September 26, 2007

Fellow Emacs geek Paul Lussier pointed me to Take Back Your Brain!, a blog about influencing _your own brain_ through advertising. Here’s what the about page says:

How to Take Back your Brain

1. Learn the techniques professionals use to persuade us and borrow any that seem useful.
2. Use our personal technology tools to make effective ads aimed at influencing ourselves.
3. Use personal technology again to automate delivery of those messages.

Good stuff, especially if you’re an advertising geek. Check it out!

E-Mail from Paul Lussier

Random Emacs symbol: gnus-cache-remove-articles – Variable: Classes of articles to remove from the cache.

I spent some time figuring out how to generate Gnuplot graphs from the financial records I’ve been keeping with Ledger. Here’s what I came up with:

To generate this graph, I pieced together the following reports:

ledger -M -C -R -n -J reg ^assets ^liab > net-worth
ledger -t -a -M -C -R -n -j reg ^Income > income
ledger -M -C -R -n -j reg ^Expenses > expenses

… and plotted it with Gnuplot:

• set xdata time
• plot “expenses” using 1:2 title “Expenses” with lines, “income” using 1:2 title “Income” with lines, “net-worth” using 1:2 title “Net Worth” with lines, 0 with lines

… and fiddled around with the plot, and that was that!

Random Emacs symbol: gnus-gethash-safe – Macro: Get hash value of STRING in HASHTABLE.