Tag: birthday

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How to Change the Default Alert Time for Birthdays on iCal for Mac OSX Lion

When I switched over to iCal from Outlook, I was happy to find that they also had a birthday calendar. However the alert time was defaulting to 8:00 am and I like my reminders going off at 12:00 am. I tried looking for a setting to change it, but there wasn’t anything obvious inside preferences. The only option was to enable or disable “Show Birthdays calendar”.

After looking around a bit more, I noticed I had my Day starts at set to 8am, which felt too much to be a coincidence. I changed the starting time to Midnight, but my birthdays’ alert time didn’t get updated. I wondered if it would only apply to new birthdays that get added.

Then I tried disabling and re-enabling to show birthdays and that updated all my birthday reminders to have an alert time of 12am. Sweet!

TL;DR:

  1. Open iCal and go to preferences (⌘+,)
  2. Change “Day starts at:” to time you want your birthday alerts to go off
  3. Uncheck and recheck “Show Birthdays calendar”

iCal Preferences

All your birthday reminders should now have the new alert time. 🙂

Technically at this point, you might be able to change your day start time back and it wouldn’t affect your existing birthday alert times, but you’ll have to test that yourself.

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Perry’s Birthday Celebration

Here’s my full set of pictures: Perry’s Birthday Celebration 2010. I believe Valerie also took some.

We celebrated Perry’s birthday today. We had dinner at Red Robin’s. By the time we got back to my place, I had realized I had forgotten to asked the waitress to take our picture, oh well.

At the end of dinner, Perry busted out his free Cold Stone coupon asking if anyone else was interested in getting ice cream. Sarah had secretly ordered a birthday cake for him and had planned for me to pick it up. Somehow it was suggested Perry could get his ice cream to go and save for later. No, no no, that was a bad idea. I was trying to decide what to do. Should I reveal we already have a Cold Stone cake for him? While Perry was about to order something, I tapped him on his back and said you should save the coupon for later. Perry goes, oh… I had wanted to pick up the cake in private and surprised him later, but it was too late now. I asked for the cake and Perry figured out it was Sarah who got it for him. Originally the cake was supposed to say “Happy Birthday Old Man” (it even says that on the order form), but it appears they just wrote “Happy Birthday Perry”.

We got back to my place. A couple decided to play a round of Settlers, while the rest of us busted out on Rock Band:

settlers rock band

Someone also busted out PGR3 sometime along the way. From what I hear, Chris dominated.

Here’s some other pictures I thought turned out pretty neat:

Phillip enjoying onion rings Valerie and Perry rock band PGR3 shrimp tempura hmmmm ying ying and valerie perry pointing

The ice cream cake from Cold Stone was really good. (Thanks Sarah!) It was a chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream, but also had pineapple and coconut. Mmmmm. Unfortunately I realized last minute that I didn’t have candles, so Perry had to pretend to blow out imaginary candles. You can check out the video on Facebook: Happy Birthday Perry!

Perry's birthday cake Perry blowing out imaginary candles Perry cutting the cake A slice of the delicious cake

We had several extra slices that Perry was going to take home. Unfortunately my freezer was out of space, so it stayed in my fridge. By the time we left, this was what it looked like:

melted ice cream cake

We ended the night night with some 4 vs 4 Halo 3 (Perry, Sathana, Valerie, Chris vs Toland, Phillip, Saran, Tom – unfortunately Ying Ying couldn’t participate) . The teams were actually quite even and we found the winning factor to be which team was using the big screen TV. Playing 4 player Halo on a 24″ LCD just isn’t good enough.