I’m a Father!

In late December, we welcomed our daughter into the world a month early. She’s doing great now, and I couldn’t be happier, even if I still get super stressed out by not being able to stop her from crying. Protip: that shushing thing really does work, you just need to do it LOUDLY and into her ear.

What does this mean? For my wife, it means getting to run and ride again. For me, it means less racing and more family time. I’m doing what I can to keep everything going between work, home, NPA, and other responsibilities (*cough* ENDracing). The work I do now has more meaning. It’s not just about helping people find local races and build stronger endurance sport communities, it’s about giving my daughter the chance to join those communities at a younger age than I ever got to.

But only if she wants to, of course.

 

Use ThemeKey to Test Drupal Themes

Every so often I want to test a new theme on a live Drupal installation, but don’t want to break the website for anyone else. You can use ThemeKey to do this, although it is probably the simplest thing you can do with this module.

Navigate to http://example.com/admin/config/user-interface/themekey.

Create a new rule:

user:name
=
your user name
theme you want to see

You’ll be the only one who sees it. If you want to try out another theme, edit the rule.

High on Information

If you haven’t read Mr. Money Mustache’s excellent post The Low Information Diet, you really should. While you’re there, check out the rest of the blog.

I’ve realized recently (and this recurs, of course) that I’ve been reading the news for the sake of reading the news and “keeping up with things,” particularly the 2016 presidential election. Unfortunately, this is not only escapism in its purest form (let’s dream about a world we my candidate wins, and we all get puppies and rainbows*), it’s a waste of time, and it keeps me from doing the things that a) I want to be doing that b) will actually have an effect on the world.

I go back and forth on social media, as well–and I find myself sucked into not only the comparisons but the thoughts of “hey, I could do that [photography/writing/cooking/science], and if I got really good at it, I could make some extra money**…”–which is escapism again. Even with notifications off, there’s that little jolt of chemicals every time I look at Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or the latest poll results (with comments, of course). I don’t need it!

There’s nothing I want to escape from, and it’s time to rebuild the mindfulness machine. So here’s to that.

 

 

*That’s not what my candidate is promising, by the way. It’s a metaphor.
**Don’t worry, we’re not destitute. I’m on a savings kick right now and it’s pretty exciting.

 

PGP Public Key

If you want to send me an encrypted email, you can use the following public key:

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Comment: GPGTools - https://gpgtools.org

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Comics

My main regret about not producing a webcomic* is that I don’t have a reason to provide timely updates about what is going on in my life.

*I don’t produce a webcomic because although it would be cool, I think other people already do a much, much better job of it.  Sort of like working for NASA.

Consolidating (Your Links May Change)

From the beginning, events on NPA have been posted as individual peices of content, with one copy of each race in the database per year.  I’ve scaled back from everything that was originally planned, though, and this no longer makes sense.  Taking a cue from Northland Runner, I’m in the process of consolidating events into one page per event, and then updating the dates and locations as needed.  So if you end up here from a link that doesn’t work, you can probably still find the event.

For the historians in the group, you’ll also be able to see revisions of each event to see what has changed (in this database at least) from year to year.

If you need to update an event and you don’t have access, post a new one and I can consolidate them manually.  I’m in the process of making this easier to do so bad links don’t end up on Twitter.

Questions and comments: As always, please email me at matt@northernplainsathletics.com or tweet at @nplainsathletes.

Find PDFs that are not OCRed (Windows grep)

 
Works reasonably well, although some files may have font properties without the word “Font” (capitalization matters).
 
Open CMD prompt
dir Desktop (or whatever target directory)
grep -L Font *.pdf > list_of_files.txt
 
-L = only return file names that do not match
-r = Recursive

Apple Mail Rules Broken in Yosemite (OS X 10.10)

This has been bothering me since I upgraded to Yosemite earlier this summer.  I finally found an answer: turn on iCloud syncing for email.  I did not need do any if the file copying mentioned in the linked solution.

In case you’re wondering: No, I am not a rules fanatic, but one IMAP email account through my hosting company has an issue with spam.  I turned on Spam Assassin, which tags the junk, and then I use a rule to put those messages in the junk folder, just in case there was a false positive.