• Use Traineo.com to track diet and exercise for one month

  Done. For the month of May, I wrote down and recorded everything I ate and every time I exercised. I’m fairly self-aware about most of what I do to my body (a habit that took years to set into place), but there were still a few surprises. The biggest was that, as I said on Twitter, using weekends as an excuse to eat worse means you do so roughly 40% of the time (assuming you go from Friday through Sunday night).

• Finish functionality on my website

  Yep. Didn’t take much work at all. I’m satisfied with what I got done. I also realized along the way that I shouldn’t make a combined personal and professional site. People who want me to make a website probably don’t need to know my opinions on food habits in America. If I ever venture more seriously into the world of freelancing, I’ll set up a business name and separate site just for that.

• Write 5 blog posts a week

  You’re looking at it. Aside from the two trips out of the country and a random day here or there, I blogged five times for every week of the year. Not always on time and I rarely worked ahead, but I did it.

  Blogging will probably slow down some in 2010. I have intentions of writing regularly; 2009 just proved I could do it. I’ll make sure to ramble and huff here as much as I have time for. It’s going to be a busy year.

• Practice using my recording/DJ gear for one hour a week

  Ehh… I got about halfway on this one. I was good for a few weeks, but I got behind and gave up. A few recording opportunities in the past month got me caught up to halfway. Not complete, but good enough to reach its purpose: I know what I’m doing better than I did at the beginning of the year.

• Learn five songs on piano

  Another semi-fail. I got a keyboard. I messed around a few times when I had spare time. I started learning chords to three of the five songs I picked. But the one I considered “finished” I couldn’t play any more. I’m guessing later this year music will become a bit easier to prioritize for (more on that another time), so I am satisfied for now.

• Read all the books on my reading list

  I went above and beyond here. I read all of the 21 I listed, one of my “if I have time” books and, by my best count, four or five others throughout the year as they came up. And, of course, I blogged about pretty much all of them.

  Considering the momentum I’ve had for the past few years with reading, I don’t think I need to make this a goal each year any more.

So there you have it. I think I did well enough this last year. Rock on.

2010 is going to be a crazy, busy and full of change. For that reason, I’m not going to set any strong goals for myself. I’ll probably do more of a month-to-month observation and make shorter-term goals as are appropriate. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, though. Setting goals and a creating a system to make it easy to plan and achieve them has been one of the most fulfilling things I’ve done for myself in the past few years.

At the very least, I recommend getting on a goal-oriented social network like 43 Things where everyone is encouraging and provides useful tips for reaching your goals.

I wonder the same thing about folks who check for new email every 5 minutes, follow 5,000 people on Twitter, or try to do anything sane with 500 RSS feeds.

Some graze unlimited bowls of information by choice. Others claim it’s a necessity of remaining employed, landing sales, or “staying in the loop.” Could be. What about you?

How do you know when you’ve had “enough?”

Not everything, all the time, completely, forever. Just enough. Enough to start, finish, or simply maintain.

(via Enough by Merlin Mann on 43 Folders)

After I read this short essay by Merlin Mann, I got rid of a good handful of the news feeds I was reading in Google Reader. My life already feels better, and has continued to for the week or so since I did it. Turns out I didn’t need up-to-the-minute headlines on Tiger Woods’s love life and fifty funny headlines a day from Fark and The Onion. If I’m aching for a funny headline, I can always peek at the site sometime. But I don’t need it every day. I certainly don’t miss it yet.

I also did a big cleanup on Twitter recently that has made it a simple joy again. Something to fill in gaps for a quick bit of communication or an enjoyable tidbit of a friend’s day. It’s not something I feel like I have to check every five minutes any more just to keep up. Turns out I don’t need to keep up with every move every band and person I know at every moment.

Suggested goal: Sometime before the new year, go through the websites, email newsletters, Twitter accounts, news feeds, newspapers, magazines and social networks that take your attention and ask yourself whether or not each of them is essential to your daily survival. Try to get rid of a third or even just a quarter of it. Then open your eyes to all the things you have time for with those extra moments.

So why it took so long to get around to reading God’s Debris — his short, free thought experiment of a book — is a mystery to me. I literally started last night and finished this morning. It was, as expected, an easy read that was thoroughly thought-provoking.

The entire book is a conversation between two men. One is teaching the other his theory on life, the universe and everything based on the simplest explanations for everything.

The climactic idea they reach is this: God, being omnipotent and all-knowing, can know everything except what would happen were He to no longer exist. So in an effort to maintain His omniscience, He destroys himself. This destruction is our Big Bang, and the entire existence of the universe is a collection of His debris, slowly reformulating into a single consciousness as God recollects himself back into His all-powerful self.

