"if the self who is directing and executing the self-improvement is the same f-u'd self that needs improving, then how can there possibly be improvement?"

Agree completely. In fact, all the ST films failed to even approach the quality of the series. The best movie-length ST "films" ever made were the various 2-parters of TNG and Voyager, led by "Chain of Command."

I wrote the following in an essay a number of years back:

But first, a word about discipline: any discipline — of the body, the mind, a student, a child, an animal — that strays from the purpose of liberating and fulfilling its potential is no longer discipline but despotism. This betrayal of discipline, this loss of purpose, is in many respects the defining error of our age and culture — in education, government, the workplace, our markets, and our media. Natural discipline is more about possibility than limitation; it affirms and supports freedom and rejects oppression and punishment. If a path of discipline that you are involved with contains a trace of punishment, guilt, or imperiousness, then I would encourage you to leave that path immediately; for it is not discipline.

If you're a student you have to research and write; try the same thing in your personal life as well. I've written a little on the tl;dr phenomenon: the point is not so much to swim against the current of society but rather to follow the flow of your own native ability. In any event, avoid at all costs the solution to which so many become slaves (Adderall).

The cashless society that Capt. Picard talks about, that's what I'm waiting for. Another 3 centuries, I guess..

Whatever language it is in which you specialize, know that to stop doing it and just watch it for a while will not make you lose it. It will, however, deepen your understanding of yourself. Spend this time in this extraordinary place in debugging yourself. Thus, if you'd like to "practice fundamentals," here is a place to start.

Mr. Watts would like to comment

CT was one of the most creative and refreshingly natural shows in the history of broadcasting -- among radio, TV, Internet, whatever, combined. Tom, you have left an extraordinary legacy.

One has to admire how the social sciences continually raise (or should I say lower) the bar of ineptitude. So marriage is a good topic for them, seeing as both succeed and fail at roughly the same rate, which in fact fairly matches that of random chance.

...but that's been taken for a while

If time is important in terms of preparation and especially maintenance, then Adobe's Robohelp product may be worth considering, probably with Captivate for producing the video material. It has its own set of wiki templates, plays well with Sharepoint, is HTML5 ready in its current version (11), and allows for production of varying formats within the same file or project. Just be ready to tweak the code for the templates.

Seems like this guy has some work to do on the self-image of the old man. But I've already registered my ideas about all that online.

Back when I worked for AIG, geeks from their satellite IT office in Chennai, India would come over for 3 to 6 month stays "onshore" as they called the New Jersey office. So whenever a few of these fellows came over, we'd take over our usual conference room for lunch and there would be introductions of the new arrivals. The routine was for everyone there to say his name, function, and his primary language. The first time I was involved in one of these, I watched and listened as they went round the table: "I am Abishek and I'm with the portal team specializing in javascript..."; "I am Ramana and I'm a sys admin, UNIX..."; and so on. So they finally come round to me: the veterans of the place are smiling because they know I don't really have a "language," unless you count HTML. So I made this announcement: "I am Brian and I'm the documentation guy, and so my language is English." Bless them, they found this highly amusing, the whole table was laughing. That's a rather lengthy lead-in to the following observation: geeks (no matter their nationality) are rarely much better at English than I am at C, so I point this out without any sense of finger-shaking. The two "slightly" responses amount to the same semantic sense as "no significant change" -- thus, 3 of the responses could be condensed into one.

It's a holographic universe, so if we play the game with sincerity but not seriously, we'll be fine. Or not.

I don't play anymore either, but I recall really liking the Myst games. The graphics, music, and the puzzles were all terrific.