Calendar

We've been reading through all the stuff delivered to our house by Royal Mail over the 3 months we've been away cruising on Erin Mae. Out of a copy of Canal Boat magazine fell a 2015 wall calendar, which was on its way to the recycling bin when I thought of entering into my computer calendar some of the events that might interest us.

The first was the Crick Boat Show. I double-clicked the date to make a new entry, and had only typed "Cric" when it offered me Crick Boat Show as a suggestion. What's more, it offered to put it either in my personal calendar, or the one shared with my best beloved. I was well impressed! I've just upgraded my MacBook to Yosemite, the most recent version of OS X, and I don't think it did this before. There are lots of little improvements of this sort, where the computer searches likely sources of info in order to offer you options. I haven't a clue how it knew so quickly that I would be interested in a Boat Show. It even knew about the Middlewich Folk and Boat Festival, which was the next entry, and then the IWA festival in August. And it knew enough for all of them to be able to create one item spanning the days of each event.

I adopt a middle path in relation to internet privacy. I don't hand out all my personal info without a care, but I'm not paranoid about divulging nothing. While I know how readily most internet organisations harvest information for advertising purposes, I'm not sure that these items fall into that category. So I'll be watching my calendar, to see what else it knows about in advance. For the moment, it's impressive, and useful.

I wonder if it knows Erin Mae's birthday?