For copy, I'm getting a lot out of "Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft"http://goo.gl/9eH5q, which breaks down the craft quite well.
You can use a color wheel to come up with color schemes, and I'd try using ems instead of pxs to handle whitespace. Whitespace is negative space, used for contrast to draw attention to positive space, which could be your copy, let's say. Use a grid to make sure you keep everything aligned and to help you figure out where to put stuff in.
I really like Futura or Baskerville for headers, and I think you should pick a bright, contrasting color against the body copy.
Gradients and Box shadows do look really cheesy with just CSS. The trick is that you should always add a little noise, somewhere between 1 or 2 percent, to your gradients or shadows so you can make them look more textured instead of just flat colors. There's a filter called "Film Grain" which I think is much better than "noise", but it's usually an external plugin. You're gonna have to hit photoshop for that, because I don't know if there is a noise/grain css effect.
You don't need to tap all the fiber running through the US to track down someone. That would take too long. Much easier to put "Wanted" posters up with "$$$" on the bottom and wait for the head to come back.
You probably just need to aim a lot higher than what you're shooting for right now, is my opinion.
Does this quote not get you pumped up?
"The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is responsible. Universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs." - Joseph Weizenbaum
How about you, let's say, write a computer game that will make people stay up all night, or an interactive fiction novel that they can't put down? But don't give up because it wasn't hard enough or whatever.
I work in sprints, I have a protein shake every morning as soon as I wake up and at night right before I go to sleep, ever since I started journaling I ditched to-do lists.
Also, the most productive times of my life, when it comes to work is whenever I'm in a relationship and the sex question is not so prevalent in my mind anymore.
The best hack I know for working out is to change into whatever your workout clothes are and just wait until you feel like working out.
You'll probably be pleasantly surprised at how quickly he catches up once he's on the job, if he really wants it as bad as you say. I say give it a try for a few months, and then make a more permanent decision based on that.
Let alone the switch to Emacs, but I've been trying to implement GTD since college, using all sorts of tools, and I've read the book I don't know how many times, and I still feel like it's over my head.
It's primarily used as an aid for visual layouts, but it took on the other useful qualities everyone else has listed as the grid frameworks got popular in the web.