Category: Blog

Upcoming Eclipse

I barely use social media, but I’m hearing all kinds of things about this upcoming eclipse on Monday.

  • Overheard someone at church say that their school is taking a calamity day on Monday due to the eclipse
  • Our babysitter mentioned using a cereal box to make the viewing lens
  • Someone in Dayton bought all of the eclipse glasses from Kroger stores and is selling them out of random parking lots around the city
  • I’ve read an article about how people regret looking directly at the sun at one of the eclipses in the 1970s and now I’m paranoid that when I see a fuzzy spot in my eye I’ve somehow sunburnt my eye
  • My wife is telling me that my plan of using a welding helmet is not safe enough to look directly at the sun
  • What takes the cake is that my Nest Thermostat wanted to know if I wanted to participate in Eclipse Rush Hour to save energy

Maybe it will be cloudy on Monday and all this hype will be for naught.

July 2017 Recap

Each month I have a reminder to write down a summary of what happened during the month, and each month, I snooze it until next month. But not today 🙂

Lots went on in July. Here’s some of the highlights.

  • First full* month back to work after paternity leave. *I didn’t actually work the full month and had plenty of days off.
  • I grew some gigantic zucchini
  • Ate donuts and travelled to Nashville for the weekend
  • Started checking my email less, and when I do check it, plow thru all the messages
  • Started working on my Spanish with the Memrise app
  • Hosted a block party at our house to meet some of the neighbors we’ve never talked to in the seven years we’ve lived at our house
  • Celebrated 10 years of marriage
  • Competed in my first ever CrossFit competiton and was sore for a good 5 days
  • Started to up my programming skills by using Apple’s Swift Playgrounds. It’s almost like a game and super fun
  • Our son turned 4 months, began rolling and nearly has two bottom teeth

Books

In July I read two fiction books and parts of several non-fiction books. I completed:

  • Camino Island by John Grisham
  • No Middle Name: short stories about Jack Reacher by Lee Child

I’m still working thru Tim Ferris’ Tools of the Titans and Deep Work by Cal Newport. Let’s see if I can finish these up by the end of the month.

Much Cooler

One of the air conditioning lines in our MDX had a leak so we’ve been without A/C for the last few weeks. 

It definitely pays to have a dad with a lot of tools. The new parts from a dealer would have been close to $200 plus labor and I got the parts online for only $60. 

Is This Poison Ivy?

Several times last year and now once this year, I’ve gotten poison ivy.

I’m highly allergic, so it’s not a good situation.

The weird thing is, I haven’t been able to figure out where I got it. We don’t live near a woods, nor have I been in a woods, yet, I have the ichy rash on four different places on my body.

Today when inspecting my flower bed, it looks like this might be the culprit. It follows the “Leaves of three, let it be” slogan of poison ivy, but doesn’t look like it.

Any experts out there than can identify this plant?

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April 2017 Recap

I’m quite certain that was April was the fastest month in history, well it seemed like it to us anyways.

Here’s what happened this month:

  • I ran the shuttle service on Mon / Wed / Fri for our daughter to go to preschool and Thu afternoons for swim lessons (got to get ready for swim season!)
  • Bought a sweet new mower so I can now cut my grass in record time. And it’s battery operated, so double yeah!
  • We made a few trips to the chiropractor to make sure our bodies are in alignment and that baby’s is too.
  • Lots of playing kitchen / restaurant with our three year old. She has quite the imagination.
  • I read Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and Guilty Minds which makes 12 books for the year. I’m a book ahead of my pace to read 35 books this year.
  • Enjoyed watching the Cleveland Cavaliers sweep the Indiana Pacers in the first round of the NBA playoffs.
  • With the combination of my Apple AirPods and holding my son for nap times, I’ve managed to cut back my podcast queue back from ~100 shows to 40 shows. My goal is to eliminate about 10 from the queue each week and be 100% caught up by the end of my paternity leave (which will be about the time I get 100 behind again 😛 )
  • And in the last two weeks, I’ve been working my way through the Full Stack Javascript on Treehouse. I currently have 39 more hours to go before I’m an *expert*, ha! Javascript is an interesting programming language and I’ve been having a blast, even though I’m only able to work thru the materials at night when I’m tired.

No Wonder It’s So Expensive 

I switched to Time Warner Cable’s Spectrum Internet last month, yet every week I get a letter in the mail with a “special offer” I cannot use because I’m already a customer. 

If they’d stop advertising to their own customers, I bet the could charge less for their service. 

March Madness Begins

The title is twofold.

Yes, the NCAA March Madness tournament starts today. And the remaining parts of March could be quite crazy with the birth of our son.

As the tournament starts, it reminds me when I was in college a handful of friends drove down from Ohio Northern to watch the opening round game. It was worth the $5 cost of admission to be at the game and one year, ESPN even captured us on camera rooting for LeHigh University as they came back from a commercial break.

Here are some pictures from the tournament game in 2005.

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100 Days of Code

In 2017, one of my goals is to become a better developer.

