Not so fast

Right now I’m supposed to be high in the air flying across the country. Having my boys experience looking out the window and down at the clouds. The force of takeoff as you rush along the runway and then feel the wheels come off the ground. Watching the trees as they get smaller and smaller. Ezra has never been on a plane and Noah was so young last time that he doesn’t really remember. As much as airports and the process of flying can be painful, I’ll never not marvel and take in the actual act of flying.

But, instead of experiencing all this with my wife and boy’s, I’m sitting on my couch drinking a coffee.

Five years ago I had a sabbatical from work. We had this same trip booked and planned. Going to visit my sister and her family who we don’t get to see nearly enough.

The universe of course had other plans back then as well. A global pandemic and we had to cancel.

Our lives are busy and it wasn’t until now that we could work it out to go again.

I thought, nothing is going to stop us this time, so I’ll save money and booked the most basic flights which also means no changes, cancellations, or refunds.

This was a trip I needed. A break from the daily grind. A step outside the usual responsibilities.

Ah my cockiness. The universe was having none of that. Not only do you not get this, but here, have another serving of stress and heartache.

One of the hardest parts was telling my sons, both of whom have been looking forward to this for so long. They were packed and ready to go.

Ezra loves his cousins. He talks about them often and despite not seeing them much considers them his best friends. He’s too young to really understand and yet I could learn from him on how to deal with disappointment.

Noah’s first day of work

Today I’m feeling proud as a father. Yesterday Noah has his first real full day of work.

A couple of summers ago we hired my friends son, who had started a landscaping business, to replace our front lawn. Since we put it in it was terrible. The hydro seed never took and it was mostly weeds with dry dirt patches as well.

He took care of arranging the materials and tools and the two of us worked together to rip up the old lawn then lay new sod.

He is a hard worker and did a great job so it doesn’t surprise me that his business has been growing and this year he’ll be hiring help. The idea had been floated around previously but now it seems like Noah will be some of that casual help. He’s someone I’m glad for Noah to have as a mentor and first boss.

The business has not only grown but expanded beyond mostly mowing lawn and now has a contract to help out in a vineyard. That’s what Noah did yesterday.

Up early on the Saturday ending March break. The day started off crisp where I had to scrape the frost off the windows of the car before we drove out to Starrs Point. It’s a beautiful area and part of the local marathon route where I ran the half marathon last year. It’s one of my favourite local areas. Lots of farmland up against the Minas Basin that rises and lowers with the huge tides of the Bay of Fundy. The land is fertile, some of it reclaimed thanks to the dyke system.

It was a beautiful morning. The sun was up, one of first real nice days as winter dies down. As we drove our past fields through the winding roads the sun gleamed off the frosty branches of apple orchards.

On my way home from dropping him off I stopped along the Cornwallis River for a short break to drink some of my coffee. As I was driving an owl being chased by several crows flew directly in front of my car. A contrasting side of nature to the serenity I had just spent time in.

Noah’s day was in the rows of the vineyard pruning the vines. He learned the proper way to do this taking into account this year and next. Trimming so that there are two branches one pointing left and one right.

There were a couple of other people helping as well, including my friends younger son, one of Noah’s best friends.

I was never scared for his work ethic. Although he doesn’t do much around the house to help out, and I have to bribe him to do things like mow our lawn. But when he decides to do something he does it and puts in the effort.

As he was leaving the boss asked him how he felt and if he wanted to do it again. So it seems like the first day was a success.

Noah was proud of the work he did as filled me in on how much he completed and the techniques used. In his mind the first six hours of the day had been easy. But for the last two he was counting the minutes.

I feel with him. I know what a grind some of the hours of a work day can be. This seems like an excellent introduction to working through. Most of it will be in the summer, but not every day. So he’ll be able to have some responsibility and earn money, but still lots of time to have a summer and have fun.

I miss those days.

Local Authors

This year I decided to read more again. Like most things in my life I seem to do this in cycles. Reading is something I enjoy, but will go through periods where I do next to none.

A couple of Christmases ago I received a book from local author Christy Ann Conlin, The Speed of Mercy. It didn’t take me long to get through it and I intended to read more of her work. That didn’t end up happening. Until this Christmas when I asked more of her work again. My family didn’t disappoint and I received her other three books. Heave, Watermark, and Memento.

Christy Ann’s work really kicked me back into my joy of reading. I decided I was going to ensure I read more this year.

To help keep me motivated I do what I usually do and set up a new site to keep track of my reading. https://coffeeandbook.com/ because reading and coffee go so great together.

