On the 1st of the year, I put our my usual public goals for 2012. I have some typical goals in there of some fitness goals, career type goals and general health goals. Some of these are pretty cut and dry to track progress. I want to run 5 5K races, pretty straight forward.

But how do you track something like getting more sleep?

Here is where Mercury App comes in. I’ve been using this product for over a year now and have mainly been tracking things like my weight and job satisfaction. Adding to it Sleep time, not only how I feel about the sleep I got but actually tracking the number of hours should give me a good overall graph at the end of the year of how well I did in getting that 7+ average that I’m looking for.

If you’re going to go to the time to make goals, you might as well make them public. So in the keeping with my tradition of past years, here are my 2012 Goals:

• I’ve been burning the candle at both ends for a while now. Late nights programming or just messing around on the internet have been the norm for years for me. My average time to bed is 12-12:30. Not an issue if you can sleep until 8. But I get up at 6-6:30 if not earlier based on the little bosses schedule. My goal, move the bed time up an hour and get 7-8 hours of sleep per night. Goal #1: Sleep More!

As we come to the end of 2011, its time for the annual review of goals and another declaration of next years goals. So let’s wind them down and see how we did.

• Goal #1: Continue to work less. – SUCCESS! I consider this one more about family time than anything else. Family time has a high value to me and to be honest, I get pretty cranky when work interferes with that time. From 5-8 at night, I’m pretty much off limits unless its something involving my family. So while I’ve put in more hours on the side business this year at night and on weekends, the little boss gets my attention while he is awake. So I consider this one a success!
• Goal #2: Drink more water – FAIL. I’d like to blame this purely on my little on and the lack of sleep that I get, but in reality, he’s fallen into a nice pattern of sleep and this is really due to the side business keeping me up at night.
• Goal #3: Ship Code – FAIL. Sure I’ve written a lot of code this year and I have gotten several new web sites out the door. But that wasn’t the goal. The goal was to write and ship on of my iPhone app ideas. I’ve made a lot of progress on it, but haven’t gotten it out the door.
• Goal #4: Write a new blog article every week – SUCCESS! OK, maybe I should take partial credit on this one. The frequency hasn’t been exactly 1 post per week. But my average is there! As of this article, I have posted 56 articles in 2011. I’d like to have more posts but we’re making progress.
• Goal #5: Run in 3 5k races – SUCCESS. I destroyed this one accomplishing this goal by middle of the year. I want to have a fitness goal for 2012 again and it will probably be along these same lines, but I want to stretch it out and make it last the whole year long.

3 out of 5. 60%. This is not acceptable. Making progress from the 50% I hit in 2010, but we still have a long ways to go.

For those looking to see my handsome mug in person and listen to my beautiful tenor voice, I will be giving a Puppet demonstration at the January 2012 CIALUG meeting. Details on the event can be found on the events page of the cialug.org site.

Puppetlabs has stepped up to offer sponsorship of the event so besides my insightful talk, there will be pizza and t-shirts that will be handed out while supplies last or whatever game we come up with to give them away. I have a whole box of them so hopefully many of you are sporting the latest in puppet wear before the night is through.

Got a call tonight concerning a VM that was having some issues. We had p2v’d our Virtual Center and when the new vCenter came online, apparently DRS decided to balance the heck out of things and somewhere in the process, a VM got squished and had a variety of issues.

When I was brought in, it wasn’t powering up and throwing an error concerning a lock. So here is what I tried.