Calendaring woes in real life

There has been a bunch of talk on the calendaring standards lists about how to handle time zones, and sure enough, last week I ran into a real-world example that pointed out the issues (but not the answers) in maddening fashion.

The Educause 2004 conference web site has an Itinerary Builder where you can select which conference events to attend and build an personal itinerary. I did that, then exported the itinerary to an ical file, which I then imported into iCal on my PowerBook. So far it worked great all the events showed up at the right times.

I then synched the Powerbook with my Nokia cell phone, figuring I could then just keep track of where I needed to be next by checking my calendar on the cell phone as I wandered the conference.

But lo and behold, all the conference events showed up on the cell phone eight hours earlier than their scheduled times!

When I looked at the data that the Educause ical export put out, I noticed that it came through with no time zone information. iCal on the Mac didn't pay any attention to that and put it on my calendar as if it were local time. But the Nokia apparently decided that any event without a time zone must be taking place at that time in Greenwich Mean Time (UTC) and shifted the event times accordingly.

Aargh!