Goal #1: Sleep More! With the help of mercuryapp.com, I’ve been able to track my sleep time and so far for 3 months I’m averaging 6.86 hours of sleep a night. I’m shooting for 7+ so I’m not too far off.

Goal #2: Time for family – Check and check. Work hasn’t gotten in the way too much so that’s all good there.

Goal #3: Ship Code. Have a small idea that I’m working on. Need to find the time. Hopefully this summer.

Goal #4: 5×5. One down, 3 more on my radar. Need one in the fallish timeframe which I think I have 1 or 2 that I’m looking at. I’ve been putting the miles on as I have logged over 70+ miles so far this year.

Goal #5: Top Secret. Still top secret.

Yet, we are in another round of the IT glory days. Read TechCrunch for 5 minutes and you’ll just be shaking your head. What was the .com boom of the late 90s has become the new app explosion of today. Money is flying at companies that have a cool new app with a bunch of users but NO REVENUE!!!

The latest example is an app that I really like. Its being reported that Instagram is raising 40 million dollars with a 500M company valuation. While its great that they can keep the lights on and servers running, but how are they going to make money? Maybe giving away the app wasn’t your best plan. I would have paid $0.99 for the full version with maybe a free version with only a few filters. 27 millions users you say, It would have been rough having 18.9 million (27M * 70% after Apple’s cut) coming in the door if you charged for the app.

I’ve bitched before about FlipBoard doing some of the same shit.

Ladies and Gentlemen…if you want to run a successful company, you need to have money coming in the door. And I’m not talking about VC money. It may help you out in the short term, but guess what, those VC guys and gals expect to get paid at some point. Stop bullshitting us with the “oh we’ll figure out a way to make money in the future, we have X million users now”. If you haven’t figured it out by now, you’re not going to asshole. And the VC that invest in you deserve every bit of loss that they get. Just don’t got public with it, screw up my 401K, and the rest of the stock market in the process.

There were a lot of things different about the Red Flannel Run in 2012 compared to last year. First and foremost, the temps. Last year we were in the mid-30s and I was warm as could be in my gear. This year, I wore pretty much the same thing except the temps were 7 degrees with a -6 windchill. It was cold out there. But with the gear I had on and the running, I warmed up pretty quickly. I just wish I would have had some sort of neck gator on. That would have made a pretty big difference for me. I kept having some breathing issues after the first 1.5 miles and I’m pretty sure it was due to things (mouth, lungs etc) freezing up a bit.

Second big difference, I ran a heck of a lot faster than in 2011. Too fast for the first mile but over all, I shaved off 4+ minutes from the previous year and beat my fastest time from 2011.

The official stats come in as this:
Time: 23:51
Age Group rank: 12
Overall: 70

Not bad for the first time out. I’m hoping for some stronger finishes later in the year when I can get some better training in. Running on the dreadmill is boring and I never want to go more than 2 miles. I’m hoping that once we get over the snow, ice and cold temps I can put some longer runs in and build up the endurance for a faster time.

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!!!