The year-end discombobulation

I used to go into the office in Champaign every day, driving half an hour each way listening to the radio or somesuch. One year I was going to work in the middle of the night to accomodate our other schedules, so I had a front-row seat for Mars' show in the eastern sky. Must've been mid-2003.

Nowadays my trip to the "office" involves stepping over the kids' toys without spilling my coffee, and plopping down in my chair in our old library at home. "Old" because it's now more a computer lab than a library, but old names hang around.

Digression is the soul of blogging, ain't it? Back to the subject, my periodic self-discombobulation. It's time for the great year-end emacs init file reorganization and email shuffle.

I've always downloaded my email to my work computer and stored it in gnus's nnml format. Now that I work from home 99.9% of the time, my plan is to get all my email archives in place here at home, then read Wolfram's imap server from here. I'll rsync back to work periodically so stuff can be backed up responsibly there.

I used to start a new mail directory each year - Mail-2002, Mail-2003, etc. Last December I was too lazy/busy to switch things over and kept using Mail-2006. Meanwhile I started using emacs' planner mode to keep track of everything and now it has scads of links to messages in the Mail-2006 dir, so I'm going to keep it all in one vast directory.

[Sat Dec 29 22:30:02 CST 2007] [billw@billwlx plans]$ du -sh /billw/Mail-2006
1.6G  /billw/Mail-2006
[Sat Dec 29 22:30:33 CST 2007] [billw@billwlx plans]$

In transferring my work gnus and planner settings to home, I was also compelled to clean up and organize my .emacs file. This year's MVP in the file organization department is Ken Manheimer's allout package. As I wrote to Ken when I started using allout,

Using allout is like putting on glasses - I've been able to improve and clarify code in every file in which I've used it. Sure, any outline mode could help with that, but they all have arcane or busy navigation & show/hide commands. The genius of allout's hot-spot navigation makes it all as easy as putting on a pair of glasses. Hmm... that sounds like promotional copy - feel free to use it if it answers a need :-)

That's about it - no conclusions, no big ideas - just a note for future reference.