[aliveupstairs]

If you are using absolute paths, I found this easier to get used to:

    hash -d b=/home/me/bin

Then you call foo as:

    ~b/foo

I have an array of these defined to my most used directories.

[mineo]

I believe hash -d and supsequent expansion of those paths only works in ZSH, which calls this "static named directories" (http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/Expansion.html#Static...).