It's been a while since I wrote that note to myself, but I somehow had .emacs setup so it'd get recompiled automatically to byte code on changes (which helps startup speed), and somehow whatever I setup at some point stopped working. (Which resulted in my .emacs changes being silently ignored, as stale .elc was used -- that was confusing to figure out!)

For now I just gave up and stopped using the byte-compiled version, sometimes life is too short, even for an emacs user!

(Though in general anyone who chooses to use emacs must not think life is TOO short...)