[emacs-wiki-discuss] scheduling rotating events

[Paul Lussier]

Hi all,

I'm trying to figure out how best to schedule recurring, rotating
events.  My dilemma specifically has to do with backup tapes and
off-site storage rotation. I was beginning to consider just a flat
text file outside of planner, but then I remembered that Sacha's
hippie-expand, specifically it's recognition of regexps like +5tue,
could come in handy.

Here's the scanario.  Every Tuesday, someone from the storage facility
comes to pickup and/or drop off tapes.  When I send tapes out, I need
to specify when I'd like those tapes back.  Given X tapes in rotation,
I can see where using +Xtue will be helpful.  What I need now though,
is a way to incorporate this into planner.

Ideally, I'd have a single file which have a tape name, it's current
location, and when it is expected to be returned to me.  It's also
like to store the date it left here.  So, I was thinking of some
format like:

 Tape    Sent    Returns

What would be nice, is if I can hook this into planner and diary (or
planer-appt?) such that each week, planner can tell me based on this
file, what tapes I should be sending out, and what I should be
expecting back.  This would surely eliminate me having to look up this
information each week, and manually calculating when I should ask the
storage facility to return these tapes.

Of course, there needs to be some flexibility to allow for manually
adjusting the schedule as well.  Occasionally, the backups take more
than one tape, which means I may add an extra tape, or request the
early return of a tape.  This I don't expect to be difficult, since
the data can be manually edited, and planner can just report what's in
that file.

Is this currently do-able with all the bells and whistles that planner
has now, or do we need to hack something together?  

-- 
Thanks,
Paul

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