The Family Calendar Blog

The Families and Work Institute says that overworking employees does more harm than good:

Article link

Among other things, this article details a study conducted by the the UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families. Here’s a key excerpt:

“Researchers say now there are three jobs in the American family — two careers plus parenting — and only two people to accomplish them.”

Here’s
the article.

Just saw this great article in the Christian Science Monitor. Here’s an excerpt:

“I’m not sure they make a calendar large enough for us,” says Ms. Reiss of Newton, Mass., explaining that her life revolves around “two companies, three children, a spouse, a lot of community involvement, a social life, the kids’ social life, and volunteering in a soup kitchen every week.

And the link to the article:

http://www.christiansciencemonitor.com/2005/0316/p11s01-lifp.html

Mediabee Web Access represents the beginnings of the second-generation of our user interface. You’ll see the changes here first and then they will also appear in the Mediabee Desktop Client at a later time. From a data perspective, Mediabee Desktop Client will provide you with richer views into your data for the time being - but eventually you won’t see much difference between the capabilities of the local client and the web access client.

We’ll quickly highlight the main features of Mediabee Web Access here. The philosophy that drives this user interface is “everything you need easily accessible from one place & updated in real-time”.

Get ready access to your home calendar from anywhere - with just a browser. And one-click access to your local (home) weather information.

Get Breaking Headlines from important news sources - updated every few minutes:

Get Health News from MedicinNet® - updated throughout the day - on medical topics of interest to you:

Surprise recipes of the day for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, of the low-carb, low-fat, and vegetarian kind - from some of the best sources:

The hottest deals on the net delivered to you fresh for the picking:

Instant access to the Family Calendar Blog:

We’re just warming up! The little search box on the corner can bring you some amazing stuff with the absolute minimum of effort!

More to come in a future article.

What is Mediabee Web Access?

Mediabee Web Access (MWA) is a “light” version of the Mediabee Desktop Client. This is a quick write-up of MWA. This and other material will be incorporated into the existing help documentation over time.

What do I need to run MWA?

To run MWA, you must first have Mediabee installed on a Windows XP or Windows 2000 machine. (A Linux version is expected to be released in the not-too-distant future.)

MWA is completely browser-based and can be used from any system that has Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0+ or Mozilla/Firefox 1.0+.

Does it work the same as Mediabee Desktop Client (MDC)?

MWA does not offer all the functions of MDC, but it offers some of the key functions that users have been asking for. MWA is meant for people who’d like to access their home calendar from work or vice versa. MWA could also be used, for example, to check on your children’s homework completion or your elder relative’s medication compliance (all standard disclaimers apply) - assuming that the children or your elder relative are checking off their completed tasks.

On what systems should I run MWA as opposed to Mediabee Desktop Client (MDC) or Mediabee Thin Client (MTC)?

As stated, you can run MWA anywhere. Let’s say you have a home network with some PCs, Macs, and Linux machines. You would run MDC on one of your PC (Windows) machines. Then you could run MWA on the other machines. MWA is light on system resource consumption, and can run on any operating system (OS) - including some older Windows machines.

Will MWA work with older versions of Mediabee?

You will need Mediabee Version 1.1 or higher to run MWA. You must be a registered user. If you registered Mediabee V1.0.13 or lower, you must re-register. To re-register, you should change the “location” field in the registration screen and click on the Register Now button.

How do I login to MWA?

Visit http://www.mediabee.com/login and you will see a button for Mediabee Web Access. Click on the button to open up a separate browser window from which you will login. You will need to have the following items from your Registration screen handy: email address, password, phone number, and location. The password and location are case-sensitive and must be typed in exactly as it appears in the Registration screen.

I’ve done everything, but it doesn’t seem to work?

If you see the message “Login failed. Try again.” then you should double-check the details from the Registration screen. You may need to re-register if you first registered using an older version of Mediabee.

If the browser appears to hang, it is likely that MDC is unable to connect to our server. This could be because your system or your firewall is preventing MDC to access port 5222.

If this error is happening immediately after you first tried to access MWA after you installed Version 1.1, you may need to reboot your system.

If you’re still having issues, please send an email to support@mediabee.com. As you know, this is still beta software, an we would appreciate your cooperation in ironing out any potential bugs.

A new version, 1.1, of Mediabee has been released! It will be available on download.com starting on March 8, 2005.

Three major enhancements have been made:

1) Performance and stability. Mediabee 1.1 will use fewer system resources and offer better stability than its predecessors.

2) Web Access! Now you can access your home calendar from work or on the road - using just a browser. (You can also use this method of access on older Windows 98 or ME computers that are not supported by the desktop application - so long as you’ve installed Mediabee on another system.)

3) More robust list sharing. We’re still enhancing this feature to iron out the last few remaining bugs, but V1.1 is more robust than its predecessors in list sharing. This feature is cool because it allows you to permit someone else to write into your calendar and vice versa!

Watch this space for more information on this download. If you cannot wait to try this new version, email support@mediabee.com.

Thanks for your interest. If you like Mediabee, don’t keep it to yourself - spread the word! The more users we have, the more we can innovate. Some truly outstanding features will be available in the coming months - we ain’t just a purty interface!

Keep that feedback coming! Remember, even though we have done a lot of testing, deploying software to thousands of users still isn’t a science. There are so many differences in the ways systems are configured and used! We value any and all feedback - help make Mediabee better for all.