Last Year of My Dirty 30's

Here I am in the basement of my house once again, typing away on the computer in an uncomfortable folding chair made slightly more comfortable by old couch pillows. It's far from quiet due to the constant droning of fans from the old SunFire X2100 I obtained while working at Zayo Managed Services. It was a neglected machine in the hosting center, destined for the scrap heap, but it was a solid piece of engineering that begged to have Linux installed on it. Today, it hosts my website and acts as a local network host: overkill.

Its presence was appreciated when my hand-built whitebox workstation gave up the ghost, as was the Buffalo NAS. The real hero of the story was the little emachines desktop workstation named `icarus', after Connor's favorite Nintendo 3Ds game, an AMD Athlon II X2 220. With it, I was able to recover all of my personal data from `skuld'. Now that I have redundant backups in place, I'm finding the little workstation quite useful.

The basement is a familiar setting, one I haven't frequented in the last few years. I attribute this to family, laptops, and mobile devices. It's far more comfortable to sit on the couch, watch television, watch my children, and generally be around than to try to retreat to the cave. Oh what I wouldn't give for a proper office.

None of this is really relevant to the title of this post, which is "Last Year of My Dirty 30's". Let's give credit for this title where credit is due, my wife's post on Facebook. Was the last nine years of my life really all that dirty? And will the upcoming year be any worse? I'm curious to find out!

The first day of that journey began today, and with it a number of challenges I've placed upon myself. I've logged 512 miles of running so far this year, I've made a great start toward completing a 1,000 miles by December 31. To help me along the way, I have started a run streak — one mile per day, every day. Today's run was a 5K Birthday Run! My penultimate goal is to complete a 100 mile marathon before July 12th next year, but you already knew that.

My second challenge is a blog streak. You've guessed it: a blog post a day, every day. I'm not really sure I have enough material that is worthwhile to write, let alone worthwhile to read. I've given myself some loose rules to follow:

• Micro-blogging does not count, obviously.
• Provide some value to the reader, even if it is only me reading it.
• Find out what it means to approach 40.

Hopefully that means I'll be somewhat entertaining, but at least I'll be consistent.

I had a few others that didn't make the cut: a beer streak (I already like beer way too much to have another excuse to drink it), 100 push-ups (although I may do this anyway), 100 pull-ups (pull-up bar necessary), 100 sit-ups (see a trend here?), a photo a day (not really a shutter-bug - this would just be work).

With the conclusion of this sentence, the journey begins!