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.

So if you have a goal that you are working on the for the new year, start tracking your progress. You’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish when you put your mind to it. Because the only one stopping you is YOU!

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!
• This goal has been around for a couple of years in various forms. But even as I work more to make my goals happen, I need to make sure that the time spent with my wife and child are still 100% committed. That time between 5-8 right now is worth more than any paycheck you can give me. Goal #2: Time for family is a huge one.
• A goal that I’m pretty disappointed that I didn’t complete last year is my code shipping goal. With the amount of work that was put in, I should have been able to get this one done. But other things kept coming up and many many delays happened. This year will be different, action plans are in place! Goal #3: Ship Code.
• Fitness of coarse had to make the list. Last year, I set out to run 3 5K races in the year. I accomplished this goal on July 4th and didn’t run another race after that. I still ran, but it wasn’t with the same drive. I could do a simple mile instead of 2-3 and that was ok. But I’d like to keep more drive there to keep me going. On each of my races, I dropped my time. I’m hoping to do the same with this years goal but it will be tough. This years goal is to keep up the running and racing and do 5 5K races in 2012. Goal #4: 5×5.
• Yes, I’m a huge believer in goals being public. But this last one is going to be kept under wraps for a while. National security is involved and I don’t want it to get messy for you my dear readers. Goal #5: Top Secret

So there you have it. My 2012 goals. Obviously, a lot of work needs to happen to make these become a reality. Some goals I’m sure will be tough to do, but that’s the point of these right.

Let’s get to work!

• 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.

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.

So put it in your calendar now to join me for Pizza and Puppet on January 18th at 7PM in the LightEdge corporate headquarters.

Check out more information about Siri on Apple’s website.

Now, for some time I’ve been using the app for small transfers here and there. I think the service is great, easy to use, and their spots feature makes it really easy to find vendors that are accepting Dwolla. This was once a pain point but now I can easily pull up a map and find a local coffee shop and for my morning cup of joe. With all the ease of transferring money and extremely low transfer fees, it still has a few areas of improvement.

Setup

If I’m a vendor taking Dwolla and you being a customer think, “Wow, this is a great service, I’m going to setup an account quick and use it at check out”. Well, I’ve got news for you, come back in 2-3 business days. WTF? The appeal just went away for that user. They’re going to pay with credit card and the chances of them signing up are very very slim. Unless…I charge more for CC transactions to cover my cost and basically force my customers to become Dwolla customers as well. Not that I mind, but I might lose some customers by doing this. For me, this seems a pretty big issue of getting more users on the platform and the ease of signup is an issue Dwolla has yet to resolve. And I’m not sure they can solve it without some helps from the various banks out there. Supposedly its gotten better, but its still not a smooth process.

Proving the business model

This is one where I’m going to pick on Dwolla the company a bit. They’re charging $0.25 per transaction which is freakishly low. It takes a lot of transactions to make $0.25 profitable. Not that they can’t do it, but there have been snippets of information coming out of the company that make me think, will they make it? Sure they have been sitting on a nice fat 1 million dollar round of investments. And I have no doubt that they can get another round with their recent announcement of 1 million dollars in transactions per week. But the business model underneath is what has me a little concerned.

A long time ago, Dwolla mentioned in a tweet that the average transaction was $500. Personally, I thought this seemed ridiculously high. But let’s run some numbers to see how the model looks. 1 million in transactions per week / $500 = 2000 transactions. Take that by $0.25 and you get $500 per week. Houston, we have a problem. Its hard to pay for your servers and put food on the table at that rate for a single person. They’re pushing 15 employees now.

So let’s assume that the average transaction has dropped to $100. That gives us 10,000 transactions or $2500 a week. Better, but can we really run a 15 person company on this revenue?

Now, where I think Dwolla really kicks ass is coffee shops, and mom and pop restaurants. And Des Moines has really caught the craze with this one. If we look at these being the typical Dwolla customers, you now have an average transaction in the $5-10 range for an average breakfast / lunch. At $5, NOW we’re talking a sustainable company. 200,000 transaction gets you into the $50,000 a week in revenue. Now that’s a number Dwolla can live with.

