Dreamhost, Ruby, Rails, Tracks, Your Health, and You

So I've been trying to do GTD. I need organizational help, bigtime. Since a lot of people who seem to be a lot like me are running headlong toward the GTD cliff, I figured I might as well bend to peer pressure.

I mean, when has peer pressure ever been wrong?

I've tried just about every GTD setup for quite a long amount of time (read: 2 or 3 of them, for maybe 30 minutes overall each), and I failed every time, mainly because every time I've tried to implement it, I've been so busy with other things that I just drop it. I realize that this what the system was designed to remedy, but I've had a LOT of years to build up experience in self-defeating techniques.

A few weeks ago, I found Tracks. A web interface for GTD! Free! Good looking!

Easy to setup on Dreamhost? God no.

Dreamhost has said that they'll support rails as soon as it's stable. That could be a long, long ways off. So, I decided to go my own way and install ruby, rails, and Tracks myself on my Dreamhost account. This was a wacky little nightmare that I wouldn't want anyone to have to relive, so I figure I'll share the instructions.

Please note: I don't know a damn thing about Ruby as a language. I plan on learning, but right now I'm more worried about brushing up on my Lisp, Scheme, and Verilog than I am about learning yet another silly scripting language.

Installing Ruby, RubyGems, RubyOnRails, and Tracks on a Dreamhost Account (That's a link to the actual blog post, as I'm having to update it a bunch and I'm sick of reflecting changes back here.)