From there I moved on to finish a book I had started probably in October, but never finished. It ended up in my bag when traveling and then when I got home I kind of lost track and fell out of reading. This book, Footprints In The Snow, is the third from other local author Laura Churchill Duke. I’d already read her first two books Two Crows Sorrow, and Rooted In Deception. All three are books that take real life historical murders from our area, the Annapolis Valley Nova Scotia, and bring them to life in creative non-fiction way.

It was through Laura that I discovered Deborah Hemming. Deborah is another local author who now has two books out. It took me very little time to get through both of them. Throw Down Your Shadows is set here in the Valley, which always appeals to me, but the story would have kept me engaged anyway. That was proven with her second book Goddess. I’m not what I consider a fast reader, but I made it through these novels in less than five days each.

We have so much talent here. They make me wish I could write as they all do. I’ve started listening to some audio books about writing. Maybe someday I’ll type out something worth reading, but I don’t think I have it in me to write as well as they do.

Query Loop Future Filter Plugin

This is the first year in a long time that I haven’t been helping coach my son Noah’s basketball teams. It’s felt a little odd, but I’m pretty out of my depth at the high school level and the team has great coaches. So this year I’ve focused more on the tech and media side of things.

At the beginning of the season I created a website that we can keep the schedule and some player info. I hadn’t built a WordPress website in a while so it was fun to get into the block themes. I created a few custom post types to use the main one for Games. Then using the power of the Query Loop block I can choose to display different sets of games. Most of this is done by filtering by different taxonomies. I have taxonomies for seasons, type of game, Exhibition, Regular Season, a Tournament, etc.

The one thing that was a struggle for me was I had games in the future. To start I wanted people to be able to see games that were in the future, but by default they would be considered scheduled posts, and not public until the date set happened. To get around that I added this snippet of code to my themes functions.php that will take any future posts and set them to be published instead.

function game_prevent_future_type( $post_data ) 
    if ( $post_data['post_status'] == 'future' && $post_data['post_type'] == 'game' )
    {
        $post_data['post_status'] = 'publish';
    }
    return $post_data;
  }
  
  add_filter('wp_insert_post_data', 'game_prevent_future_type');
  remove_action('future_post', '_future_post_hook');

The next issue was that I wanted to be able to show only upcoming games, but there wasn’t a way to do that with with the Query Loop Block. I wanted to add a filter that would allow me to show only future games. Thanks to Misha Rudrastyh I was able to create a plugin that allows to do just that. It can be found on GitHub, the Query Loop Future Filter Plugin.

It won’t be the most common thing someone needs but maybe someone will find it useful.

Ten years at Automattic

Today marks ten years from when I officially started at Automattic. Before I joined this company I switched jobs often. I guess I’ve still switched roles fairly often, but I’ve stayed with the same company. Being able to switch roles is one of the things I love and value about Automattic. I can try new things, but still stay with a great company.

December seems to be a time for change for me as well. December 2014 is when I joined Automattic. December 2020 is when I joined the Developer Apprenticeship program. December 2021 is when I finished the Developer Apprenticeship program.

Now in December 2024 I have another change. I’m moving away from working on the Day One app that I’ve been working on for the past three years. I’ve really enjoyed my time working to help create the web client for Day One. When I joined it was a basic prototype and I was lucky enough to help take it to a beta launch, and then full launch as what I think is a really nice experience.

There were lots of challenges and things to learn along the way, but I’m happy with what we accomplished, and I’m excited to see it continue to grow and evolve with the awesome team.

I’m staying at Automattic, but I’m moving back to the Happiness Division where I started here. This time as a Software Engineer on the Happiness Operations team. I’ll get to help with the tools that we use to interact with our customers, as well as internal tools that our awesome Happiness Engineers use to help customers.

This seems like a perfect fit for me. It combines my experience with Happiness as a long time Happiness Engineer, and what started me writing code to begin with. Way back in a previous job I was working in a Call Center doing technical support. It was a small company and I wasn’t always happy with the internal tools we had. So I started learning to code so I could make tools and improve them to make our jobs easier while talking with customers.

Recently I had the opportunity to join the HappOps team on their meetup before I officially joined. We met up in New Orleans, a city I’m forever connected to, and got to know the team, and start planning out our work. Some of the team I’ve known for a long time, while some I hadn’t met before. They are all great and I’m super excited to start with them tomorrow.

Here’s some pictures from our time in New Orleans.

Day One Meetup in Prague

In October of this year, most of the people who work on Day One all traveled to Prague for a meetup. A chance to all be together, plan, work, and team build.

It is such a great group of people. Working remotely is great, but there really is something magical about being in person with people. Causal conversations over meals, or while running through a foreign city are great ways to get to know the people you’re working with better.

