Magus's Grimoire [Abridged]

It seems posting about events I'll be attending has the positive effect that friends of mine frequently decide to join me. Accordingly, I'm going to try to occasionally post information about upcoming events I'm planning to attend.

You can always contact me about any of these for further information; for some I don't have information or links on hand to provide.

October 31st, Albany NY, Fall Frolic [SCD] ($50, Students $25)

The Albany-area Scottish Country Dance group hosts an annual ball in late October. Always lots of fun and good dancing, I try to attend every year. On Halloween this year, which means costumes! No costume requirement I'm aware of. More information in the PDF flyer, including instructions for all the dances, 'cause SCD folks are cool like that.

December 13th, Rehoboth, MA (near Providence, RI), Jane Austen's Birthday Tea Dance [Regency]

Afternoon Regency Tea Dance, period day dress encouraged but not required. I'll probably post about this again when I have more detail.

December 19th, Salem, MA, Fezziwig Ball [Civil War?]

This is being hosted by CVD, and I don't yet have very complete details on the event. Evening event to be preceded by a lantern-light promenade in Salem. Period dress encouraged but not required: period being anytime during the life of Charles Dickens [1817-1870]. Dance likely to be primarly Civil War-era, but that's a guess.

I may not be able to attend this one, as mid and late 19th Century dance features a lot of couple dancing that's very hard on my right forearm. These are interspersed with set dances and quadrilles danced in the stately walking style.

February 21st, Cambridge, MA, Tea Dance [Regency]

I'll definitely be attending the Regency Tea Dance. Also worth mentioning is the rest of the Vintage Tea Dance series--I'm sure I'll be attending some of them, although as they're mostly Victorian, my arm may again limit my participation this year. These are great, fun events, though; I encourage people to go without me. These are Third Sunday afternoons through April.

Alternate Fridays, Salem, MA, Vintage Dance [19th Century]

Fun, beginner friendly, low emphasis on costume evening of dancing in Old Salem Town Hall. I get up there occasionally when my free Fridays coincide with the event, especially if I have someone to drive up with. However, again, with my stepping back from couple dancing I haven't been up as much recently.

I think I'm in search of a new calendaring application. gcal, while great, doesn't seem to support the features I really want (or needs a front-end I haven't yet discovered to do so). Here's my feature wishlist:

• Lets me store my data on my own computer. A tool which requires that I give some vendor all my data will lose points. A tool which does so and also doesn't allow me an easy way to replicate that data locally so I still have access to it in the event of connectivity issues (or the provider disappearing) will lose even more points.
• Is easily usable from the command-line within a terminal window for basic functionality. This includes both displaying the calendar in reasonable views and adding events to the calendar. For the latter, editing a file is acceptable as long as it's easy.
• Makes it easy to interrogate the calendar for things like "what do I have going on today/this week/this month/the second weekend in April/etc.?" and "When is that Passover thing happening again, anyway?"
• Does all the work of including holidays I might care about.
• Makes it easy to dump all of my data into it, but doesn't clutter its UI so much that I can't tell what's going on after I've done so. Should be able to easily visually distinguish the importance of the most important thing going on during a given time-period (day/hour/whatever).
• That means the UI needs to be able to know what my definitions of importance are.
• Should have support for existing open standards for calendaring, because this might be useful down the road (say for sending events to other people).
• In an ideal world, has a web-enabled front-end with access controls (or just one which is read-only). This should allow me to easily (ideally without any intervention at all) share my schedule with my friends. My schedule is busy enough with interesting stuff that for some reason it seems to me that there are people who'd be interested in seeing what I'm doing just to know about stuff that's going on. (This UI should also, at a minimum, be able to filter on some sense of importance so people aren't confronted with boring minutiae.)
• Again, it must be sufficiently usable that I will actually use it. Usable is here defined as requiring a minimum of effort for tasks I want to perform while allowing me to perform any task I reasonably want to. In particular, I have to bother to enter every event into it as I become aware of the event, and I have to bother to check the calendar regularly.
• A bonus feature might be allowing others to enter (provisional) events for me. This could work with the open standard support mentioned above.

Any suggestions? Just as Hiveminder has been great for helping me dump tasks I want to do someday somewhere central and not have to worry about forgetting about them indefinitely (and is also handy for things I need to do more immediately), I'd like something which helps me keep track of what I've promised to/hope to do when so I'm aware of potential conflicts sooner.

(Incidentally, hm fails the not requiring me to give someone else my data test. This is something I forgive them for partly because they apologize for it. If I find something which gives all the functionality I use without that requirement, I might switch to it.)