Re: [O] converting people to Emacs and org-mode

[Loyall, David]

I might have converted someone this weekend.

I had been babbling about Emacs, lisp, and the early 1980s to him for some 
time. 

I told him that Emacs was a 37 year old tree, that it had carefully tended for 
all that time by a community of folks that really cared about doing things the 
right way, and the result was that it already knows how to do just about all 
the small tasks that you can imagine asking it to do.

I started to demonstrate org sparse tree functionality[1], and he joked: "Yeah, 
yeah, but can it tell me what time sunset will be today?"

So I fired up the info browser and started searching and in less than sixty 
seconds, we'd invoked M-x sunrise-sunset .[2]

We didn't know our own longitude and latitude offhand, but it didn't matter: he 
was already impressed.  After I assured him that this was a built in function, 
and that I'd really never heard of it until just now, he said that he would 
look into Emacs.

:)

--Dave

[1] I should really make sure that I've memorized key bindings (well enough 
that enjoying a couple beers doesn't make me forget them) before trying this 
again.
[2] On my work PC, this says "Cannot open load file: solar".  Thank goodness it 
happened to work on my home laptop!  (I won't fix this; no worries.)