I've called out less than quality service on my blog before. I've also tried to give credit where credit is due and today I am happy to say, Philip at Sprint's customer support deserves a whole lot of credit. Not just for resolving my problem but for following through exactly how he said he would follow through.

Yesterday, the click-wheel on my trusty BlackBerry 8703 gave out. No click-wheel makes the device nigh-unto useless. The help desk hear at Rentrak was able to provide me with a temporary phone until they are able to get me a new 8830. The temporary 7250 worked as a phone, I could use the browser, I could SMS, but I could not send and receive email. Yesterday evening I tried to setup the email on the 7250 and when I put in my name and password I was told "Account has been suspended." That's never a good sign.

I dialed 611 and after a short wait I was put through to Philip. I told him my story of woe, he ran through a few things and said "I think it should be working now. But I will call you back in three minutes to make sure."

We disconnected the call, I waited a few moments, and got several "Activation" emails. I then got distracted by something...ohhhhh shiny...and not having set the phone up all the way, missed it ringing, so missed the call-back from Philip. I didn't notice this for a bit, but then saw the message light flashing saw I had voice-mail, and on top of that and email to my personal email account asking me to confirm that I had received it.

They're small things. But in a world where so many people apparently don't care, it was wonderful to meet someone who did care, and took an extra step just to make sure they had a happy customer.

Thank you Philip. I hope that I can pass this on to your boss.

I have PocketMac.

I hate PocketMac.

It sorta kinda works most of the time, but it requires me plugging in a USB cable--I don't know why, both my BlackBerry and my PowerBook support Bluetooth--and sometimes it gets all messed up and duplicates events, but like I said it sorta kinda works, but since it only sorta kinda works I often didn't sync it, it was just to frustrating. That frustration led to me not always remembering things I was supposed to remember, and that is bad.

I wasn't really looking for a solution, Rim had acquired PocketMac, and I was hopeful that they might eventually bring out a version of the product that worked the way it should. That hope, so far has been in vain.

First I started using GMail, then after several years of doing that I started using GReader, and with both those products working so well for me, I decided the time had come to try GCal. I messed around with it a bit and, as usual was impressed by how good a job Google had done creating a web app, but I didn't do much more than mess around a bit until I discovered that Google had created a syncing tool for the BlackBerry. Then things began to change.

The previous link will let you download Google Sync over the air, directly to your BlackBerry, once you have it installed, you can log in too GCal using your Google credentials and perform your first sync. By default Google Sync will resync every two hours or whenever you make a change on your BlackBerry. There are a couple of things you need to know. Google Sync will not sync events created prior to its installation. It will only sync new events. This seems to be a bit of an oversight, but that's the way it works. The other thing to note is that sync has frozen up on me at least once. I don't know why. It just stalled and it took me rebooting my BlackBerry to get it moving again.

After getting things working between GCal and BlackBerry I tackled getting things working between GCal and iCal. I found this reference at Google which will help you decide whether to setup a CalDav link between GCal and iCal or not.

Now that everything is configured, I can make changes on my BlackBerry and have them appear on my PowerBook as well as on the web at GCal. I'm sure I'll discover problems, but it works far better than PocketMac ever has.