Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Century Link: A Year of Bad Customer Service

There are companies that have a seemingly permanent reputation for bad customer service. After the last 1+ years that I’ve spent battling with Century Link, I think they deserve a spot on the podium…

Our church was built in the late 1950s and only has telephone lines running to it. There weren’t any lines from the cable company so our only option for internet was DSL. We got 20 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up and that was all we could get. I’ve been responsible for our contracts at church for the last 10 years and Century Link was always a royal pain to deal with, but it started to escalate in October 2023.

October 30, 2023
Century Link said they could upgrade our service to 80 down, 10 up. That would be a big improvement for us so we decided to go for it.

November 22, 2023
Our appointment day finally arrived… and we were immediately stuck. The tech they sent said he wasn’t allowed to work on the ticket because we were installing internet for the church address but the service address on the account was for the house on the property where our pastor lives. The two addresses are different but it’s all one property.

November 27, 2023
Every time I called Century Link it took 30-60 minutes. Later in this process I started measuring the duration, but for now, just keep that in mind. The person I spoke to on the phone eventually said that they could not give us internet service at the church address even though it was fine at the address where the house is. So we were stuck. We had working internet that was apparently “illegal” according to their rules and depending on which tech showed up, we may or may not be able to get any service at all. It was time for a change.

December 2024
Over the next couple months we were able to switch to Comcast Business and the experience was glorious. They were excellent at communicating, the speeds were fantastic (100 down, 100 up), they ran a line to our property for free, and the bill was less than the old DSL line we had before.

February 12, 2024
I called to cancel our internet service with Century Link. We had to keep our two phone lines because fire code required that our fire alarm have two physical phone lines hooked up to it. So the new bill for two physical phone lines that we never use was going to be $117.33/month. Great.

March 19, 2024
I thought our service was canceled but we kept getting voicemails saying they needed to come out an shut off our internet service. These voicemails were extremely frustrating because they didn’t leave any number to call them back and when I’d call their customer support line, they didn’t know anything about it.

March 21, 2024
Our bill never went down to the new price and they still hadn’t been out to actually shut off the internet, but I was able to get them to prorate the bill so we wouldn’t pay for that service for the previous month.

May 7, 2024
I opened a case to report that we had no dialtone on our phone lines. We found out about this because our alarm system was unable to communicate and the problem started April 25.

May 10, 2024
I waited at church all day for a tech to show up. He never did. I spent the whole day at church waiting.

May 11, 2024
I called the number to reschedule the appointment. Apparently a tech was never assigned to my appointment on May 10 but I wasn’t notified.

May 13, 2024
I called to complain that we’re still paying for internet even though we asked for it to be cancelled three months ago. She said they couldn’t stop charging us for it until they sent out a tech out to shut it off but they couldn’t shut it off until the phone line issue was fixed.

May 14, 2024
A tech showed up at church to work on our phones so I dropped everything and drove over there. He determined that our lines were out because of vandalism. Someone had cut some of the main lines and the ticket would have to be transferred to another team that handles the main lines.

May 15, 2024 – 20 minutes
I called to see when the lines would be fixed. I got a new ticket number and was told that someone would come out on May 24. So yes, our business was going to be without phones for 9 more days.

May 24, 2024 – 15 minutes
I arrived at church at 7:45am for our “8am-5pm” service window and then got a text saying the window was now 12:30-4:30. Around 11:45am I got a text saying they were rescheduling and the website said the new date was June 3. I called again to complain but didn’t get much more information other than they were probably working on repairing the cut cable, but there was no way for me or the person I called to actually communicate with the team that does these repairs.

June 3, 2024
I sat at church from 8am to 12pm waiting for someone to show up. Nobody came. I called around noon to get more info and was told the new date was June 11.

June 11, 2024
They missed another appointment.

June 12, 2024
I called to get more info. The new date for my repair was June 14 and I would get a text message when it was fixed.

June 24, 2024 – 40 minutes
I called again and asked to be escalated to a supervisor. She didn’t have any additional information and said she would give me a call back on a regular basis to update me on the situation.

July 8, 2024 – 30 minutes
I hadn’t received any calls from that supervisor so I asked to be transferred to her. She wasn’t available so I left a message and she did call me back but there was no new information. She was going to look for more and call me back.