Yeah, it sounds crazy and weird. That’s what’s so fun about it. And the fact that Adams explains it so easily only makes it that much better of a read.

I highly recommend God’s Debris for anyone who enjoys exploring philosophy and religion. You can download it as a free PDF and it’s a very quick read, so there’s not much excuse not to read it.

This one is an examination of the Catholic Mass, explaining many of its parts, but mostly looking at it from the context of the book of Revelation. He argues, rather convincingly, that Armageddon is the current time we are in and that, while we are in the midst of Mass, we are actually in heaven, and not just symbolically. Instead of looking at political events in search of the end times, he matches up almost every key aspect of the final book of the Bible with an aspect of Mass. I won’t list those things off here because, well, there’s a lot of them. Plus, I’m no expert at Catholicism or the book of Revelation so a lot of it was new to me.

This book will be surprising to most evangelicals, who try to draw parallels with current events while they flip through Revelation, but (this was surprising to me) many educated in the Catholic tradition won’t find much of this new at all. It became clear to me as I was reading that Revelation was written with the Church and Mass in mind, not as some wacked-out prophecy about how the world will end. Sure, it was written in a strange format, but it’s impressive how much of it lines up with the procession of Mass and the overall structure of the Church.

Like I said, I won’t try to argue in favor of the ideas presented in The Lamb’s Supper because I’d fail quickly. But if you’re interested in end times theology, the Catholic Mass or finding heaven on earth, this will be an eye-opening book for you.

This is probably one of those books. Today I feel like doing some research, logging into my Etrade account and making a few well-informed trades. Tomorrow I probably won’t. But hey, I did bookmark the Motley Fool site so I can do a little research for later. Maybe that’ll help.

This book is split in half. The first half is about “rule breakers,” the companies that are exploding out of the gate with potential that the stock market reflects. The second half is about “rule makers,” the companies that rule their industries unequivocally. Think Coca Cola and Microsoft. They do a good job of outlining the characteristics to look for when investing directly in the stock market. I recommend it if you’re curious about doing so.

However, I’m at an interesting crossroads with all of this. On one hand, investing your money for the future is a wise thing if you have the resources to do it. On the other, when you start looking at companies this big, it’s hard as a socially-conscious person to find many that are both reasonable to invest in and healthy for our world.

Coca Cola slings high fructose corn syrup and sugar at literally every person on earth. Pfizer probably lobbies for drug laws and develops symptom-serving (rather than disease-curing) drugs that benefit them more than humanity as a whole. Tech companies feel a little safer, but even those allow for huge energy drains. Sure they all do “green” stuff, but big businesses are bound to have their major issues.

So what, do I ignore my conscience for the sake of my financial future? Or find the one company that’s a good investment that doesn’t hurt the world as much as it helps? Of course, I “invest” in many of those companies every day with my dollars. I’d have to go completely off the grid to avoid it.

So many questions, so few answers. Such is life. But getting back to the point, if you are interested in investing, or even just running a good business, this is a good book for learning all about that.

On another note: I’m on the final stretch! Four more books to read to finish my 2009 reading list. And they should all be fairly easy reads. Rock on.

Drew Curtis runs Fark.com, a site where people submit links to news stories with rewritten headlines making fun of said news story. Running such a site leads one to have a pretty strong understanding of how the news media works.

As it turns out, Curtis has noticed eight distinct types of news articles that the Mass Media uses for filler when there is no real news, or annoying ways they go overkill on actual news:

• Media fearmongering
• Unpaid placement masquerading as actual article
• Equal time for nutjobs
• The out-of-context celebrity comment
• Seasonal articles
• Media fatigue
• Lesser media space fillers

I recommend this if you want to get angry at everything wrong with the world like I do. Actually, Curtis does a pretty good job of saying, “Well, the world’s doing pretty okay, really.” Or if you just want to laugh at some ridiculous headlines from Fark and the ensuing user comments, this one’s for you.

Wuthering Heights is that kind of book. You know, the kind where you have to slow way down to understand what’s going on, inevitably there’s some character that speaks in an accent or dialect that is beyond comprehension, and there’s always something to do with cousins marrying each other, then killing each other, and riding horses through “the moors.” Whatever those are.

What I wasn’t expecting, though, is a book that is all sorts of dark. Well, as dark as a girl in England could have written 150 years ago without getting thrown in the loony bin, anyway. Every character is plagued by some sort of evil, and a couple of them don’t have a good bone in their body.

So what ensues is a 200-year-old British soap opera where kids are marrying each others’ inlaws (not cousins, but close enough). And there’s this guy Heathcliff who only does stuff to piss people off, so he marrys his brother-in-law’s sister, just to make the guy angry, cause the guy married his sister. Well, sort of sister, cause Heathcliff’s adopted.

