I was playing around with Calendar on my phone the other day and realised whole calendars had gone missing from my schedule. I have 4 Google accounts with at least 4 calendars each in them to keep events organised, and clearly this was a big problem (one that went missing tells me when my bills are due, so quite a big issue).

Following a lack of working fixes online, I have come up with this process for completely nuking just the Calendars on the device so that it fixes it itself. Follow the steps in the screenshots or in bullet points below.

• Open Settings. The easiest route to this on any device is to open Notifications and hit the little Settings icon.
• Select Apps from the menu
• You need to perform this action both on the Calendar and Calendar Storage apps. You will find these listed under the “All” tab (third one on the top bar).
• Open Calendar from the menu. Hit Force stop (accept any popups). Wait, then when it’s done, hit Clear data. Observe that all the storages go to 0B (zero bytes).
• Repeat above procedure immediately for Calendar Storage.
• Go back to Settings and select Accounts & sync, then check your Google accounts are doing Calendar sync. This is only really to give it a minute to download the calendars.
• Open up the Calendar app from a widget or from the menu. You should see this screen. Select Not now, as you already have all your accounts set up.
• Calendars gradually appear (may take a few seconds to start downloading them). This is madness, so let’s clean it up. Select which calendars you want displayed from the menu.
• Much better! All fixed.

If I ever make some statement about thinking about joining / applying to Google, please remind me of this post so that I come to my senses.

Follows is a non-exhaustive enumeration of the reasons I do not wish to work at Google.

1) I will not sign a contract that prohibits me from telling my significant other what I did at work today. I can promise you she is not a Bing spy, and wouldn’t even know what I’m on about if I said the code I had been working on had provided a 3x speed boost for users of a certain API. There’s something wrong with being contractually obliged to hold secrets from your other half.

1a) Same as 1) but for mum.

2) I will not have “sweetners” used to offset wages, which may subsequently be removed. See here for more.

3) You can slap as much lipstick on the pig as you like, but Google is still a large company and will still feel, look and act like one. No thanks.

4) I’d like transferable skills. Sure there’s learning programming languages and people skills etc., but I can learn those elsewhere. Learning behemoth internal APIs and writing apps that will only ever run on one architecture (Google’s massive one)? What’s the point in learning about scaling if you can only scale on one architecture? Hardly transferable.

5) I do not want to be bombarded by questions I cannot answer. Not that I do not know the answer, but I am not allowed to give you the answer. I.e. any conversation I have with anyone who asks “So what do you do?” is limited to “Work for Google” and “I write software”. Booooorrrrring. Additionally, because I work for Google, everyone spends the whole time trying to extract information out of me in increasingly stupid ways. Also boring.

6) I don’t need the CV boost it could give. (I deleted my CV anyway)

7) I fundamentally disagree with their hiring process. Specifically, the bit where they pull some names of algorithms out of a hat and ask you to state their time complexity. This will be controversial, because Google engineers say “But this is the simple stuff”. It is a waste of my time to remember this – I am sat at a computer, and if I really need to know it then I can look it up quite easily. What matters is that I can analyse algorithms in code for their time complexity, and suggest optimisations; properly assign problems to suitable data structures and pick algorithms for specific cases optimally; and understand common formats for expressing algorithms in pseudocode so that they can be easily implemented if necessary. I see memorising this lot just for one interview as counterproductive and an inefficient use of time. Unfortunately for Google, this is the first pre-screen on their phone interviews, so it never goes that well.

Would you like the chance to get your hands on Beginning Android 3?

This book is an excellent guide to getting started building Android applications, ramping up from installing the SDK and setting up Eclipse right through to advanced Android APIs and development practices. We’ve got a copy to give away thanks to the lovely folks at Apress.

To enter: simply add a comment on this post telling us why you love Android (don’t forget to leave your e-mail address or we won’t be able to contact you!) and we’ll pick a winner at random. Don’t forget to say “hi” on Google+ too (not required for entry).

Rules: Closing date is 9pm UK time on Friday 19th August 2011. Winner will be picked at random. Prize will be available for collection from Reading or London; if you want it shipped to the UK or abroad please get in touch and we’ll see what we can do. One entry per person: multiple entries will void all of them.

Not lucky this time? Grab it on Amazon.

Beginning Android 3 is a fantastic introduction guide by Android developer and CommonsWare founder Mark Murphy.

This book is an almost essential text for anybody who wants to get started with building Android applications and who has some programming experience behind them already. Presenting topics covering everything from getting the Android SDK installed to the most advanced Android programming and design discussions, this book presents an excellent ramp-up for just about anyone with a little programming behind them who wants to find out just about everything you could possibly want about Android.

A few weeks ago now I got hold of a shiny new HTC Trophy running Windows Phone 7.

I’m a bit of a smartphone geek (I’m permanently attached to my Nexus One) so to give the new platform on the block a bit of a workout, I thought I’d swap the Trophy for my usual N1 for a week to see how I got on with it.

Out with the old...

... in with the new

I’m going to be publishing blog posts (check the WP7 tag), tweets and videos all week telling how I get on with it. This is day 1, and the first video is embedded below!