Like a lot of people, I tend to define goals for a year at the beginning of each year.  Many of them are typical: get in shape, pay off debt, etc.  Once I went a whole year without consuming alcohol.  Since you're curious, this year's item (I assume you are curious or you would stop reading) was to make a great deal of $$ so that next year I can relax more.  At any rate, I'm adding one UberGoal™ right in the middle of the year.  Yes, I know its not a best practice to change the deliverables in the middle of a project but management says this is important.

My goal is to Be Progressive.  There are a lot of ways that we should just Do The Right Thing that we don't, some of them vitally important to our position in the world and our continued prosperity as a species.  I have some specific things in mind:

1. Use the metric system as much as humanly possible.  The current NASA fiasco reminds me of just how silly it is that we are not using the metric system.  Being an obnoxious elitist, imagine the fun I'll have telling people how many Kilometers it is to my house, how many liters of beer I drank at the Nerd Dinner, or how good the 700 gram steaks I ate were, or how many kilowatts of power and newton-meters of torque my WRX has.  This will be kilograms of fun!
   1. Action Item: SmartPhone program with conversion rates for everything.
   2. Action Item: Refactor common sayings such as "Kilograms of fun", "A kilogram of cure is worth a gram of prevention", "Go the extra kilometer", "A journey of a thousand kilometers is begun with a single step", "This weighs a Metric Ton", "I'll bet you can't drink 1.83 liters of milk in under an hour", "The whole 8.73 meters", "Give them a centimeter, they take a decimeter"
2. I cannot type as fast as I used to, due to the Carpal Tunnel/tendonitis brought on by me working way too much.  Contemplating this, I recalled the bit of trivia that the Qwerty keyboard layout was specifically designed to make typing as slow and uncomfortable as possible back in the Golden Age of Typewriters.  Considering the amount of work that is done on PCs these days, my bean counters estimate that this costs us approximately Eleventy-gazillion (0xff∞E^eleventy) in productivity losses each year, mostly in email and MSN messenger related time loss and overly verbose VB.NET code.
   1. Action Item: Obtain, learn, and evangelize an alternate keyboard
3. Look into renewable energy as much as one man can.  Am I the only person who can see the upward curve in gas price is going to have us paying over $1.20 per liter as soon as next year?  This does not mean I'm buying a hybrid car: I hate to be the one to say that hybrid cars are a joke.  The amount of energy a hybrid car will save you in gas over its lifetime is not as much energy as it took to create the battery in the first place.  How did the power plant make the energy to make your battery in your hybrid car?  Why, burning fossil fuels of course.  On top of that, due to the principles of Entropy, a lot of energy is being wasted in this transformation as well.  That's right, Hybrid Vehicles are driving gas prices up.
   1. Action Item: Laugh at people who drive hybrid cars
   2. Action Item: Look into solar panels on my house, assuming they do not suffer the same drawback as hybrid cars.

That's enough for one year.