With the crackpot idea to mix what I learned from “Time Management for System Administrators” by Thomas A. Limoncelli with “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen R. Covey.
I had the 
crazy idea: what if I made a tool that scraped Liquipedia for e-sports events and gave them Franklin Planner-style priorities?
God have mercy on my soul.
The first thing I had to do was write a tool that took the fire hose of events, sometimes reaching into the mid-200s during peak season, and helped me put them into a normalized format I could move into Google Calendar, to prevent people from trying to schedule time to chat about a tech project or bug issues.
Back in the day I used to use PlanPlus, which used to be a one-time purchase, software you could buy once and use forever.
Originally it was even called “Franklin Covey PlanPlus,” offering the ability to sync your calendar with your Palm OS, Windows Mobile, or even BlackBerry devices. I loved it as someone who was that weird kid in high school who had a BlackBerry Bold 9900 (Bold Touch in some markets), it ran BlackBerry OS 7 and synced with my Linux laptop amazingly, letting me back things up. But that’s beside the point for this article.
Now I am sure some readers will say “you can still buy a Palm device,” and that’s true, but the issue is the upcoming “Palm Day” flaw, an issue similar to Y2K where Palm devices can only hold dates up until 23:59 on 12/31/2031, making any Palm device an invalid option going forward.
Some might say “what about a BlackBerry, could I use that?” Well, that’s where you would be wrong. Both BlackBerry OS 7 and the cell towers that supported those devices are now long dead. Honestly, if I had my way we’d still be on BlackBerry devices, since I loved them for SSH and simple command line work.
As for Windows Mobile, that always had issues on Linux, so it was out the window.
And so necessity became the mother of invention, and this idea was born.
I normally work in i3 or other command-line-heavy Linux setups, so I needed a tool that worked natively on my hardware. Since the tool can only pull the next 3 days of events, I knew I’d be hopping into it quite often.
So my first major need was figuring out how to grab my “firehose” calendars, as I refer to them in the code. A firehose calendar, for those unfamiliar with the term, is simply a calendar that pulls everything in.
Simple enough, right? I assumed I could just pull the ICS web link. Well, that is where you’d be wrong. I had the hellish nightmare of dealing with the Google Developer Console for this.
On top of that, I have to switch between two Google accounts: the Google Calendar with the firehose and the one that people can send invites to.
Some of you might ask why not use the same one. Well, that’s where you end up with two sets of the same event, and when I tried it that way it caused more issues than it’s worth.
I do not understand who at Google created the god-awful developer dashboard, but if I want to make a simple tool to pull my own calendar I shouldn’t have to jump through a bunch of hoops just to make it work. Whose idea was this?
I swear Google is shooting itself in the foot more and more every day.
At some point I am looking at how to make a custom drop-in solution covering compass, task lists, missions, goals, and values to be a full replacement for my Palm OS Franklin Planner.
But for now the key features of this tool are simple: A, B, C and 1, 2, 3 style tagging for matches I want to watch and their level of importance to me.
A lot of people might say this goes against the idea of relaxing and going with the flow that Dudeism and the Church of the SubGenius strive for.
Well, to that I have this to say.
My idea is that if I can plan around some of my favourite things, there is less stress to deal with.
I can just go with the flow and know exactly what needs to be done and when, without running around like a child who wandered into the middle of a movie and demands to know “what’s going on?”
It’s that simple, and I love making software and finding ways to fix problems.
I’ll likely have more blog posts related to this, but for now I am just glad I got something created.
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