What more exciting time is there for a calendar enthusiast than the start of a brand new year? Those of you still stuck in the Paper Age have crisp new wall calendars and day planners to break in. And let’s not ignore the stack of daily vocabulary words or Dilbert cartoons that may have just materialized on your desk.

Good stuff, no question.

But what of techies like us? Folks who rely on electronic calendars? We might not need to restock any paper goods, but that doesn’t mean that now isn’t the perfect time to kick your scheduling up a notch. Unless you’re already getting everything done that you set out to do, then this may be the year to resolve to improve your Calendar Fu.  (At least, Mark Hopkins at Mashable seems to think so…)

Think about it: your other resolutions are only as good as your ability to execute on your plans.  Why not make the pursuit of schedule mastery a top priority in 2008?

Join the FuseCal team this Wednesday, December 19, for yet another installment of the monthly Providence Geek Dinner at AS220. It’s always a great time to network & talk shop with other local techies. If you’re in the area, you definitely should check it out… This time, there’s even gonna be robots!!!

Of course, in the interest of keeping this post at least tangentially related to online calendars, here’s the Providence Geeks iCal feed.

I’ve already made my iPhone devotion quite clear, but seeing how our CEO is a long-time BlackBerry user, I feel compelled to at least make mention of new calendar features for everybody’s favorite thumb-crippler: You can now sync your BlackBerry with Google Calendar.

Can it possibly be a mere coincidence that Bill was in Mountain View yesterday? Spooky.

I hope you like going to the dentist, because you just ran out of excuses to miss your regular cleanings.

You can also look forward to changing a lot of smoke alarm batteries, donating a lot of blood, and all kinds of other things you’ve been putting off. Here’s a great list of Brilliant Recurring Events [found via LifeHacker], that a bunch of very responsible people have been putting together. Consider them your pro bono personal assistants. Except they won’t bring you coffee. Which is probably okay, since your dentist was just going to complain about your yellow teeth anyways.

Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as “Snakes on a Plane,” but then we all can’t be Samuel L. Jackson, can we? (Note to self: Try to be more like Samuel L. Jackson.)

Aaaanyways… a couple of us on the FuseCal team have converted to the Church of iPhone, so we have a heavily vested interest in calendar technology for our touchable little bundles of joy. Here are a couple updates in that department… probably the first of many.

Scott Mace at Calendar Swamp has a few calendar features in mind that he’d like to see in the upcoming iPhone SDK. I hope Apple’s listening to him, because I definitely like his vision of the future.  The iPhone’s calendar is really slick, and it works even when I don’t have a network connection.  The better I can keep that calendar updated, the happier I’ll be.

On other hand, though, I am really liking the new iPhone UIs for the various Google apps, as reported on earlier this week by Mike Arrington at TechCrunch.  The calendar looks great, and this approach eliminates the need to sync with iCal on my laptop, which I really like.  I’ve already got a few FuseCal feeds updating my Google Calendar all the time, so for the time being, this seems like the best way to make sure I have that info up-to-date when I’m away from the computer.

Some updates to travel planning site TripIt were reviewed on TechCrunch today. The biggest new feature looks like a slick way to pull together your travel plans into an iCal feed. Seriously, check it out if you’re looking for a good way to share your itinerary with other folks or collect all the details for your own reference.

I’ll definitely be trying this out next time I go to a conference. Combine that with a FuseCal feed to pull the conference schedule itself from the web, and I’ll have no excuse not to be in all the right places at all the right times (unless, of course, there’s an open bar calling my name!).

Okay, you MacBook-toting hipsters out there… here’s a good one for ya…

So you’ve used FuseCal to move all your events to iCal, and now you want to throw some GTD goodness into the mix…? No sweat. Just surf on over to 43F Recap: Best of iCal Tips, where Merlin Mann has a few tricks up his sleeve to totally pump up your iCal Fu.  Hiiiyaaa!

For the enterprise set: A recent discussion on Slashdot focused on Quality Open Source Calendaring & Scheduling Options. Lots of talk about CalDAV, Zimbra, pencils in space, and more! Worth a gander if you’re in the market for some serious groupware, but afraid that an Exchange server will eat your children. (I’ve heard things….)

The ever-thorough folks over at Mashable have compiled a crazy-huge list of 65+ online calendars and calendar tools, including a bunch I hadn’t used yet.  Most of them appear to support the iCal format, which means they’ll play nice with FuseCal.

Who loves you, baby?

Hey kids! It’s your favorite Uncle Matt, here with an important message… The FuseCal alpha is alive!!!

That’s right: we’ve deployed to our fancy new production servers, and we’re ready to serve your online calendaring needs. So, be a good friend and kick the tires for me.