Dated appointment reminders

[Desmond Rivet <desmond_news@videotron.ca>]

Hi all,

Is there any way to get an early warning reminder of an upcoming
appointment in my agenda without using the DEADLINE feature?

Allow me to elaborate...

What I'm after is something very close to the DEADLINE feature, but not
quite.  With DEADLINE, you have the following behavour (unless there's a
way to alter it?):

 * without a TODO state, you get early reminders in your agenda up until
   the DEADLINE date, after which you get warnings that the date is
   past, forever.
 
 * with a TODO state item, you get the same thing, except you can turn
   off the reminders/warnings by setting the state to DONE.

So unless you want the DEADLINE'ed date appearing on your agenda forever
after the due date, you need a TODO state and you need to set it to
DONE.

What I'm after is something similar to this behavour, except that I
don't want the warnings after the due date is past, even if the TODO
state is not DONE.  Ideally the TODO state, if there is one, would not
be involved at all - it would just be a plain vanilla appointment, with
the added feature that I get early warning reminders as the due date
approaches, and nothing after.

I am currently using the diary for this, and incorporating it into the
orgmode agenda.  I have entries like this:

%%(diary-remind '(diary-date 11 12 t) -14) Mom's birthday.

I've been using this system for a while, and it works.  But it's not
ideal.  For example, I haven't figured out how to incorporate a time
with the date using this system.  If I had an appointment on April 17th,
2010, 6pm, for example, and I wanted a simple reminder 5 days in
advance, I don't know how I'd do that.

Any ideas are appreciated.  Thanks for any help!

-- 
Desmond Rivet

Pain is weakness leaving the body.