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.

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.

The one big change for the Gala this year was the acceptance of credit cards. Luke had taken cash, check, and Dwolla in the years past though really, it was just check and cash. I was a bit disappointed, but not completely shocked, that no one used Dwolla, sorry guys. Adding credit this year was a huge step forward and I was quite pleased with the results.

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.