Create Backpack reminders via e-mail/SMS, Part II

I've gone back to putting everything into 37signals apps after a brief honeymoon with other tools. The 37signals stuff just works too well to use anything else.

My current approach is to use Highrise for work stuff and Backpack for personal stuff...it's a pretty good split. I find that work is more people-oriented (call this person, e-mail this person, etc.) and home stuff best organized by keeping track of lots of little lists and bits of data. It's also kinda nice to keep them separated so you're not thinking about work all the time.

Anyway, besides keeping lists, I also get a lot of use out of Backpack's reminders at home. It's great for reminding you about little domestic things like picking up stamps and paying your credit card bill. My problem is short term memory...if I think of it, I've got to write it down immediately. This is especially true if I'm on the go.

To deal with this problem, I've written a little bit of Ruby code that creates a reminder when I send an e-mail to a certain address. I did something like this a while ago, but at the time I didn't have a way to run the code without constantly polling a POP account for new messages (which is no good). Thanks to the fact that I've now switched to TextDrive for web hosting, I can call my script when an e-mail comes in, which is much more reliable. (The message is fed to the script via good ol' STDIN...nice.)

The script tries to be a bit clever and interpret text like "Call Mom tuesday 5pm" into a reminder with the text "Call Mom" that will fire next Tuesday at 5pm. Take a look at this to see other examples of input it will interpret, but please ignore the sucky POP-related code and just go with this simpler version if at all possible.