unicornucopious

Remind is a great command-line utility for 1) expressing when future events will happen, 2) expressing when you'd like to be reminded of them, and 3) executing the reminder (kind of).

The first part is the most interesting. It's interesting because no one else has solved the problem of expressing dates. No joke. Expressing a date like May 16 is old news, but expressing complex patterns of matchable dates is generally not handled well. Since my frame of reference is Outlook, Yahoo calendars, and Google Calendar, I can compare remind with those three.

• Every Wednesday at 2:30 (yes)
• Every third Wednesday at 2:30 (I don't think so)
• Every third Wednesday at 2:30 unless it's Thanksgiving or Christmas, then the second Wednesday. (definitely not)

I'll try not to expound on Remind's features, since those are well-documented. I want to propose one useful way to use Remind. See, Remind's design follows the Unix philosophy of being a small command-line tool that does one thing really well. Being a command-line tool, it only reminds you of dates when you run it.

"How do I use it?" is a question with as many answers as users. There are UI wrappers, export formats, and daemons. I've settled on calling it in my .bashrc:

alias r='remind ~/.remind'

r

Since I'm constantly shelled into my laptop, I'm reminded of upcoming events at every login (local or ssh), every new screen session, and any time I command 'r'.

My .remind so far is very noob stuff, just Birthdays and ad hoc events:

# Important personal dates
REM 15 June +10 MSG Anniversary %b

REM 14 Jan +10 MSG My birthday %b
REM 13 July +10 MSG Al's birthday %b

# Tasks
REM 1 Sep 2008 *90 MSG Wash cars %b
REM 28 Jun 2008 +5 MSG Democrat party %b
REM 18 Jun 2008 +5 MSG Lunch w Louis %b

REM 1 Sep 2009 +30 MSG Contact WF to drop PMI

The %b, when run, is expanded to something like "in 3 days' time" or "tomorrow".

I've already followed up thoughtfully on some items, thanks to Remind, so I don't see this tool falling out of my stack anytime soon. You can see, I've put in a reminder for 18 months from now, to have Private Mortgage Insurance dropped (which in the U.S. you have to personally request), so Remind may make me more profitable (in addition to thoughtful).

And yes, I've forgotten my birthday in recent years, so a reminder is more necessity than narcissism :-)