Tim,

Late last year and early this year I was looking for a new desktop calendar with a page for every day of the year to replace my 1998 Far Side calendar.

There are several derivations of this calendar type, from Dilbert, to Far Side, to Murphys law, to Religious lessons....

I however was looking for a UNIX (preferably Linux) based calendar that would have 365 lessons or suggestions I could spend 5 minutes a day to further develop myself.

Unfortunately I was not able to find any such item on the market (either in retail stores or the Internet).

I am fairly new to the Linux/UNIX world (about 3 years) so I am not sure how much I could develop such an item on my own. Your organization however has a tremendous wealth of information on the subject developed by many people. A prime example is your book _Unix Powertools_ with all kinds interesting tips. Your organization also has the infrastructure to get this product out to the people, along with the having the right audience.

Is this daily Unix calendar a project your organization would be willing to take on to produce? If not, do you have suggestions I how I could proceed on the project myself? If I were to pick 365 hints and tips from your publications would you then publish the calendar?

a calendar needy person,
Federico Grau

Federico,

If someone came to us with a good calendar, we'd likely publish it--or at least make a deal with a calendar publisher to do it. (We actually did this with Workman Publishing, originator of the Page-a-Day calendar format, for the Internet, creating with them a calendar based on The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog.) What's more, if someone wanted to try to put one together based on a book like UNIX Power Tools, we could grant you the right to use material from the book. But I think it's actually a harder thing to do than you might think. But hey--send us a proposal, with samples of the kinds of things you'd put in there.

One problem with calendars is that they are harder to sell than books. They are sold in to bookstores once a year, in the Spring of the preceding year--so the year 2000 calendars have already been sold! (The bookstores decide in the Spring what calendars to carry; the publishers print them based on advanced orders from bookstores, and deliver them in the Fall for sales through the end of the year.) This long lag time makes it very hard to create a really timely calendar on a fast-changing technical topic.

The timing problem more than anything else is the reason that we haven't done calendars before, since we get this request all the time.

--Tim

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