Prague itself seems like a great city. Autumn was a fantastic time to visit as well. Some of the best times and views were on our morning runs, starting before the sun was up. We also did a scavenger hunt tour broken into teams, leading us to places I likely wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

Here is a photo dump from my time there.

First half marathon

Since my last post I’ve continued on my training for the half marathon though I hit a couple of set backs. The first set back was our family summer vacation not long after that post.

We went to North Carolina but stopped into Maine and upstate New York for a while on the way. I did manage to get some running in while we were gone, but not nearly as much as I should have. The temperature was hot and even short runs had me drenched. I also didn’t keep up my nutrition either which made running harder ad set me into a bad routine. It probably set me back about 1.5 months were I did very little running. I had been doing about 40km a week before that and over a 6 week period I did a total of bout 55km.

Thankfully I pulled it together and got back into a good routine with 11 weeks left to train for race day. I modified things a bit and was doing only about 3 runs per week most weeks Tuesdays, Thursdays, and then a long run on Sundays. Previously I had a short easy run on Saturdays, but I found it was really affecting my long runs so I cut it out. Maybe I wasn’t taking it easy enough.

The next set back came on September 26th. It was the day of a work 24 hour relay event. The Sun Never Sets on a8c 5k relay. We have at least one person run a 5k every hour for a full 24 hours. It fell on a Thursday which was a scheduled run day for me anyway. I planned on doing 15km, but 6km into it I had to stop. I was getting sharp pain in my left leg and it wasn’t one of those things that would work itself out.

It turns out that it was a strained adductor muscle. I quickly booked the first appointment with a Physiotherapist that I could get and took it easy until I could get into see them. I did research some light stretches and exercises and did those daily until I got there. The Physiotherapist I saw was fantastic. Gave me great advice, a structured exercise plan including some of the ones I was already doing, and treatment while I was there. The acupuncture with electrical stimulation was so cool. We came up with a plan to to ease back into some running and as long as the pain didn’t get worse as the run went I should be fine. I did a 2km run one day, then a 5km run, then a really easy 15km run. They progressively felt better each one, and each time the pain got better the longer the run went. I had one more appointment for a check up and treatment, but I was back in it.

I think the mental impact was as bad as the physical I really wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to run in the race after training for so long. That and running is really good for my mental health anyway, so not being able to do it was rough. Thankfully I had my family and a friend who was training to do an ultra 50km marathon at the same event with me to talk through things with. It really made a difference to have someone going through some of the same things as me during their training and to be able to get out and run with a couple of times.

Race day came and Ella an Noah got up early to drive me to the event and to cheer me on at the starting line. The day before had been very windy and rainy and it had me worried. Though it was a bit colder than I would have liked the wind wasn’t bad and it was pretty sunny. Overall pretty good running conditions.

Early on in my training I had set my goal to do a sub 2 hour half marathon. I knew with the injury set back that it would be tough. I hadn’t got there yet in the training but I was close. For about the first 13km I was able to keep it to the right pace but ran into some hills and couldn’t sustain the pace for the rest of the time. But over all I felt really good up until about the 19km mark. That’s when my legs were really feeling it. By the time I was coming up to the finish line I was going pretty slow. But I made it across without stopping once for the whole time and did it with a gun time of 2:02:00 and chip time of 2:01:19. I’m happy with those results given the whole picture, including the fact that I’m turning 45 at the end of the month.

I’ve been running off and on for about a decade now. It was 2014 when I first ran in a Valley Harvest event. I ran the 10km that race and was in pretty good shape. I ran it again the next year in 2015 and wasn’t in as good of shape. Then I didn’t run again until 2019 when I was really not in good shape and did the 5km. 10 years later when I first started I ran the half marathon.

Next I plan to keep the running up but also add in strength training to hopefully prevent another injury. I won’t push distance for a while, but 10km is a nice comfortable distance so I’ll keep that as my max for a while. But my plan is to train again and get the half marathon below that 2 hour mark.

Here’s my Strava training log from when I started including the off weeks in the middle.

Here’s some pictures and videos from race day.

Half marathon training

For a while, off and on, I’ve had it in the back of my mind that I would like to run a half marathon. Each time I get back into running and get a good routine going I figure I should work on going longer.

I’ve run in a few races over the years, but the longest were 10k races. A number of years ago I did end up running 20k one night on a whim. I had been running regular 10k’s then and was out one night and at the 10k mark I felt really good so kept going. 15k was still feeling pretty good so kept going. It wasn’t long after that though that things started to be bad. I limped back to my car. I ended up hurting myself pretty bad, pulling something my leg and it took me away from running for quite a while.

Back in 2021 I signed up for a half marathon training program but never actually went into it. After some inspiration from a couple of co-workers, including Zandy’s recent half marathon, I finally a month ago I started in on the training, and things have been going well.

