Patterns

I've been noticing two patterns lately in my various activities. They're not really bad or good (or at least, I'm unsure which); it's just some digital behaviors I've noticed in myself.

Firstly, anything of even vague importance on my personal workstations is a git repository that I've made it a habit to udate each time I use each machine. Between the three independant computers I use on a daily basis, my data is pretty safe from a random hardware malfunction. Granted a building fire or similar would still take them all out but a single piddling hard-drive failure isn't something that strikes fear into my heart at this point. My most used git commands are (in descending order

1. git add .
2. git checkout
3. git commit -m
4. (since I started using git from Emacs; see below) git log

Next, Emacs and Gimp are quickly supplanting almost every program I used to use. In fact (for my personal work) I now basically live in Emacs, Gimp, Inkscape and Chrome. Gimp gets used for image manipulation (Inkscape just for vectors), Google Chrome for the obvious, and Emacs for everything else. I used to use Terminal to run git, erl, mzscheme and (every once in a while) SBCL. Since getting heavily into Emacs, Quack lets me drop into an improved mzscheme prompt, erlang-shell does the same thing for erl, and despite my earlier complaints, SLIME is actually very nice once you're already comfortable with Lisp and Emacs. Emacs 22+ also comes with a git package that you just need to require to get a pretty freakin' good interface going.

As an aside, if you're interested in picking up Emacs, I highly recommend these two articles by Steve Yegge, and Xah's awesome tutorials. If you're interested in picking up a Lisp dialect and don't already know the editor very well, I actually recommend staying away from Emacs until you have a firm grip on PLT Scheme, then coming back and picking up Elisp once you're more familiar with the language.

Like I said, I'm not sure whether these pattrns are positive or not, but they remain as I've stated them:

1. Anything even remotely important on a machine I pilot is in a GIT repo.
2. I use a grand total of 4 programs for any and all personal projects (and the usage is skewed heavily towards Emacs and Chrome).