For several months now I have struggled to get my Blackberry’s calendar to sync with iCal on my Mac. This is true with both Missing Sync and PocketMac for Blackberry. Today, my Blackberry started to chew up my address book — both in my computer and on the device. Hard to believe but it erased all but three contacts from my computer and nearly 200 from itself. Fortunately I had a backup.

I spent hours on the phone with Blackberry support today… hours! We worked through a number of troubleshooting options using PocketMac and eventually resynced the address book. Then, feeling lucky, we moved on to the calendar. After about 40 minutes of stalled calendar syncing we discovered that my Blackberry was systematically erasing all of the appointments in iCal. It was hard to say who was more shocked, me or the support tech who sounded amazingly stressed when we made the discovery. Luckily, I had a backup of iCal, too.

RIM has made it quite clear that they are far more committed to supporting their Blackberry devices on the PC platform.

I have a 7190 and a Pearl. Both are officially for sale.

During the installation process, Waves plug-ins automatically attach themselves to key audio and video production applications on your system. In my particular case those applications are Cubase and Final Cut Express. If you’re like me, you don’t want to use your Waves plug-ins in Final Cut. More directly, you don’t want the dependency of your iLok key in order to use Final Cut.

Thanks to Waves customer support for telling me that there’s a simple way to decouple these two tools without affecting your other applications (like Cubase). On your Mac, navigate to…

Macintosh HD / Library / Audio / Plug-Ins / Components

…and remove the Waves component from the folder (I deleted the file and then emptied the trash bin).

Follow that simple procedure and the next time you launch Final Cut you can do so without needing your iLok.

Thanks to Nick for alerting me to the March 8 release of the AirPort Extreme Update 2007-002 by Apple. According the the notes, this update “contains an additional non-security fix for a compatibility issue when using certain third-party access points configured to use WEP”. If that includes WPA, the grief that 2007-001 caused me should be over.

I followed up with Apple this morning on my trouble report on the WWAN update.  The technician said the Apple engineering is investigating a connection between the update and certain models of Intel Macs and wireless routers.

You can help Apple troubleshoot and solve the problem by helping them collect as much relevant information as possible.  If you are having Airport connection stability and reliability issues since installing the WWAN update of February 19th, open a ticket with Apple and send them the results of your system profile.

I just read a post at Hear 2.0 about the intersection of personal computing and driving Ford vehicles (At Ford, Windows is Job One). The possibilities are limitless (including the potential of fresh Podcast consumption replacing radio listening) provided the driver can keep his or her eyes on the road.

If Mac gets into the game, there is the potential that vehicle purchases could be influenced by consumer loyalty to operating systems.