Conclusion

If you haven’t checked out Dwolla, I highly recommend it. Its a great service from a local Des Moines company. I really think that the average transaction has come down and these guys are making some major waves with their product announcements. Even if they don’t become the de facto online payment service, they’re proving that the market is out there for something other than credit cards and others will follow. Its going to be some exciting times for online payments in the next 12-24 months. I hope the best for Dwolla and will continue to promote them wherever I can.

UPDATE!!!!!
Since writing this original article, Dwolla has announced that they are now doing 1 million in transactions A DAY! If they have lowered their average transaction like I think they have, holy crap, they’re killing it!

WRONG!

We liked our old iron. It worked great and always produced massive amounts of wonderful steam. The replacement, well, let’s just say it has some areas of improvement. The old iron didn’t completely die either. It simply had a lose connection of some sort and wouldn’t stay powered on for the duration of your ironing. Well, it would stay on right up to the point when you needed to iron and only if you kept the cord really really still. Just what everyone does when they iron, keep really still.

Before officially retiring the old iron, I took some time to check it out and see if I could just open it up and look for a loose connection or something easy that would save us some dough. It should be easy to access the back panel right, maybe a screw or two. Well, sure enough, there are only two screws to get the outside cover completely off, but low and behold if one of them isn’t a damn security screw. No, that’s not a typo. Black and Decker actually put a damn security screw on their iron in an attempt to discourage people like me. Well, I’ve got new for you…its on now bitches!

Seeing as I don’t have a security bit set readily available, I bid my time and the iron stayed on a shelf toying with me. But today, it was fate after a trip to Menards. For $7, I am now fully stocked with a 33 piece security bit set from Snap Tools. The iron was mine to deal with in whatever evil ways I wanted.

The end result is below, the power cord is now roughly 8 inches shorter to remove a suspected short in the wire and I have an iron that turns on and no longer goes off when the cord is wiggled.

Victory is mine!!!

On July 4th, I completed one of my goals for 2011. The 3rd 5K was in the bag!

This is a race that I had been fairly familiar with in the past. Years ago, the wife and I ran the 8K race with my Dad. We were living in Wisconsin at the time and had trained and felt pretty good about surviving the run. What we didn’t plan for was the humidity. In Wisconsin, there isn’t the humidity that Iowa can bring. And on July 4th of that year, it brought the PAIN!!! Mid 70s for a start with 97% humidity. Imagine running 5 miles while being water boarded. Not to mention my dad gave my wife and I a senior citizen ass kicking. Not only did he finish before us, he had time to get food for himself and then go back for some recovery food for us once we finished. So yeah, I pretty much swore off the 8K race for the rest of my life unless a pack a rabid dogs were chasing me. And even then, I think I’d take my chances with the dogs.

So, the 8K was out for me. The only reason why I entered this thing was that my wife had entered the 8K before her Dam to Dam race to keep her running. She knew it would be easy to just take it easy for a few months and eventually fall off the wagon completely so adding this to her schedule before hand would keep her running. Since they also have a 5K, I thought what the hell, let’s kill 2 birds with one stone.

Race day was actually quite pleasant for July 4th in CR. Lower humidity and mid 60s for the start. The 8K started at 7 AM while the 5K started at 8:15 though I don’t think we got off until 8:30. The coarse was different this year and I have to say, it sucked. We were on some back road due to construction on 2nd avenue. We got to see the sites of the dump (affectionately known as Mount Trashmore) and some of the stagnant back waters of the Cedar River. Sure it was shady for most of the coarse, but there were very few people down to watch due to the shitty coarse, and the road conditions were less than ideal. If you ran in the middle of the road is was alight, the edges were rough and pot hole filled.

My race got off to a FAST start. Too fast if you ask me. I ran the first mile in 7:00 flat. That is WAAAAY faster than I have gone at any other point this year. A week ago I pulled a 7:35 average for 3 miles and I thought if I could do between 7:30 and 8 I would be super pumped with my time. My main goal was to get in under 25 minutes. Starting at 7 for the first mile while great, was going to prove disasterous if I kept going at that pace. So the second mile I backed off the throttle and ran that in around an 8 – 8:15. Still at a good clip, but not at the break neck speed as before. And it paid off. The last mile had a slight gradual grade to it. Nothing that would make you think its a hill, but on mile 3 and the sun had come out, it was a bit grueling. But once we were over that, it was down hill and flat to the finish.