And then (SPOILER ALERT) pretty much all the main characters die from either grief or madness.

The long and short of it is that this book isn’t too bad. A slow read for me, and not worth reading if you want something happy, but still well done, considering the odds were against it for me in the first place. But yeah, Wuthering Heights is pretty much a book about how to make people unhappy.

Another coincidental book choice while on my trip to Thailand. Not only was it fitting to be reading a calling for a change in American Christians’ perspectives on politics while dropped in a world of foreign politics, but I happened to be reading it much of the day on the 4th of July while stretched in a hammock on a remote island in the south of the country.

Jesus for President is written by Chris Haw and Shane Claiborne (who I already respect much for his book The Irresistible Revolution. They both have learned, from personal experience, the value in living a communal life with other Christians that is radically different than the culture that surrounds them. They make their own clothes, grow their own food and ask that those they commune with use their God-given skills and finances to help each other in every way possible.

The book itself is not a calling-out of a particular Christian-political demographic, as many might expect. It doesn’t say, “Here are the issues you should vote for and against.” Instead, it is a strong reminder that Jesus, our King, is not a king of the earth, like many hoped for in His time. He is here to raise a kingdom not of this world: the Church. So why should we even be buying into the politics of man?

Certainly some particular issues are raised, especially a concern about Christian support of war. But they spend a good portion of the book encouraging a shift from over-consumption to simplicity, questioning our need for “stuff” and asking if we’re really following Christ’s example in helping those in need around us when we set aside a big enough portion of our own money to afford flat-screen TVs and high-speed Internet.

I wish I could find nice, little quotes to pull out to convince you to change your life, but this is a book that needs to be read from cover to cover. I am not good at defending my points just yet (I want to read this again), but I want to say that this book has done more to break me down and rebuild my lifestyle more than pretty much anything else I’ve read. I can no longer support being a soldier as a profession, I’m starting to buy local more and I intend to buy a bike in the near future. Small steps, but they lead to bigger things.

Jesus for President is not easy to read, but necessary for any American Christian in my opinion.

It’s absolutely no secret that I’m a Donald Miller fan. Maybe slightly less known is the fact that I love road trips, traveling and leaving places in general, especially stories about such things. They are always ripe with epiphany and growth in their characters.

Through Painted Deserts is a true story about Miller himself, who, in his younger years, jumped in a van with a friend in his hometown of Houston and meandered his way to Portland, Oregon, where he still lives today (I hear).

It’s noticeably less spiritually-conceived than Blue Like Jazz and Searching for God Knows What, with much more emphasis on storytelling, character development and descriptive writing. No complaints from me. Miller’s a wonderful writer, no matter the subject.

Still, though, those road trip epiphanies and growth are there. And it was clearly no mistake that I was reading this book while on my first international adventure in Thailand, for in his introduction, he offers a simple command to the reader: Leave. As in, get out of where you’re comfortable, even if for a little while. Go out and see the world, learn how you differ from others and what they do better that you could stand to improve upon. This was, coincidentally, a common subject of discussion between my travel partner, Buddy, and I.

Now, enjoy some random Don Miller quotes:

I had only recently begun questioning my faith in God, a kind of commercial, American version of spirituality. I had questions because of the silliness of its presuppositions. The rising question of why had been manifesting for some time, and had previously only been answered by Western Christianity’s propositions of behavior modification. What is beauty? I would ask. Here are the five keys to a successful marriage, I would be given as an answer. It was as if nobody was listening to the question being groaned by all of creation, groaned through the pinings of our sexual tensions, our broken biochemistry, the blending of light and smog to make our glorious sunsets.

I was raised to believe that the quality of a man’s life would greatly increase, not with the gain of status or success, not by his heart’s knowing romance or by prosperity in industry or academia, but by his nearness to God. It confuses me that Christian living is not simpler.

I love that second one especially. And it ties in with my next book review heavily, which you’ll see tomorrow, as well as my recent post about buying phones.

One more book down on my reading list, fourteen more to go!

A standard Dan Brown-style, modern adventure involving cryptography, the NSA and an attempt to bring down all their wiretapping abilities. Unlike his two most well-known books, this is hardly controversial, only touching lightly on the issue of surveillance in government: hardly a monster of a topic as the entire history of the Catholic church and Jesus Christ Himself.

I would say this book isn’t Brown’s best, but still impressive for a first-timer. It wasn’t difficult or annoying to read, but the flow was a little jumpy and it was a bit too predictable at parts. And I enjoyed the computer talk because, at heart, I’m kind of a nerd. In case you hadn’t noticed.