The training program consists of 4 runs a week and I’ve been getting out in the morning which used to be my preferred way to start my day and it makes a big difference.

I’ve meet some wild animal friends and had some great sunrises, I’ve also had some PRs this week, feeling strong and looking forward to the Valley Harvest Half Marathon this fall. I’m confident I’ll be able to do it, and am setting a goal to do it in under two hours.

Screenshot

Break a cycle

Seems like a common thread for my life and writing here, periods of being good about my health and fitness followed by periods of sliding backwards.

In August I was back up to 250lbs and not in a great spot. Since then I’ve been doing fairly well with eating well and exercising. But I’ve had a few periods where I’ve really let the eating get back out of control.

They’ve typically been fairly short lived and seem to have started with trips where I’m away from home and out of routine. But they’ve carried over once home for a while. I’ve been able to get back on track pretty quickly.

This last one felt different. I was away with my team for a work trip and I did pretty darn well with my eating habits and even out for some good runs in the morning most days away. It was once I got home from that I really broke routine.

Meals were still pretty good but snacking got out of control. It was of course all mental. I didn’t need the food. I wasn’t really hungry, but for some reason I’d grab something, then another something, then another. Night time was especially rough.

I decided I needed to do something to maybe try to get a handle on it and increase my mental toughness. What if I did a multi day fast? That would prove I can resist the urge to stuff my face even when I’m hungry. A challenge I could look back on the next time it’s after supper and I want to grab something from the cupboard.

So last Wednesday night I decided I wanted to give a three day fast a try. Break the bad cycle I was in and build some mental toughness. I drank only water, coffee, herbal tea, and some bone broth for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. It went way better than I thought it would.

I expected to feel really hungry, be really tired, and maybe even not be able to concentrate, but none of those things really happened. There were times, especially when cooking for others in the family, or when I grabbed my son a fast-food burger that I started to feel the pang, but overall it went smooth.

My energy levels were still pretty good as well. Friday I went for a 5k run and Saturday I was out doing yard work all as normal.

This morning I got up and it felt good to eat but also a little weird. I’m going to try hard to use this as something to reach for the next time I start to slip.

How to deal with passwords

There are far too many places that we all have accounts for now, each one needing a password. Many people give up trying to remember passwords and pick one and use it, or some simple variation of it, for all the places they need one. This is a terrible and unsafe practice but very understandable.

I’ve seen so many cases of people having their accounts taken over, or broken into because one service they’ve used has been breached and the password they’ve used there exposed and then used to log in to another one of their accounts. I used to think that it really wasn’t a big deal, no one is going to try to hack me or get into my accounts. That’s not how it works though.

There are targeted attacks on people, but more common is someone will get their hands on a list of exposed passwords and then use automated tools to try the list of passwords and common variations on the password to log into different accounts. They don’t care who is on the other end.

If you want to get a bit freaked out put your email address into the free site Have I Been Pwned. It keeps track of breached services and will tell you if your email has been seen in any of them.

My best advice is to use a password manager. This is a program or service that will help you keep track of all your accounts and passwords for them. For most of my accounts my passwords look like this Q@pUkJ!NPgZ4wGwU38-cNP@TG2MXkBRy I don’t remember any of them though. There are only a few passwords I need to remember. Ones to get into my devices, and the one for my password manager. From there it will get me access to all my passwords and auto fill them when I need to log in somewhere.

For the passwords I do need to remember I don’t use a typical password, I use a pass phrase. This XKCD comic is one I come back to. Instead of a password you can take random words and create a phrase out of them. It turns out that is much harder for a computer to crack then most passwords.

The other thing to do is to use two factor authentication for any service that offers it. This typically involves another app or a text message sent to you with an extra code you need to enter to gain access. It can seem like a pain sometimes, but the added security is worth it.

One of the exciting things that is becoming more popular as support grows is passkeys. These have a lot of advantages in security and ease of use once set up. It involves private and public key cryptography. You keep a private key stored on your device and a public key on the service you are signing into. There are protocols in place to send checks back and forth between your device and service using the keys to encrypt and decrypt and verify it’s you. You don’t have to remember a password typically if you are on a device that takes fingerprint or face ID you have to verify yourself that way before logging into a service.

To manage all these things, strong random passwords different for each account, two factor authentication, and passkey’s I use the 1Password password manager. My work will pay for it, but I pay for it myself to get a family plan so we can all be a bit more secure. I really like it for passkeys because I don’t have to set up a passkey for each device I use to log in somewhere I set it up and store it in 1Password and then can use it from my phone, or computer.

It’s a bit of work to get set up and get used to using it, but it’s really worth it for the added security and not having to try to remember a bunch of passwords anymore.