Journey into sync

I’m fairly picky when it comes to how I manage my personal data.  I like a fair amount of separation between things but I want everthing accessible.  Quite a while ago I moved my domain (for email, etc) over to google apps.  I can’t really understand why anyone with less than 3 or 4 thousand users would run their own mail servers, but that is a post for another day.  Since I’ve been a user of google apps for a while I’ve been looking for a good way to manage my calendars.  I’ve never been totally happy with GoogleCalendar especially when compared with iCal.  I’ve used both spanning sync as well as busy sync, but I never got enough use out of them to warrant paying for them.  Throw in the addition of my iphone and I just wasn’t happy with how things were setup.