July 29, 2024
I called back and asked for the manager but he couldn’t find anybody by that name. The tech I spoke to was very friendly and said he feels bad because he gets a lot of calls like this from our area, but there wasn’t anything more he could do.

October 18, 2024
Every week or so, I’d get a text message saying that our service would definitely be repaired by a new date about a week in the future. All this time we were paying over $100/month for no service. We finally shut off autopay. Earlier we had found a new alarm company that new the fire codes better and was able to set us up with a cellular connection instead of the physical lines so we were finally free of Century Link.

October 29, 2024 – 74 minutes
Looking at all the money we had paid since we first reported the issue, I believed we were owed $529.97. I went through multiple people trying to cancel our service and get our money back and I eventually got transferred to a black hole after 32 minutes. So I called back and started over again. His math worked out to $512.09 and I figured that was close enough. He said I would get a billing statement showing the credit and then a few weeks later we’ll get the check.

December 3, 2024
Our November bill showed a credit of $297.47 with no mention of what happened to the original $512.09 number or the $529.97 that we had actually paid. The website does show that our account is finally closed but we still have not received the check.

January 9, 2025 – 8 minutes
I’m saving time on these calls by recording my path through the phone tree. It normally takes about 6 minutes to get to a human but I’m able to save a lot of time by knowing which numbers to press. The person said our credit hadn’t been released yet. She put in another request and I should wait another 60 days to get the check.

March 17, 2025
Still no check. I called again and was told the check should arrive within 30 days.

April 5, 2025
The check finally arrived.

How does a company like this even stay in business? Throughout the whole thing, the only time I ever spoke to the same person twice was when I had a couple calls in a row with the same supervisor. Every person that answered the phone would infuriatingly say “I’m going to do my best to own your experience today.” That clearly wasn’t true. They just wanted a good survey result at the end. I lost so much time and sleep over this experience and sometimes I wonder if the lines are still broken even today.

Ultimately I’m very thankful that we moved to Comcast internet right before the problems started with a lack of dialtone and I’m also super thankful that we were able to move our alarm system to the cellular monitoring.

benmartens May 1, 2025 Geek No Comments

Walnut Desk Upgrade

When work sent us home in March 2020 but before all the COVID lockdowns were in place, I quickly pulled the trigger on a standing desk purchase that I had been considering for a while. I’m so thankful that I did since they were hard to find for a while and prices went up a lot. I’ve reviewed the functionality of my VertiDesk before, but after 5 years, it’s time to talk about aesthetics.

I initially slapped a 3/4″ piece of pine plywood on top with a little bit of edge banding and some light attempts at cable management. It worked fine but it was never what I wanted and as with most desk areas, the surface got cluttered and the cables procreated. It also doesn’t help that in addition to my desktop with two monitors, I also have a laptop with a docking station connected via KVM, but I also have a second laptop from work that gets used most days too.

When I built the nightstand, I carefully planned out the walnut plywood usage so that I’d have a piece leftover that was just about the desired size of my desk. I added some ~1/4″ strips of walnut as edge banding and used multiple coats of General Finishes Arm-R-Seal Oil Based Topcoat in semi-gloss to make it look real purdy. Then I had to let the whole project sit for about a month. The instructions on the can note that you shouldn’t set anything heavy on the finish until it fully cures in 30 days. I was busy anyway, so I decided to wait the full period.

As I removed everything from my desk, I was surprised to see the giant pile that it produced, but I was finally able to get it cleaned off and then attach the new desk. While I had it upside down, I mounted some power strips and a cable management solution from Flexispot. As I put everything back in place, I paid a lot of attention to what cables needed to run down to the floor and what could stay up on the desk. I even 3D printed a holder for my thunderbolt dock so I could keep it on the bottom of the desk surface.

When I built the desk, I also built a small platform for the center monitor and spent way too long designing custom honeycomb 3D printed risers that no one will ever see. This was the perfect height to hide the mess of cables associated with my KVM switch, SD card reader, etc. Now I just see the front of the switch poking out and I can easily click the button to switch back and forth between my machines.

I’m very happy with the end result. That Flexispot cable management system is a major upgrade. I can easily add more cables in the future and remove ones that are already in place. They hold a massive amount of wiring and even some power bricks as well. There is still a small pile of wires on the ground for the battery backup and network switch that I need to clean up, but this is one of those projects that will always have “one more thing” that I can improve.

benmartens April 24, 2025 Geek, Woodworking No Comments

MLC Visit

When you list top places to visit for your 15th wedding anniversary, New Ulm, MN is near the top of the list, right? Ok that’s probably not the case in general, but it is for Tyla, and it just happened to work out that we took a trip there on our anniversary weekend. Because of Elijah’s spring break, he was able to come along on this trip too.

