For some strange reason, I’ve always wanted to drive a car to 200,000 miles.

My first car, was a Pontiac Sunfire (1990) that I gave to my sister when it had 150,000 miles on it.

My next car, a Pontiac Grand Am (1995), made it to approximately 177,000 on it before I sold it.

My current car is a Pontiac (do you see a theme) Grand Prix (2006) and hit the 200,000 mark on Sunday this week. Our other car, a Pontiac Torrent (also a 2006) also hit a mileage milestone on Sunday of 85,000 miles.

Back in December of 2014, I tried to blog every day for a month, which was a complete failure. Looks like I posts 5 times in the first 5 days, then three times after that.

I’m going to give it another go this month, September 2015.

I’ve got a bit of traveling this month, which hopefully give me something to write about because my life is pretty boring when I never leave the house 🙂

The goal of this challenge is to use the different posting platforms we have on WordPress.com (both web based and app based) to help find bugs and make the interface better.

Let’s see if I can post more than 8 times this month!

https://me.sh/5qzwf50/1it

Spring is finally arriving in Ohio!

Yesterday I had the opportunity to be on the local NBC channel to talk about the upcoming WordCamp Dayton event.

It’s hard to believe how much time goes into getting ready for a 4 minute live segment on the show.

A few days before the event, Gery Deer and I emailed back and forth about the content to be on the show.

Living Dayton airs from 12pm-1pm and we arrived at the studio at 11:15pm to get my computer hooked up to the television to make sure everything worked properly.

Our segment was the last of the show, so we were able to watch all of the groups of people get ready and broadcast their segment.

I wish we could have gotten in more details about building a website on WordPress; but unfortunately, our segment was only 4 minutes in length.

Every Friday, I have a reminder to update 10 of my passwords to my online accounts. I value the safety of my identity and want it to be hard for hackers to create chaos in my online life.

Back in the day (pre college), I used to have one password and I used it for everything. It didn’t matter if it was my login for my ESPN account or my bank, my password was the same.

Then I got a randomly generated password for my college email account and once I had memorized it, I started using that password for anything I needed a ‘secure’ password. Basically any account that had my banking information, now had that password.

This is particularly bad, because if someone got that one password, they could get into all of my accounts.

I liked having one strong password that I could remember for everything as it was easy to log into sites very quickly.

Then, one day, my eBay account was hacked and someone purchased a $500 phone from my account. After getting that all cleared up, eBay reset my password and I now had a third password to use to set up online accounts.

So, when I’d sign up for a new online profile, I’d pick one of the three. Then when I came back to log into the site, I’d only have to try three different ones.

Fast forward to last year.

I started using a program called 1Password to start generating and saving new passwords for my accounts. It’s got a great feature built in that you can control the ‘formula’ of your password. You can set how many characters and how many numbers or symbols make up your password.

After generating the password, it will prompt you to save your username / password in the 1Password vault.

Last year I was really good with adding my accounts into 1Password, but I wasn’t good about making sure my passwords were unique to each individual account.

That’s where Password Friday comes in to play.

Currently I have 335 usernames and passwords stored in my 1Password account and a little more than 100 are older than one year old.

I use the Security Audit to find my oldest accounts and update the passwords to about 10 accounts each Friday. The oldest accounts = the accounts that have been stored the longest without the password being updated.

I’ve been working at this for a few months now and it’s actually been a fun activity to start a Friday. It’s sometimes a challenge to find the ‘Reset my password’ link so I make a game of it to see how fast I can update a password.

My thought is that I will continue until all of my passwords are unique and then I’ll start over because the passwords I changed first will have remained the same for about a year.

I’ve also been closing accounts that I no longer need and merging duplicate entries in 1Password.

I’ll save how to user 1Password for another post, and highly recommend you to start using a tool like 1Password or LastPass for storing all of your passwords.

Today I am starting a challenge of posting daily to this blog for several reasons:

– I’m very bad at blogging and need a reason to regularly post
– I need to familiarize myself with all of the different options to post to WordPress, especially mobile and the WordPress app

Who knew playing on an empty laundry basket would be so much fun?

First and last bike ride of the season for Kenley in the pull behind carrier.

If you’ve been following the last few posts, I’ve highlighted the changes in our backyard. As of a few weeks ago, it’s finally finished.

Here are a few more pictures during the construction:

We are incredibly pleased with our new outdoor space and excited for the cool fall weather to use the fire pit.

