There’s a great piece by Adam Gopnik, “The Real Work: Modern Magic and the Meaning of Life” in the 17 March 2008 issue of the New Yorker in which he traces the modern history of magic.

Sheldon Brown, you have a posse, originally uploaded by cyclofiend.

Sheldon Brown, 1944 – 2008

Darwin Day poster by Colin Purrington. Sure, Charles has a posse like Andre, but what about Wallace?

Tripit is nice; forward it your itineraries (car rental, hotel arrangements, flight info…) and it will organize and track them for you. It’ll even hook up to an iCal-compatible calendar — Google Calendar for instance — although it only pushes out summary information, at least as far as I can tell. But the concept suggests to me that Google Calendar, rather than another startup, is the place for this kind of thing; it would be cool if Gmail got smarter about reading my email and could, for example, figure out that this is a travel itinerary with departure and arrival times and offer to put that into my calendar for me. This is a very extensible idea: Amazon sends me structured text emails with purchase and shipment notifications which would be nice to see on my calendar if I so chose. The package that I ordered two days ago is scheduled to arrive tomorrow and here’s the tracking number. That sort of thing. Email is the conduit and the representation of time on a calendar is one other display mechanism.

Given the importance of calendars to peoples’ daily lives for the past N-thousand years, it’s terrifying how little progress has been made in using technology tools to simplify and manage calendar information.

(Posted, as an experiment, using ScribeFire.)