Musings on Quo Vadis

I’ve been thinking a lot lately. With the current state of my bank account, thinking is a very inexpensive pastime. I’ve reached a point where I know quite a lot about myself, my profession and living in general. What I’m still trying to come to terms with is translating what I know into action. I’ve also had problems reconciling what I know with what I feel. My psychologist tells me that is because the limbic system takes much longer to achieve stability than the frontal cortex does. This means when you’re angry, you stay angry long after you’ve resolved the issues that made you angry in the first place. I suppose there was probably some kind of survival benefit of this at one time but it doesn’t seem to be nearly as useful in the modern world.

I am approaching a time when I can take early retirement from my job and draw a pension large enough to pay most of my bills. I’m too young, IMHO, to consider really retiring, as in quitting work and living the life of Riley. I don’t think I’ll ever really want to retire in that sense. Instead, I am considering what I want to do now that salary is not a major consideration. I have been thinking about what I enjoy doing most as well as what I can contribute to the world. I still haven’t achieved my initial goal of financial independence. I really don’t want to be rich. I just want to have enough money so that money is not hampering me from doing whatever it is I want to do. Perhaps that is at the core of why I am not financially independent yet :-).

Whatever I decide to do, I have this gut feeling that blogging is going to be part of it. Blogging is a way of getting your thoughts out where you can see them and doing it in a public forum helps keep you honest with yourself. I need to get in the habit of writing something here every day. It doesn’t have to be big, just regular.

Web Development is Just Plain Fun!

I’ve been reading a good book lately. It’s called RESTful Web Services and it’s by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby, O’Reilly Media, Inc, May 8, 2007, ISBN 0-596-52926-0. It got me past an old obstacle that I basically ignored when I initially encountered it, which is how to access the web through a proxy from Ruby. I updated my Rails homepage, a private affair intended to give me quick access to a number of links that I access frequently. While I was at it, I figured out how to display the RSS feed of this blog in the center column of the homepage.

So, how does this make me feel? Totally empowered and back on my game. I haven’t done any web development in so long that I was beginning to think I wouldn’t be able to catch up with all the new developments. I guess I knew better deep down but it was still exhilarating to finally update my homepage after literally years of not changing anything on it but the content.

I also started looking in to Amazon Web Services but that’s a topic for another post.

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