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.

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.

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.

I finally had a chance to use Square in a real world checkout scenario a few weekends ago. My friend and local Ankeny Iowa artist Luke Hubbard held his 2nd Annual Garage Gala. My wife and I stepped in to take care of the check out so Luke and his lovely wife Jen could handle entertaining, talking to guests and mingling with people that wanted to know more about the art.

Today I can add a few more letters to the old signature line. I passed the VMware Certified Professional 5 test! Overall, I thought that the test was pretty fair. This test was rumored to test more on your real world experience with vSphere and it didn’t disappoint. I would say that the test was easier for me than the VCP4 test but I also have 2 more years of experience under my belt and had a chance to go to VMworld 2011 with some great sessions and labs that dug into the nitty gritty of 5.