Christmas cards and Addressbooks and vCards

As of now, Jan 20 -- we still have not mailed a single Christmas card. But enough
about that -- let's talk address books!

Candy's fell into many pieces -- full of scratchouts. Her electronic Palm version
was corrupted N times, as was mine. The Palm has a propietary format, and even though I did successfully port it to linux using the Jpilot application, it just has not been the same.
I've abandoned the device itself, and only used the calendar addressbook.

But it didn't work -- because I have too many computers and I couldn't safely keep
the addressbooks synced between them all. I needed my contacts in a simple text form. Certainly I could go back to a text file like we all used to use on mainframes, but maybe I can do better?

I ended up using the .vCard format, which is a standard for address books that's been
around for more than a decade. It does not seem widely adopted -- but it's the only
standard that exists, and it has some support. Also, it is in pure text, with
keywords like ADDRESS: PHONE: etc.

The application I found is PyCoCuMa (Pythonic Contact and Customer Manager). It's
Alpha or Beta code, but it works adequately, is Python for gosh sake and does a
decent job reading vCards and generally being an address book. ALSO -- If I find
(or write) a better vCard reader, I am not locked in. My contacts are in plain text,
and they will still be readable in 50 years provided I update my storage media!
So now for the first time in five years our contacts are all organized in one place -- and now we can do our Christmas cards. Will we? Stay tuned!!