Conor Muirhead · Conor.cc

Eight Weeks Come & Gone

2012-01-16

Well eight weeks have come and gone, and I haven’t lost 16 pounds. Actually I haven’t really lost any pounds.

I’d like to blame it on the fact that I injured my back and have been going to physio therapy instead of CrossFit, but let’s be real, that’s not why I haven’t lost any weight.

I bought and have almost finished reading The Abs Diet, it’s a really great book, so great that I’ve even started to do some of the things it recommends. That’s the problem you see, I’ve only really put half my heart into this thing.

Browsing through some old entries on Katie’s Blog tonight has renewed my motivation though. I want to look my best again, and I know I can do it. I’ve still got 2 months and 10 days left to meet my goal, I’m gonna make it.

Advent Cards

2011-12-04

On December 1^st Christmas started around here, and so far it’s been really fun. Holly is old enough now to actually enjoy the excitement of Christmas stuff, so Katie and I have really stepped up our game. Katie’s been working on Christmas stuff for months now, but my first project came last week when Katie and I started making our advent calendar.

Katie made some really cute advent calendar envelopes, and I made some little cards to go in them. Nothing too fancy, but Holly, Katie, and I really like them.

Hacking My Blog Post Workflow

2011-12-03

This blog runs on a little blogging engine called [Toto][1]. It’s entirely .txt file based, which is neat for a few reasons:

There are no databases to deal with
Posts are preserved in a future-friendly format
Everything can be easily backed up using [Dropbox][2], Time Machine, etc.

These things all make Toto awesome, but the process of creating a new post was causing friction for me, so I decided to hack my way to a solution using a little [Ruby][3], and my ol' friend [Alfred App][4].

The Problem

Before today, getting a new post started was a bit of a process. Before starting to write I had to:

Find and then duplicate an existing post
Change the filename of the new file
Open the file in a text editor and
Delete the duplicated content of the new file
Update the metadata of the new file
Start writing

The Solution

I wanted to be able to hit command+space, and then type something like: “blog: Hacking My Blog Post Workflow”, and have that automatically complete the friction steps I mentioned earlier. Here’s what I wrote in a file called newpost.rb — but first a disclaimer: I don’t really know how to program, and this code is probably terrible to even the semi-trained eye.

dateDashed = Time.new.strftime("%Y-%m-%d")
dateSlashed = dateDashed.gsub('-','/')

def prompt(default, *args)
  print(*args)
  result = gets.strip
  return result.empty? ? default : result
end

title = prompt "New", "Article Title: "
urlTitle = title.gsub(' ', '-').downcase

content = "title: #{title}\ndate: #{dateSlashed}\nkind: article\n"

filename = "./articles/#{dateDashed}-#{urlTitle}.txt"

File.open filename, 'w' do |f|
    f.write content
end

system('open #{filename}')

This little program grabs the current date, and saves it in two formats, then asks me what the post title should be. Once it’s gathered that information it creates a new file using the date and title for the filename, and the post’s in-file metadata, and then opens that file for me in a text editor.

When I finished writing this, I was just running the file from the terminal like so:

ruby newpost.rb
> Article Title: Hacking My Blog Post Workflow

This worked, but still felt like I had to do too much work.

Enter Alfred

Fortunately I’ve been using a great little utility called Alfred. Alfred helps you with launch applications, quick calculations, checking spellings and definitions, and other useful things like that.

Just this week I discovered that Alfred also has the ability to run some commands in terminal for me, and even pass input from me to the terminal. I took advantage of this and created a new Extension that looks like this:

cd

Halfway to Obese

2011-11-26

This week I went to the doctor’s office to get a physical. My body mass index (BMI) is at 27.37 kg/m². This puts me in the overweight category. Here’s my weight category breakdown:

Healthy: 125-164 lb.
Overweight: 165-197 lb.
Obese: 198-263 lb.

I’m 5'8" and I weigh exactly 180 lb., which puts me right in the middle of the overweight category. Halfway to a healthy weight, and halfway to obese. This scares me.

I was at the top end of the healthy category in high school and likely through the first year of marriage. Then over the last 4 years I’ve creeped my way up to the middle of overweight. Based on those stats I could easily be at the bottom of the obese category within the next 4 years if I didn’t change anything.

I recently started working out regularly, and I’m aiming to increase the frequency of those workouts, but I don’t think that’s enough. I think I really need to change my eating habits too.

My goal is to drop 16 lb. in the next 4 months. That would put me right at the top of the healthy range. My doctor recommended a book called [The Abs Diet][1], saying that though it has a cheesy title, it really does contain some good science. I just purchased it on amazon, and I’m going to give it all I’ve got…

Los Angeles

2011-11-21

Katie and I took off to Los Angeles this weekend without the girls, it was wonderful. I tried to capture a little bit of the trip by taking the occassional photo, here are a few of my favorites.

Jobs Not Users

2011-11-20

In answering a question about how to cater a product’s design toward early adopters rather than mainstream users, Ryan Singer said:

“So I would advise that you orient your UI around the job to be done — around the problem — and not the person. Then people who have that problem can fall in love with your product because it makes the problem go away, whether they are the first in line or the last person to hear about it.”

I love this. Worry about solving the problem in the best way possible, and you’ll be pleasing not just the early adopter, or the mainstream user, but everyone that has to do that job. Jobs, not users.

Thank You

2011-11-11

Growing up I never knew any soldiers, and I never shot any guns. I wasn’t even allowed to “play wrestling” as my Mom called it. So as you can imagine, joining the military was never something I was likely to do…

CrossFit Kills Me But I Love It

2011-11-04

So I joined a [CrossFit gym][1] a month or two ago, and it’s been absolutely brutal! Each time I go I leave feeling like I just got my butt kicked, the funny thing I seem to like it…

I'm Not a Writer

2011-10-31

I’ve never been much of a writer, but I’ve almost always loved the idea of being great at writing. This week I’ve decided to just go for it.

I realize that not many people will be reading what I have to say here, and that’s okay. I think it actually makes it easier to put something out there knowing that (for now at least) it’s just for me…

Solarized Color Palette

2011-10-29

This is my go-to color palette for code syntax highlighting. I love the colors so much that I decided to rotate through 7 of them for each day of the week on this site as an experiment. I’ll try it out for a bit and see what sticks…