As I am completing my divorce, it is causing me to find obscure bugs in various software.  I have a 4 year old son, and I have 50% custody of him.  Part of that arrangement means that I have to share holidays with him on alternating years.  I had him for the Thanksgiving vacation this year, but his mother has him next year.

As a user of a Palm Tungsten E2, and Outlook, I figured that I would set-up the “recurring appointment” in Outlook and the sync that to my Palm.  I learned that it’s not that easy.  The first thing was learning the syntax of the recurring configuration in Outlook.  First I created the “Thanksgiving Vacation” appointment in my calendar, from November 22 at 7:00pm, till November 26th at 7:00pm.  Then, I have to create a recurring appointment that repeats “From 7:00pm till 7:00pm lasting 4 days, monthly on the fourth Wednesday of every 24 months, starting on November 22, 2006 through November 29, 2020”.  Outlook actually deals with this ok … but when I sync to the Palm it fails.

As I dug further into the problem, I found that the issue is that the Palm conduit, or sync software, can’t seem to deal with the 24 month interval.  The error log tells me to “split the appointment” into individual days, however when I do that the appointment sync’s to the Palm on a 12 month interval.  Uh … not quite what is showing in Outlook.

After I spent hours trying to resolve this I finally realized that the only way around this is to “hand create” all of the appointments each year.  Or to go in and modify each of the “occurances” of the recurring appointment to modify them in a way to make them unique and “non-recurring”.

Hello … Palm?  Anyone out there interested in fixing this bug?