MemeMachineGo!

A new calendar for the forthcoming year can set you back $10-$20. As soon as the new year rolls around, one Berkeley bookstore is dumping them 3 for $10. They continue to drop during the year, reaching nearly “we pay you” prices.

When Pocahontas brought up needing a new calendar, and I mentioned that I could print them myself using pcal, she was excited. So, yesterday, we wrote a configuration file including my work days, the birthdays and anniversaries of our friends and family, our neighborhood’s yard waste pick-up days, and more and printed them out. She taped one copy over a 2004 collie calendar; I taped the other over a 1999 Colors of Nature calendar I received as a premium for being an Exploratorium member — the pictures were so nice, I’d saved it.

Pcal had gotten hard to find a few years ago. It’s nice to see that it has a new maintainer and a Sourceforge site. It’s very flexible — it can identify anything from Ash Wednesday to a Blue Moon, as well as repeating events like my plant debris pickup — every other Thursday all year except Thanksgiving week, when it’s Friday. (It only does the Gregorian calendar though; events based on another calendar, like Hebrew or Chinese, would have to be specified manually.)

7th Wed before Easter          Ash Wednesday
2nd full_moon in all           Blue Moon
odd Thursday in year           Plant Debris Pick-up
delete 4th Thursday in Nov     Plant Debris Pick-up
Friday after fourth Thu in Nov Plant Debris Pick-up

I found a couple of interesting calendar sites while looking up holidays: Time and Date and Earth Calendar.