Today marked the official start to the race season for me. I’m not competitive in these things by any means but calling it a race season makes it seem like I know what I’m doing. Signup, run, don’t die. Pretty much in that order. In the end, its all about knocking out one of my goals for 2012.

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.

For those looking for the slides from the puppet presentation that I gave last week, here they are.

I’ll be working on getting a screen cast of the demo up in the next week or so. Too many other things distracting me at this moment.

For those that haven’t seen my twitter feed…

I’m going to be doing a presentation in the coming days for the local linux user group (CIALUG) on Puppet from Puppet Labs.

Free pizza and some swag will be thrown around.

The event is 100% free and should hopefully get you acquainted with all the cool stuff you can automate. Signup for your free ticket!

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!