After we landed in Minneapolis, we made a very quick stop at the Mall of America. Tyla and I had both spent time separately there before, but it was Elijah’s first time. We took a quick spin on the Pepsi Orange Streak roller coaster and then had dinner at the food court before quickly exiting and making the 1.5 hour drive down to New Ulm.

New Ulm is home to Martin Luther College which is the school that trains every one of the pastors and teachers in our national church body. The solid Biblical doctrine and training received at MLC is a key factor in the consistency of teaching across all of our churches and schools. As with our previous trip last fall, this was another trip to work with the MLC leadership team. Tyla and I had a full day of meetings talking about work they are doing, asking questions, and providing feedback. It was exciting to see all the projects that are in motion there and hopefully our input was valuable to them.

While we were in the meetings, we had planned to just have Elijah hang out next door in the library and enjoy some bonus time on his tablet, but they set him up with a student ambassador for the day! Elijah got to tour some buildings, have lunch in the cafeteria, and play disc golf. Getting all that personalized attention was a dream day for him! After lunch, Elijah was supposed to attend a history class with the student but it turned out that he had a test that day. While they were eating lunch, another student mentioned that he was heading for Greek class. Elijah thought that sounded like fun so the student offered to take him to Greek! It’s hard to imagine a sixth grader going to a senior-level Greek/theology class, but he loved it.

We stayed an extra day to attend a baseball doubleheader and tennis matches. Everywhere we went that day, we saw people we knew and we had great conversations. We even found someone to give us a quick tour of the Betty Kohn fieldhouse.

As always, the faculty and staff made us feel incredibly welcome. We’re so thankful for their kindness and hospitality in addition to the amazing work they are doing at the school.

benmartens April 17, 2025 Family, Travel

Simplify Your Windows Reinstall

Reinstalling an OS feels like it should be painful and scary. I’m going to lose files. I’m going to spend hours booting into safe mode and looking for drivers. I’m going to forget some apps. So when my computer got stuck on Windows Update and couldn’t update to the latest version (24H2), I wasn’t excited, but I finally bit the bullet and completely reset the machine. But in keeping with my previous post, I chatted with Copilot first about some ideas to make the process smoother. These aren’t going to be general purpose tips, but if you’re not intimated by a command prompt, I bet this will save you some time.

Before I reset anything, I did my usual application list checks and file backups. But then I did two additional steps.

  1. Have you learned the glory of winget yet? It lets you install any Windows Store app from the command line. I’ll be honest… I hardly ever installed stuff through the Windows Store, but once I found this app, I was hooked! I regularly reset my machines at work and we have a team script that automatically installs most of the apps that we will need. In my chat with Copilot, I learned that winget is even cooler than I thought: you can export a list of all your installed apps and then import it later! “winget list” will give you a nice table showing all the apps and whether they are in the store or not. “winget export” will dump a json file of all the Windows Store apps on your machine and then you can use “winget import” to reinstall them. If you run the import from an admin command prompt and use “–accept-source-agreements –accept-package-agreements” then the whole thing is silent. I installed 22 apps with a single command!
  2. Driver installs are much better than they used to be, but I still worry about missing something, especially since I built this PC myself and I can’t just go to a website and download all the drivers for it. But it turns out that you can easily list and back up all your drivers with these three commands. I didn’t test the reinstall part because Windows was able to find everything, but it’s nice to know that I had a backup plan.
    • List them all: driverquery /FO LIST /V > C:\DriverList.txt
    • Back them up: dism /online /export-driver /destination:C:\DriverBackup
    • Reinstall from backup: pnputil /add-driver C:\DriverBackup\*.inf /subdirs /install

Resetting Windows is so easy these days! It’s done right from the settings app and you can choose to refresh or completely wipe and start over. I did the latter since I wasn’t sure exactly what was keeping me from updating. That put me on 23H2 again and I wasn’t immediately being offered 24H2 so I forced it with the Windows 11 Installation Assistant.

