I already posted a wile ago that I use a program called PocketMac to synch my blackberry with my mac.

That way I managed to get my Blackberry calender (which I use mostly) on my Mac in iCal, and I managed to get my addressbook from my Mac on my Blackberry, which is kinda neat, 'cause now I have all our private addresses in my address book on my Blackberry as well.

What was going wrong during the synch was the birthdays. I have a list of birthdays in my addressbook on the Mac, and they are shown in iCal (if you activate that option). They are, however, in a different calender than the rest of the appointments, which are all in one calender Pocketmac.

While synching again and again, I got every birthday three times on my Blackberry! And finally in iCal as well, one in the birthday calender and three times in the PocketMac calender.

Finally it occured to me that I am also automatically synching with my .mac account and that that's where it all went wrong.

So first, I deleted EVERYTHING from iCal, except the birthday calender. Then started a refreshed synch on .mac, overwriting .mac with the iCal calender, containing ONLY birthdays from my addressbook.

Next, I told PocketmacSynch manager, NOT to synch the birthday calender and synched the blackberry with my mac. In iCal, I had the triple birthdays from the blackberry, plus all my regular appointments. Deleted all the redundant birthdays from iCal (which is much quicker than having to delete them from the Blackberry) and synched again. And yes, now they were gone from the Blackberry.
Next, run a synch between my mac and my .mac account.

Last but not least, I told pocketsynch to synch the birthday calender too, and tried synching twice. It worked. I was expecting the birthdays to show up in both calenders like they did before, but now they didn't.

So I am guessing it is working now. Tada. The joy of synching can be troublesome at the best of times.

But when it works.... :-)