Now, the before and after photos:

What do you do if you have a dozen zucchinis in the house? You bake them into brownies. #NotQuitePaleo #SoGood

My sister-in-law and her fiancé are getting married tomorrow and here’s the view from my position up front with the groomsmen.

Pulled all the weeds in my raised flower beds and planted tomatoes and eggplants.

This is by far the easiest / best way to shop with a toddler. No awkwardly heavy car seats shifting from arm to arm and no huge strollers running into display racks.

Our car has hit the 180,000 mark. Officially the most miles on any car I’ve owned. Here’s to 20,000 more

I’m pretty sure I could eat this meal every night! Brown some ground beef, sauté some veggies and throw it over rice or cauliflower rice and enjoy.

Tonight’s version includes pineapple, carrots, peppers, asparagus, and celery.

This weekend, my college roommate and his wife traveled from Columbus to hang out with us for a few hours and to meet Kenley face-to-face (as we’ve previously only Skyped).

Today, a friend from our church came over to hold her during the day so mommy could sleep and daddy could work.

We’ve had dozens of people stop by, bring food, and lend a helping hand.

Even though we’d enjoy moving to somewhere where it’s warm all the time, it would be hard to give up all of our friends who love and support who are here.

I think we’ll be in Dayton for quite some time (as a permanent location).

Kenley is being silly wearing her hat that Aunt Ashley gave her 🙂

Tonight my wife was inducted into the Ohio Pharmacists Association (OPA) Board of Trustees with a semi-formal dinner banquet.

Now I’m not normally drug (no pun intended) to these types of things, but since we have a brand new baby that’s getting 100% of her nutrition from Mommy, I got to attend.

For this special occasion, I had the privilege of dressing up, dress pants, shirt, tie, and dress shoes. I can’t remember the last time I looked so fancy.

Typically, I wear mesh shorts and a t-shirt. If I have to leave the house, I’ll change into jeans.

Okay, back to getting ready to go.

After successfully picking out a tie, since my wife didn’t like the first two options I suggested, I attempted to tie the tie.

Tying a tie is like riding a bike right? Once you learn, you’ll never forget.

Well, I could remember the process of double loop, pull up from the bottom and tuck, but I couldn’t remember how the long the short end of the tie needed to be.

My first try resulted in my tie almost reaching my belly button.

Tries 2 – 5 resulted in a tie that was much too long.

Attempts 6 and 7 again resulted in a tie too short.

Finally on the 8th attempt, I finally got it.

And I have to admit, I look pretty good in a tie.

I’ll try wearing one again in about 6 months 🙂

As most of you know, I’m a huge WordPress fan, even so much so that I now work for Automattic, the company behind WordPress.

For the last few years, I’ve had a goal of contributing to WordPress core. Basically I wanted to find a bug in the code somewhere and notify the team and have the bug fixed.

Well, today is that day.

It all started yesterday when a user wrote in with a problem with their website. With their current theme, when they added the form for people to subscribe to their blog, the text box was completely white, without a border and the text inside the box was white as well.

After confirming that it was a bug with the theme, I submitted my first bug report to WordPress core. Here is the link to the trac ticket:
https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/27677#ticket

And here is the screenshot of my ticket:

Yesterday I got a call from our credit card company validating an $8.90 charge to a glass stemware company in Alabama, uh, no.

After a few minutes on the phone and validating all the other recent charges were legit, the card number was shut down. It’s not a big deal, I don’t have to pay for the fraudulent charge and a new card is on my way tomorrow.

But it is annoying for two reasons:

First, I have my credit card number memorized so it’s quick and convenient for me to purchase things online. I memorized it after several times trying to purchase something on my computer and I didn’t have my wallet with me.

Second, I now have to go thru and update my payment information for all of the companies that I have automatically drafted each month to our card. If I were to guess, I probably have 15 different places I now have to update once I get our new card.

If only this was an April Fool’s joke!

2014 is going to be an incredible year for the Hartzler’s.

In additional to expanding our family with our daughter on approximately February 28th we will be adding two brother-in-laws and a niece and a nephew!

Melody’s sister is getting married in June and my sister is getting married in the fall (date, TBD).

Our little family is getting bigger 🙂

I think 2014 is going to be a crazy year, but hopefully the best one yet!

Hot chocolate with home made marshmallows. Can life get better? I submit it can not.

Don’t think I’ll be needing these anymore.

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Blast from the past

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Green screen video shoot on a budget

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