Stupid, stupid, stupid.  Tried to get brother's phone to sync with outlook properly and it wound up deleting stuff.  Fortunately, I pulled the wire, but not before all the events got whacked from the calendar.  As somewhat of a software programmer myself, this underscores the importance of error checking.

Using my high-school progamming instructor's all-to-frequent thought, I may not be writing code for pace makers or any other kind of medical, life-critical applications.  Still, the inconvenience of losing all the calendar events and contacts, is more than a slight annoyance, especially if no proper backups exist (which they didn't).

I suppose that's enough of a rant for today.  The message I'm taking away is that too much error trapping is better than not enough.  And that electronic gadgets have one commonality - they'll all fail sometime.