I still had to reinstall a bunch of apps that weren’t in the Windows store, but everything up to that point was a breeze and went amazingly quickly. Of course, having a solid backup strategy is critical to an operation like this. I knew that I had multiple copies of all my data in case anything went wrong. Using OneDrive to backup your Desktop, Photos, Documents, etc is a great way to do have this happen by default.

So I don’t know who this post will benefit, but I wanted to celebrate how easy this reinstall was!

benmartens April 10, 2025 Geek

GPS For Your Brain

I’ve written posts about how LLMs (large language models like ChatGPT, Copilot, etc) are changing my life, but I continue to have conversations with people who are hesitant about it. It seems like it takes that one “aha!” experience where to help someone internalize how this will revolutionize something in their daily routine. So here’s another post where I’ll share a bunch of examples of how I use it to see if any of them trigger for you. Once you get it into your daily flow, it becomes like GPS for your brain. It doesn’t replace you in anything, but it enhances your abilities dramatically. Just like I wouldn’t drive somewhere with a paper atlas anymore, I’d be left behind in life if I wasn’t using AI.

  1. Argue Against Me. Humans love to have their own beliefs reinforced, but true learning happens when you can really understand the opposite viewpoint. AI is great for this. I’ll open up a prompt and explain my viewpoint and then say “Give me some logical arguments from the opposite point of view.” It’s very eye-opening. It’s how I wish all discussions would go but with AI, it’s a lot easier to get non-emotional responses.
  2. Coding. There’s a lot of talk about using AI for coding. I code for a living so obviously I’m interested in whether AI is going to come for my job. I currently find it to be fantastic for small, self-contained problems like “write me a powershell script to do x, y, and z” but it’s not as good at “This class feels unnecessary to me. Rearchitect this project to clean it up.” I’ll keep trying the more advanced scenarios though because it improves so rapidly. If you’re interested in this topic, I recommend checking out this article: How AI-assisted coding will change software engineering: hard truths
  3. Command Line Arguments. I guess this is related to coding, but sometimes I find myself using a command line tool with a ton of different arguments. Instead of reading the documentation, I’ll just say “I’m using ytdlp and I want to download only the audio of this video and I want it saved to mp3 format. Generate the command line arguments that I need.” Bingo!
  4. Explain like I’m 5, 10, and 15 years old. When I get curious about a new area, I’m not sure how much I know, so I’ll ask AI something like “I’m curious about quantum entanglement. Give me separate explanations like I’m a 5, 10, and 15 years old.” The numbers might vary, but something like that will help me get quickly up to speed and lets me ask much more specific questions as I continue to learn. It’s awesome to be able to ask dumb questions in a private environment!
  5. Sermon Summaries. Each Sunday I’m responsible for posting sermons from our church services on Facebook and YouTube. I like to include a quick blurb about the sermon and I’ve been experimenting with AI for this. I take the automatically generated transcript of the sermon, feed it into AI, and then ask for a 2-3 sentence summary in the style of the speaker. That “in the style of the speaker” phrase is a key piece of the prompt. It produces a much more natural sounding blurb. I still have to review it for theological accuracy and sometimes I’ll even give it more prompting about what type of source theology is acceptable, but in general, it’s a very solid start and much more eloquent than I would have generated on my own. And even if I could have written something good, using an automated solution like this is a lot easier for someone else to repeat.
  6. Bible Study Companion. During our Bible studies at church, I’ve been typing the questions in and seeing what AI thinks about the answers. “What does placing Ruth in the line of the savior tell us about God’s salvation plan?” I read through the answers and it’s usually a cheat sheet for all the answers that the group will give. Every once in a while they miss one that I think is relevant and I can share it with the group. Now obviously this loses part of the self-reflection benefit of Bible study, but as someone who sometimes finds themselves leading the study, it feels good to have a tool like this in my back pocket.
  7. Homework Helper. Sometimes I have a hard time explaining concepts to Elijah either because I’m unable to formulate it in a way he grasps or because we’re not working well together. In both cases, I fire up the voice version of an AI and have Elijah chat with it. Even if the AI explains it the same way I was, it usually goes over better.

Those are just some examples from my daily life, but there are other awesome ideas too. How about using it to learn a dying language and then safeguard it for the future? And this next example isn’t specifically related to LLMs, but imagine AI training to speak in the voice of someone who has lost their voice to disease? Now their text to speech actually sounds like them. We’re just starting to discover all the possibilities.

