In 2018, I’m going to try to document our lives better. In 2017, I posted daily from Jan 1 thru September, then fell off the wagon.
Let’s see if I can make it a full year this time.
In 2018, I’m going to try to document our lives better. In 2017, I posted daily from Jan 1 thru September, then fell off the wagon.
Let’s see if I can make it a full year this time.
This is a fun skit that pretended an Apple Store was in the subway and folks were lining up to buy the iPhone X.
I’ve had the same Gravatar online for the past 5+ years and figured it was time to have some new headshots taken.
Here are the three that Jen took and I’ll be updating all my social profiles as I have time.
Thanks Jen!
If you are looking for a mind game and want to waste some time, check out Game about Squares
The weirdest thing I did today was sell at blender on Craigslist at my daughter’s swimming lessons.
I even had to plug it in in front of other parents to demo that it worked 😂
I barely use social media, but I’m hearing all kinds of things about this upcoming eclipse on Monday.
Maybe it will be cloudy on Monday and all this hype will be for naught.
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.
In July I read two fiction books and parts of several non-fiction books. I completed:
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.
It can be summed up with this simple request
I was reading an old version of Men’s Fitness tonight, and I read this article “Ask Men’s Fitness: How Often Should I Wash My Jeans?” and the recommendation was at least three times per year? Really?
Seems like they should be washed more than that 🙂
Unloading the car the other day, I broke off an RCA cable for the auxiliary input.
After a bit of searching Google, I found the method to fix it and it worked like a charm.
I love the internet 🙂
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?
The Cleveland Cavaliers looked impressive in the last two games of the Eastern Conference finals.
Tonight, the blew a 20+ point lead.
🤔
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:
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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!
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 🙂
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 🙂
I like listening to Christmas music (in December only). This by far is my favorite Christmas album.
Our 21 month old daughter was able to pick out all the letters in her name. She hasn’t quite mastered placing them in the right order yet.
Today I spent time going thru the Git Course on Codecademy.
Git is a way to version control your code as well as giving you the ability to easily share your code with your team.
I’ve been using Git as a version control system for my own personal projects, but never with a team.
In 2016, I want to help our developers out and write more code, so they don’t have to 🙂
Today a few of my coworkers got together to work and hang out in person.
We worked together at the Greene in Dayton and enjoyed dinner together.
I love that since we don’t see each other regularly that Automattic paid for our dinner tonight and encouraged us to see our local coworkers.
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.
I took advantage of the 70 degree weather and cleaned out our car in preparation for our upcoming holiday travel.
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:
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