> >>
> >> Daily, weekly, monthly, first day of the week, third thursday of the
> >> month, last day of the month, something exotic?
> >>
> >> Thank you for your help.
> >
> > Every Tuesday and Thursday from 8:45-945AM, for the next nine months
> > (corresponding to the school year), except for these dates.
> >
> The most difficult case I've encountered is "the day before the x'th
> weekday".  For example, I lead a worship team at church.  we are
> responsible for the 1st Sunday of the month.  The rehearsal is the
> Saturday before, so I want to schedule a recurring event for the
> saturday before the 1st Sunday of each month.

The `remind' calendar application can do this already.  The syntax can
be tricky:

        REM Sat 1 --7 MSG Last Saturday of the month

That triggers the message "Last Saturday of the month" to be displayed
on, well, the last Saturday of the month.  It does so by finding the
first Saturday of the month (`Sat 1') and then going back seven days
(`--7').  Since weeks are always seven days (regardless of the length of
the month) this works.

If this program integrated with Evolution I'd use it in a heartbeat.  I
need sync capability with my phone so I use Evolution.  remind is quite
powerful.

Check out this presentation for more stuff: "For example, we have a
sales meeting every Monday, but it's moved to a Tuesday if there's a
holiday."  I don't know of any other calendar app that can do that
automatically.

http://www.roaringpenguin.com/files/download/remind-oclug.pdf
-- 
john-thomas
------
The man's desire is for the woman but the woman's desire is rarely other
than for the desire of the man.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet (1772-1834)