new and improved
We're coming up on New Year's so, ah, time to start making false promises to yourself.
Last year I don't believe I made any resolutions. Instead I loudly declared "this year better not suck!"
I guess somebody heard me, because the Chinese determined that 2005 was to be my year, The Year of the Cock. They proudly certified it with a zodiac placemat, which I magneted to my refrigerator to make it official. The placemat lived up to its word as the year proved not only to be favorable for me, but also to give a quite literal interpretation of the name.
Before that, I think I just had a New Year's mantra.
I don't really remember. I was too busy drinking campange in a hot-tub full of girls. I think I must have used up all of 2004's good fortune shortly after midnight.
God, I hope next year is the year of the cat.
The point is I don't typically make a bunch of resolutions at New Year's.
The best I ever do is a New Year's philosophy.
This year I'm trying something new: the New Year's cleaning.
Its kind of like when you stop at the gas station to fill up, and something inspires to finally pick up all the empty McDonald's bags and 20 oz Tahitian Treat bottles that are carpeting the floor of the back seat and throw them in that trash can next to the pump. You've been putting it off for so long that when you finally just do it you're surprised at how easy it was.
Well, ok, New Year's is gonna be the gas station, and like, that car is me. And the trash in the car -- in me -- is all the stupid stuff I still do. And me, i'm like me cleaning me. Yeah. Think about that. And the trash can... and the gas pump... well... ... ok look, I really don't have the attention span to keep this up, alright? Either you get it by now or you don't.
Anyway, I think its really time to clean out all the crap before I even think about adding something new.
Hey, maybe this site could be the trash can.
Yeah. Yeah, that would work.
Its already full of my garbage.
feedback

I really don't like making any reference to this site on the site itself. I don't discuss the maintenance of the site or anything about how I write. I don't even like to use this space to explicitly describe what I'm trying to do in any respect. But, as you should have already surmised, this post is breaking the rules. I hope that as you read on, you find this wanton defiance to be appropriate for the subject matter.
For some time now, I've been under construction. By "for some time", i mean the past few months; this is not one of those "all my life..." moments. My utter lack of budgeting is leaving me slowly draining my savings to death, the management of my web design projects is equally non-existent placing me chest-deep in chaos, and my performance in Karate has been steadily slipping for the past year, give or take. This is not a complete list. Simply put, I've been fucking off for too long.
Out of all the wreckage I find myself in, the area I'm most concerned with fixing up is the web design stuff. This is not solely because there's a guy signing my pay checks who's asked me to start showing improvement in my efficiency. Its primarily because an increase in efficiency means less stress, and more projects which means more money. More money = more freedom = more happy.
I find myself in the position of trying to examine what it is I do and build a pattern of functionality out of it. While my knowledge-of and experience-with websites is extensive, my understanding of managing/executing a project of a website's construction is incomplete. In other words, I know how to make a site and make a site well; i don't know how run the project of building said site, unfortunately.
The finished product is going to consist of essentially two new components: a new ideology for the management of a web design project, and new technology to effectively facilitate the tasks required to manage the project in the manner defined by the ideology. I know, that sounds like the meaningless drivel they fill software whitepapers with (and if this job ever falls through I'll know I can get a job writing those) so if you don't work in an office, i'll try to translate: first i gotta figure out how to do this shit, then I have to get some software to help be do this shit.
The ideology part requires me to disassemble any and every project into core components so I can quantify a project's labor requirements. Being able to quantify the project means, among other things, I'll be able to come up with better quotes for labor costs and completion schedules, and I'll be able to track the project's progress better. To break down the projects like this, I've been considering all the projects I've worked on so far plus new scenarios that I've imagined, and trying to see what the pattern is. Given the wide range of what I can do, the process has been pretty tedious, but after months I think I'm finally making progress.
The technology end is something else. I'm probably going to be writing a lot of my own software, at the very least writing the interface to tie together a lot of existing technologies. I'm going to be introduced to a lot of new technologies, and it will not take shape overnight. Simply put, the development of my new project management tools will be a project of its own.
Hang on now, here comes the fun part. I've been half-assedly managing projects for customers for the past year or more, which is no good. So I need to do something to effectively manage projects. I need to totally revamp the way I work, which is -- you guessed it -- a new project.
But how do I keep from half-assing the project of organizing my projects? Why, I need to organize the project of organizing projects! And to manage it, I'll need software, yes software to track the project of setting up software for managing projects. But where will this software come from? How will i set it up? A new project.
If you're feeling dizzy right now, then i've described this correctly.
When you find yourself in an endless chicken/egg cycle like this to which you can find no starting point of entry, you're about to enter the wonderful world of
bootstrapping.
Making it out of this situation is usually very tedious and never predictable. Seeing how often situations in my life come to me having to
pull myself out of the swamp by my own hair, I'm starting to take note of how this works. Yes, that's right, I'm talking about spontaneously figuring out how I spontaneously figure stuff out.