These topics come up in a lot of podcasts, but one good one I listened to recently was an interview with Reid Hoffman who recently wrote a book called Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future. You can listen to the episode here: Unlocking AI’s Potential: Reid Hoffman Discusses ‘Superagency’. I got the “GPS for your brain” quote from that episode.

So if you tried AI once and it gave you a dumb answer or didn’t work for you, don’t give up. One piece of advice is to use the voice version of the AI and just talk to it. That can feel a lot more natural. Or if you want to chat via text but aren’t getting good answers, there’s a whole school of knowledge called “prompt engineering” which is about how to craft the right types of questions. As an example, one thing I hear at church a lot is “AI gives me too much reformed theology.” Sure, maybe it does by default because that makes up a lot of the theological material on the internet. But you could also start your prompt with something like the following:

Serve as an AI theologian with a primary focus on interpreting and teaching Christian doctrines based solely on the Bible as the ultimate source of truth. Use the creeds of Christianity (such as the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian creeds) as supporting documents to clarify key doctrines. Supplement interpretations with insights from faith leaders, especially Martin Luther, whose writings emphasize justification by grace through faith and the authority of Scripture. Maintain a Christ-centered perspective throughout all discussions, ensuring that interpretations align with a literal and historical reading of the Scriptures.

You’ll get a much better response from that prompt! Also, there’s a “think deeper” button in many of the tools now. This helps apply an iterative response to the AI’s response which takes a little longer but can give better results. And while I still use mostly free tools, remember that the free option you’re using is old tech. If you want the latest and greatest, you’ll need to explore the paid options.

Need some links to get started? Here’s my current list ordered by most frequently used first:

benmartens April 3, 2025 Uncategorized

Migrating Off MailStore Home

I’ve been a happy user of MailStore Home for years. It lets me easily archive mail off of my various email accounts, store it locally, and still easily search it all. (I’m probably paranoid, but I don’t like having years of my personal emails stored on free email services.)

Due to some security changes and lack of support from MailStore, my Outlook.com accounts no longer work with their tool. It’s hard to complain too much when I’m using a free tool. They make their money from corporate customers. So I was off to search for something else.

There are lots of other options, but I kept seeing people recommend Thunderbird which is the email client from the Mozilla Foundation (makers of the Firefox browser.) I was able to export all my emails from MailStore to EML files and then import them into Thunderbird. It will take me a while to get used to the search interface, but functionally I’m back on track. I don’t like the interface enough to switch from my regular email client to just using Thunderbird, but it’s easy enough to open Thunderbird every once in a while and archive some emails from my various accounts to my local folders.

So if I’ve previously recommended MailStore to you as a way to archive your email locally, my new recommendation is Thunderbird. It’s a nice way to have access to all my old emails without letting companies scrape through my content. If you don’t care about that and if you don’t run out of space on your free email accounts, then you can ignore all this.

benmartens March 27, 2025 Uncategorized

Canon EF 70-200 First Impressions

I posted a few weeks ago about our new Canon R8. After buying that, I traded in almost all our old camera gear at keh.com to swap it for a used Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens. In Canon lingo, the L series lenses are as fancy as they get, and this 70-200 lens is one of the most popular lenses that Canon makes. Our R8 body takes the newer RF lens mount but since that is still very new, there aren’t a lot of lenses on the market and very few on the used mark. We already bought a mount adapter that lets us use the older EF style lenses and since those have been around for so long, there are tons of great options on the used market.

I’ve eyeballed this lens for probably 10 years but we’ve never been able to justify the cost. But with Elijah participating in more school activities, we wanted to be able to capture them well. But wait you say. Isn’t that the justification we used to get the R8 body? I have no idea what you’re talking about. Moving on.

The lens from our old camera that we kept is a Tamron AF 28-75mm f/2.8 SP XR Di LD. Until recently, that’s the nicest lens I ever used and I thought it was great. The f/2.8 aperture helped a lot with collecting enough light into the lens for indoor shooting and I got some great photos out of it, especially when combined with the new full frame sensor on the R8. Never having used anything nicer, I was a little nervous spending so much money on a nicer lens because what if I couldn’t tell a difference?