I spend a lot of time troubleshooting with customers for my day job at Automattic, but I don’t have the skills to fix any code.

While I’ve called myself a developer in the past, I’m more of a tinkerer type of developer. I can take someone’s code and modify it to work as I need, but my skills are highly lacking when it comes writing code from scratch.

This will change in 2017.

I found a group of aspiring developers who are challenging each other to spend 100 days of an hour each day working on their coding skills.

Here are the details if you want to join.

I started Day 1 today as I’m pretty sure I’ll only get to 80ish days before being interrupted by the birth of Baby Hartzler.

My plan is to wrap up a lot of the outstanding projects I’ve been putting off for awhile, like some new features to YourWebsiteEngineer.com and work on my plugin in the WordPress Repository As Heard On

Now on Dustin.blog

The new home of my blog is Dustin.blog.

I plan on using this to post updates from me, rather than on Facebook and Twitter.

I wiped my phone clean back in November and the only social account I added back was Instagram. And with my busy life taking care of a two year old and prepping for a baby, I find it’s nice to have the extra time that I used to spend on social media.

Blogging will give me a chance to test our product at WordPress.com and work on my writing skills.

Get your fancy new .blog address at https://get.blog

iPhone Battery Issues

I’ve been having some major battery issues with my iPhone 6s. Today, with only a few minutes of use, I was down to 12% charge by noon.

I finally made time on my schedule to do what the Apple Genius suggested; factory reset my phone.

After loading my “critical” apps, like DuoLingo and Elevate, which I have more than a year daily use streak, to my iPad, I backed up all the contents to my Mac and completely wiped the phone.

I’m heading to bed with 90%, let’s see if it can last all night.

100 Pushup Challenge

Last week at CrossFit, we had a workout that had four different moves and each move had 100 reps. The moves were box jumps, pushups, situps, and lunges. For me, the pushups were the by far the hardest.

Since this a move that I can work on at home, I found the 100 Pushup Challenge. Over the next few weeks (and while travelling next week), I’m going work on getting strong enough to do 100 consecutive pushups.

After doing the initial assessment, I was able to skip to week 3 to start the program. The last two rounds of 13 and 17 were tough! I’m excited to see how I progress thru July.

Upcoming Travel

Over the next few days, we are heading back to the US after being abroad for more than six weeks.

We’ve been in Valencia for the majority of the time and we’ve taken a few excursions which Melody has eloquently documented on our family travel blog.

Today, I’m in Austria, set to fly home after volunteering at WordCamp Europe.

Tomorrow, we take a train from Valencia to Madrid. This seems to be the easiest way to get back to Madrid in time for our flight home.

On Tuesday, we’ll start the long journey of flying across the Atlantic Ocean, going thru customs and immigration in Atlanta before arriving back in Dayton.

We’ve had a ton of fun and created a lot of memories, but I’ll be glad to be home!

My Morning View

We’ve been in Spain more than three weeks now and while a lot of our daily lives are the same (Melody and I are still working during the day), but my morning view is much nicer.

In order to fit all of my work in, I’ve been getting up around 5am each day and get to watch the sunrise around the church bell tower. 

A few more weeks of adventures before we head back to Ohio 🙂

Inbox0 – Finally

In 2015, I set a goal of clearing out my personal inbox every day. I was able to keep this going for more than 4 months, until travel season started and I couldn’t find the energy or time to fully clear out my inbox from May on.

I had the goal of repeating the same habit in 2016, but I was sick the during the first two weeks of the year and that didn’t happen.

Yesterday, I was finally able to respond to and create to-do items for all my messages.

My goal is to keep it up and for my inbox to not rule (or ruin) my life.

My inbox is empty and signing off for the day. What a great feeling 🙂

Cincinnati Zoo Lights

For my father-in-law’s birthday, we gave him a coupon to see the zoo lights with his granddaugther (and her parents too 🙂 ).

We went this evening because it was almost 70 degrees today. By getting there at 4pm, we were able to beat the traffic and see some of the animals.

Kenley was a big fan of both the elephants and the giraffes. So also really enjoyed the lights.

Tracking Activity with FitBit

A few weeks ago, we found that our company, Automattic, was going to purchase all of us FitBits to track our physical activity. 

I opted for the FitBit One because I didn’t need another thing on my wrist, since I already wear my Apple Watch. 

This tiny device fits in my pocket and will track my steps when I walk while walking on my treadmill desk. 

I’m glad it arrived before we travelled to New Orleans because I recorded a record amount of steps yesterday:

  

The Signal is Down

This morning, I worked from a coffee shop in Yellow Springs before my chiropractor appointment called Dino’s.

Dino’s Cappuccinos is a small local coffee shop and this is the first time I worked from here. Side benefit: they accept payments via the Apple Watch 🙂

I walked up to the counter to ask for the wifi password and they said “The signal is down” before I even asked.

Uh, what?

They said, yes, the password for the Internet is thesignalisdown.

#PerfectlyExecuted