My official chip time was 24:01 with a 7:45 pace. 24:05 was the non chip time and a 2+ minute improvement over my Dam to Dam time a month earlier. The biggest surprise for me was where I finished. I was 53rd over all which was nice to see, but number 8 in my age group! Holy shit! I’ll take a top 10 AG finish any day. Not bad for a guy that sits on his ass 9 hours of the day in front of a computer screen. The big boss also did pretty good setting a person record for herself and beating a previous 8K mark by 3 minutes!

So, my goal is complete, what next? Well, I did this mainly to keep myself in a certain physical shape. And I think I like the 5K distance. I might try a few 8Ks in the future, but I want to get at least 1 – 2 more races in at the 5K distance still this year.

My 2nd official 5K of the year was the Dam to Dam 5K. One of the largest in the US with 2800 runners. This goes hand in hand with the largest 20K that my wife ran.

Race day was warm and a bit humid with the starting temp nearing 80 at the 9:45 start. Add in the 80%+ humidity and well, you have a day of suck ahead of you. The start of the race was delayed due to a medical emergency so we really didn’t get running until about 10AM. My goal for this race was to finish somewhere in the 25-27 minute range. I had been running a lot more since the first race and felt that a 8 – 8:30 mile range was my new comfort zone. Given the temps, I knew I would be pushing the higher end of the range.

My company has sponsored a few of us with some fancy jerseys for the race. I didn’t see anyone at the beginning of the race but after a mile and a half, I came upon my first LightEdge running. Crabb was slowing a bit but still looking strong as I came up to him. After reaching him and chatting for a brief bit, I saw ahead another fellow LightEdge employee Jacob. He was in the zone and setting a nice pace. I thought I could easily close the 50 meter gap that he had opened up on Crabb. Little did I know it would take me a mile to catch the speed SOB. The last little bit I ran with Jake and the last 100 meters I said, what the hell, let’s blow up this heart thing. And sprinting we went.

My final time was 26:05 (8:24 pace) finishing 201 overall and 22 in my age group. This shaved 2 minutes off my first run of the year so some solid progress so far. I’m pretty happy with this run but I’d like to get one 5K this year under 25 minutes. More work needs to be done!

The Big Boss

My wife ran the 20K and I couldn’t be more proud of her. She was running with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team In Training. Her cousin Brandon was diagnosed with Diffused Large B Cell Lymphoma. He’s been kicking cancers ass and will be done with his treatments on Wednesday.

My wife tore up the coarse! For her first distance run and she came in at 2:05:50 finishing 1453 out of 8000. Her goal was to finish upright on her own two legs. She accomplished that and a whole lot more. I couldn’t be happier for her. Check out this very happy woman!

The big boss and I had been talking for a while about getting a new computer for home. The last one we purchased was a white MacBook Core Duo (2GHz with 1GB of RAM) The ram has been maxed out at 2GB a few years ago and I beat the hell out of that thing. Its been through major development projects over its 4 year lifespan.

What to get?

We’re a Mac shop in this household. No, I’m not some zealous nut but I’m a fan of the simplistic design. The thing that appeals to me most about a Mac is that it is UNIX under the hood. Unix is what provides food on my table so having a unix workstation with a nice interface is an extra bonus.

So our choices were going to be something coming with an Apple logo on it. Do you go with a new MacBook Pro and all its power and new hotness? For what I would want, it would be around $1500. Not bad, but… I could get something better that we BOTH could enjoy.

We mainly use our current laptop for surfing the web and checking email while sitting on the couch. When my wife goes to bed, I develop on it down in my office. Surfing the web and checking email from the couch? Sounds like a perfect job for the brand new iPad! But the development side is still missing. Sure I could just replace the iPad and still use the laptop for development. But as I mentioned, I beat the HELL out of that laptop. It doesn’t take long for me to burn through that 2GB of ram.

The Solution

iPad2 for the main web surfing and email checking from the couch. All the other apps just make it super sweet. I ordered mine online and it will ship in 2-3 weeks.

For a development box, a new mac mini. The form factor is small but still provides enough power to get me through what I need to do. I went with the dual core 2.4GHz model and upgraded the ram to 8GB. Its getting the job done and I have yet to run it out of ram with various tasks.

Both devices combined came out to what a new MacBook Pro would run me. In the end, I think I made both of us happy while staying somewhat budget friendly. Its been 4 years so it was about time to spend a little cash.