Life, in my opinion, is pretty pointless. Some may think the objective is to bring glory to God or to accumulate as much wealth as possible. I however think that the universe and our lives are inherently meaningless. Not because I am an atheist, I am not so simple. I am at my core a hypocritical cynic: my cognitive self lives in a bunker ducking the less sophisticated, contemptible, aspects of me – my emotional, physical and spiritual components. These latter few are in a perennial struggle to dominate one another. Whoever’s on top for the moment gets to taunt the bunkered down rationalist with wisps of threats, intimidations, false promises, and insults.

Anyhow, I believe that even the people with the strongest faiths devise for themselves whatever meaning they experience. We bring our own meaning to this world, and that makes us responsible (and I can be very judgmental). Although the universe really is meaningless at its pith, we are not able to completely and willfully redefine it. We as individuals have been built on a foundation of meaning assembled during our development and socialization. We can recognize the foundation, even if we cannot remove it. For me personally, the knowledge that parts of me with powerful influence (such as emotions, first reactions, the tendency to classify in certain ways) are not innate brings me a sense of peace. This is the bunker in which I hide while the rest of me is busy recreating the emotional equivalent of the German western front of the First World War.

So life is pointless, was my point. The days pass, time moves on, and what of it. We did not choose to be here, it simply just happened. We don’t really choose to continue (although a pedantic existentialist might say not ending it is a choice). Time just passes, and we have the option of doing something with this time. We could let it pass indolently or busy ourselves with some activity. Either choice is as good, really, and neither will have any impact on anything ultimately. But that nagging foundation within me has got me inclined to think that I better do something with my time, as a means to alleviate that emotionally painful thought “the man I will be becomes the man I have been.”

And so allow me to introduce my new Goal Oriented Living™ perspective, just in time for New Year’s resolutions. This idea springs in part from my experience this year, where I took it upon myself to accomplish a couple of goals including graduating from the SIRLS program within a year and changing my diet. The successful conclusion of both of these has left me feeling really empty and hollow. Which really wasn’t what I had intended or expected (I mean shouldn’t I feel good?). Instead I just feel dread, a dread more painful than the anguish of trying to accomplish seemingly un-accomplishable goals (that are within my reach if only if I can defeat my terrible self image). And so you see there’s an option I have here: feel terrible dread or less terrible anguish, and I am choosing the latter.

In 2007 I will accomplish the following goals:

Body – Run a marathon (created a training schedule)*, reduce weight to under 200lb (currently at about 215lb – was 250lb a year ago).
Mind – Learn C# and ASP.NET, strengthen my Python, XML, and regular expression skills.
Spirit – Finish Anna Karenina, read the Aeneid, and the Divine Comedies.
Career – Make manager.
Financial – follow my (intensive) student-loan repayment plan.
Relationship – have a child with my wife.
Development – create a new version of my Color Tool.

*I tried it last year and failed. I will succeed this year.

These goals also fit in with my new ‘metrics are important’ outlook. You see I will create plans to succeed; I will measure my progress, and re-evaluate and retool as needed. If I fail at anything I will be able to know why, readjust, and retry. This will set the direction for my activities this next year, center my thinking, and prevent me from going off the path. When I am approached with or develop an idea that may take up resources and time I will be able to evaluate to what extent the idea(s) fit in with my prior established goals, and if they do not fit in, I will discard them. Commitment will be essential, and I will apply the same level of commitment to these goals as I did to my SIRLS graduation in 2006, when fear of marriage failure and bankruptcy motivated me to succeed.

Cpl Jason L. Dunham, a United States Marine, has been posthumously awarded the Metal of Honor by President George W. Bush.

On April 14, 2004, in Iraq near the Syrian border, the corporal used his helmet and his body to smother an exploding Mills Bomb let loose by a raging insurgent whom Dunham and two other Marines tried to subdue.

The explosion dazed and wounded Lance Cpl. William Hampton and Pfc. Kelly Miller. The insurgent stood up after the blast and was immediately killed by Marine small-arms fire.

“By giving his own life, Cpl. Dunham saved the lives of two of his men and showed the world what it means to be a Marine,” said Bush.

I used to stand inside the battalion headquarters of my unit when I was a Marine and read about WWII, Korean and Vietnam war Metal of Honor recipients, and it seemed so distant to me. Their names were on plaques on the wall, with the official record of how they earned their metal. A different time. That was during the Clinton years, and we as a country were not doing much in the way of combat and war. To read about this now, it’s a little stirring. However anyone may feel about the war, this man gave his life to save his friends. There’s no denying the heroism and valor of Cpl. Jason L. Dunham, a Marine and a Hero.

It has been a rough couple of days. The site has been up and down repeatedly. Now however, it is all finished. Search engine friendly permalinks are now working. I have basically created this website from scratch on IIS 6.0. has been absolutely essential. I don’t think I would have been able to get this site running and customized without it. It is a fantastic reference, easy to read and straight to the point. I wish I had gotten an “Administrator’s Pocket Consultant” for Windows 2003 Server as well instead of the massive Microsoft Press behemoth I bought instead. The pocket consultants are cheaper and more helpful if you just want to get things to work (about $30 cheaper). This has been an incredible learning experience, and I am glad I have done this manually. I have learned a lot about FTP, web servers, and Windows 2003 - especially user permissions and IIS 6.0.

Well, I think the site is working. I removed Plesk and installed everything from scratch. I have installed the Color Tool. I have gotten rewrite to work as well via the Ionic URL rewriter, however, I haven’t gotten to the point where I can get permalinks to look nice for Wordpress because I have to figure out the regexp for the redirects. You see the way it works is that on Apache’s mod_rewrite module .htaccess files in a directory are filled with specific rewrite rules that utilize regular expressions. Wordpress creates those by default for htaccess. It does not create them for this Ionic URL rewriter and it isn’t even creating .htaccess files (maybe because I’m on IIS). Well now that I have spent about eight hours setting the server up, I think I’ll head to bed. I have more work to do tomorrow. The FTP isn’t working the way I want it to. Man I can’t wait until this all over with so I can just blog. Heh.

The new mean green blog theme I have been working on is finished (as you can see, unless you’re reading from a feed). It is 100% CSS based, which means if you turn off your CSS, my blog will look like web pages did circa 1993. The image load is quite heavy, it’s well over 200kb. It is also really wide, 1013px, which means you’ll get a horizontal scrollbar at 1024 pixel screen widths (except with Opera). So almost everyone will get a horizontal scrollbar, which sucks. I love how it looks though, and I am tired of working on it. I have spent three or four full days on it now. My next goal is to get URL rewriting to work, and as I mentioned if you find the site is down, it’s because I am playing with the server settings.

Here’s a little screenshot for you lazy feed readers (see I accommodate!):

Just FYI: I am hosting on a Virtual Private Server that came with Plesk installed. Unfortunately Plesk is absolute crap. It has configured my IIS (Windows 2003 Server) in bizarre ways that I can’t administer so I am going to uninstall that (expensive) Plesk crap, and create the websites I have from scratch including Share Wonders and my Color Tool. There will be downtime. Hopefully not too long.