Blogs

Meet Hank.

He's a Golden Retriever/Labrador Retriever mix that my family and I are raising as part of the Seeing Eye's Puppy Raising program. The Seeing Eye is a non-profit organization that breeds, raises, and trains puppies to serve as guide dogs for the blind and visually impaired.

It's been four years since the last Nuketown redesign, and I don't know how many years since I first started powering the site with Drupal. It's time for some changes.

First up, I'm moving the site from Drupal to WordPress. I've been on Drupal since the 4.x days, faithfully upgrading with each major release until arriving at Drupal 7.x. It made sense at the time; Drupal is one of the open source content management systems we use at work, and it was helpful to be able to dabble with it in my free time.

The Geek Tree has grown. In previous years, that meant additional oranments. This year it truly grew higher, going from 7 feet to 9 feet as I upgraded to a new, taller tree.

The goal of the new tree was to add some more surface area for oranments and put off the day when I'll need to start theming my trees. The plan worked, but not quite as well I'd hoped; the new tree is narrower than the old one, so while we gained surface area from height, we lost some with the slimmer circumfrance.

I'm now paying to get my ass kicked.

After nine months of working out on my own, I reached the plateau that I knew I'd reach. I was walking a few miles a day, running 3-5 miles a couple days a week, and doing the occasional stretching exercises in the morning. I've been slowly improving my run times -- my best mile is 8'42" on the indoor track, my best 3 miles is 30 minutes with an average 9'57 pace.

Earlier in the summer Evernote limited their free service to only allow syncing between two devices. This severely hampered my Home Mac/Work Mac/iPad/iPhone workflow, and led me to try some other services: Google Keep and SimpleNote.

Why do I have a summer reading list? Two big reasons: 1) because I need time for myself, to be alone with the book, the plot, and the mental scenery I'm constructing and 2) because I gives me a project that I'm completely in control of.

The summer did not go as I imagined. Back in the spring, when I was coaching baseball, I had these visions of three mile walks every morning, running every other day, and starting to add on to my fitness regime.

It didn't work out that way.

I'm five months into my exercise regime and it's going great. Yep, this is an exercise update in which I don't lament my inability to maintain my exercise program. Instead, I'll celebrate the fact that the program begun in the depths of winter has continued into the spring.

2015 was a great exercise year for me. Through a combination of running, walking, the occasional game of disc golf, and coaching baseball for a bunch of 8 and 9 year old boys, I lost 15 pounds and hit my summer goal of 210 pounds.

I had a great routine -- get up in the morning, go for a run with the dog, then go to work. Get in another walk or a brief run in the evening, then go out on Saturday or Sunday mornings with the guys for some disc golf. According to my Apple Watch's exercise app, I was regularly hitting my 1,200 active calorie movement goal.

Last year saw an array of family games invade the Geek Tree. This year it's all about the RPGs.

The first two books to hit the Geek Tree's space-and-rockets themed tree skirt were Savage Worlds books that I received for my birthday.