The world is rapidly dissolving into a
solipsistic nightmare of me constantly tripping over myself. Projects determine the management of projects, websites discuss their own content, and everyday I wake up and make money and eat food to keep myself I alive so I can continue making money and eating more food. A camera captures the image of the video monitor displaying its own live image and the only sound is steady, resonant feedback.
I'm tempted to end here, since I really hate when posts just hand over the interpretation and outcome. I'm not writing short stories over here, so I have no incentive to be cathartic. I'm perfectly happy to take you up in the plane, but i'm pushing you out when we get to the top and you can find your own way home. Today you’re lucky because there's still more to come.
Let's continue talking about the site and turning the camera on itself; Some of you might have noticed that there haven't been any posts lately. This is due in part to me being busy with these projects that I've been discussing. Some days I just spend so much time focusing on work that needs to be done that I might only remember the site briefly and think "oh shit; gotta think of something profound to post." And then my mind wanders onto the next to-do on my list.
Other times, there's really just no easy way of summing up what I need to say in a simple post that doesn't violate any of my rules. This post is a perfect example. For all I do to keep my writing simple, independent, and needing no introduction, it sometimes means periods of silence because I can't
adapt all my ideas to my style of writing.
Now, as you can plainly see, if I break from the format it is possible to then make commentary about the complex stuff. But i do so at the cost of the quality of my writing. My style is an effort to keep my writing concise and interesting. I need to be sure that I'm breaking the rules for the right reason (to make an effective post) and not for the wrong reasons (i'm too lazy to write well anymore).
If you clicked on the
"solipsistic" link above and read the Wikipedia article on Solopsism, then you should have seen this passage of text:
Thought similar to solipsism is present in much of eastern philosophy. Taoism and several interpretations of Buddhism, especially Zen, teach that drawing a distinction between self and universe is nonsensical and arbitrary, and merely an artifact of language rather than an inherent reality.
I went searching the Tao and Zen articles, looking for a better summary than this, but only saw what reminded me what I disliked so much about Tao and Zen. It seems so abundantly empty to me. I find the rhetoric to be really contrivedly paradoxical. Semantically impossible sentences just don't strike me as "deep", what can i say?
Despite how much these eastern philosophies (or least their rhetoric) lets me down, I really liked the summary in the solipsism article because of the part about breaking the barrier between self and the universe. This is a very common western philosophy, characterized as "me vs. you" or "us vs. them". When considering the universe, one has to remember that the universe is defined as all things, and we are still things. Therefore we are an active part of the universe. No matter how objectively we try to view the world around us, we're cheating ourselves out of the whole picture if we do not include ourselves in the picture.
Don't take this as my full concession of skepticism and acceptance of Tao/Zen, but I’m beginning to think that there might be something there which I was never able to grasp before. Perhaps that was because I was approaching it objectively and trying to understand Zen itself without really trying it out. A favorite Zen phrase is "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" Its so hackneyed that I'd all but forgotten what it means; it means essentially that some things are more than just the sum of their parts. So perhaps to study Zen without also considering yourself is like trying to get a clap from one hand. Zen teachings + your life = CLAP! Zen.
This really reinforces the conclusions I've been coming to lately with this
feedback loop of projects I'm stuck in. I had realized that the key to bootstrapping just seems to be to take what you have, jump in, and start doing what you're trying to do. Accept that thing will fail and/or not meet your ideal requirements, just try to learn something from it, tweak your actions, and try again. Each time you should improve until the point where you've reached your goal.
I'm seeing how trying to study something academically without actually applying it and studying it first hand is frustrating because of how incomplete it is. Its only when you take the principles that you're trying to study and actually apply them to something real that any kind of real learning can occur to allow you to make actual process. Until then, the house-of-mirrors solipsism thing takes on a very real manifestation wherein your mind tries to logically sort out a problem but lacks the information that it needs to reach a solution. Real world testing produces results that your mind could not have anticipated because its lacks the knowledge. If nothing else, it just goes to show that solipsism in the text-book sense that only one's self exists can't be possible because learning is impossible without outside stimuli.
And so its necessary for the eye of scrutiny to observe the world around it as well as itself. When these two elements meet, the sound is known as "understanding".
I'm waiting to hear what sound is made when this meets my website.
Perhaps I'll find the answer in the comments section?
tonite's insomnia
Here is an incomplete list of questions currently helping to stave off the sleep:
Should I pay rent tomorrow?
Will I have enough money in checking?
Should I take another month off of Karate?
Will it matter?
Do I have the time/resources for another web design client?
When am I going to actually function with some sort of efficiency?
When am I going to go freelance?
When am I going to be able to afford things again?
What am I going to say to her tomorrow?
What is she going to say to me?
What am I forgetting?