Emacs bankruptcy!

Reading this page inspired me to greatly overhaul my .emacs:

http://milkbox.net/note/single-file-master-emacs-configuration/

In particular, I really liked the idea of not having package.el
packages checked into version control, because that's just pointless
and creates tons of diff noise when packages get updated.

So I've rewritten a lot of things, adopted some milkypostman ideas,
and written some new code that does a decent job of bootstrapping the
packages I want if they are not present. So if you were to take this
init.el and use it on your own, it would detect that certain required
packages are missing, and automatically download & install them on
first run.