My concerns were unfounded. This EF 70-200 blew my mind. I took it out for its first real test at Elijah’s basketball game. During the game, I was trying to review the photos on the camera and sure, they looked good, but it’s a tiny screen. How much could I really see? When I got home, I was amazed at how sharp the photos were. That lens combined with the amazing focus tracking of the camera body left me with way more good shots than I used to get and those shots were all of a much higher quality level. I now feel like I’m more limited by skill than by camera gear so that’s a fun place to be.

But maybe this was just cognitive dissonance. Maybe I want to believe it’s better because we spent extra money on it. It’s time for a test.

I set up a tripod in our living room and, using both lenses, I took a photo of Elijah’s science fair posterboard across the room. Both photos were f/3.5, ISO 2000, 1/100 sec at a focal length of 75mm. Zooming in on my PC revealed this comparison. The new lens is remarkably clearer.

I’ll leave the professional reviews to other people, but in both my subjective and objective tests, this new lens is wonderful. Physically, it’s a beast to carry around. The lighter weight of the newer RF lenses is a major advantage, but for the price savings, I’m ok with the extra weight. However, for regular shooting days, I’ll be packing the 28-75 lens… and wondering when I can replace that one with the L series equivalent!

benmartens March 20, 2025 Gadgets, Photography

COVID-19: Day 1826 (Five Years)

This blog serves a few purposes, but one of the major ones is being a (public) journal. It’s interesting, for example, to look back at my thoughts right after the planes crashed on September 11. The spread of COVID-19 feels like one of those events that we’ll remember for a long time so it felt worthy of at least one post, but this probably won’t be the last one.

That was the first paragraph of a post from March 6, 2020, one week before the lockdown started for us. Looking back at the many posts I wrote about COVID-19 I had two thoughts. First, I’m so glad that I wrote all those posts. It’s an incredible record of what was going through my head as I went through an event that will be in history books. Secondly, I’m not embarrassed by what I wrote. That’s a surprise… you can’t find the first years of this blog (mid 2000’s) on my site anymore because I cringe when I read a lot of those posts. But our family’s approach to COVID-19 and other health issues hasn’t changed even after five years: get vaccinated, trust the current science (even when new research invalidates old research), and rely on guidelines from the experts (even when it gets updated.)

The disease is still killing a lot of people. Thankfully death rates are lower now, but it’s still well-entrenched in the top 10 causes for death (though it takes a couple years for agencies to collect exact numbers.)

Our family has been COVID-19 free for quite a while. I’m very thankful for that because even though the risk of death is lower than before, there are still risks of nasty downstream impacts from the disease. Two of the YouTubers that we follow have been hit by long COVID-19. Shawn from Kids Invent Stuff recently announced his challenges with it and Diana from Physics girl just got out of bed for the first time in two years. While I like that society isn’t shut down by this disease anymore, we can’t just ignore it. Research needs to continue, and we need to keep communicating the importance of vaccines. If everyone got vaccinated, couldn’t we remove this from the top 10 killer list?

One of the biggest challenges, especially during the first couple years of COVID-19, was educating people. There is enough blame for that to spread around to everyone: scientists, news media, government, the general population, etc. Unfortunately, this problem doesn’t seem to have gotten better. How much of people’s opinions are currently formed by TikTok and doom scrolling? How is our reaction going to be any more informed the next time we go through an emergency like this? On the home front, I’ve put extra effort into trying to teach Elijah how to evaluate information that he hears.

It would be hard to live through a situation like this and not be forever changed. The mental and emotional aspects are hard to evaluate but there are regular parts of my visible life that are still different than before the pandemic. Here are some that I can think of:

  1. I still work from home! I’m officially a 100% remote employee, and I love not having to commute into the office. No two members of my team work in the same building and most of us are spread out across North America.
  2. We still wear masks on planes. I used to get sick so often when I flew. Why didn’t I do this before? Now I haven’t gotten sick from a flight in five years.
  3. I still do my grocery shopping on Friday mornings before 7am. This started during the lockdown to avoid contact with other people, but I’ve grown to love it. I don’t have to give up more valuable evening/weekend time, it forces me to food plan for the whole week so I make less trips to the store, and my shopping is faster because the store is so empty.
  4. Almost all our meals have always been made at home, but when we do eat from a restaurant, we still do takeout like we did during the lockdown. Ordering online, picking it up, and eating at home is not only cheaper, but it saves us a ton of time waiting around at the table.
  5. We have always tried to keep up with flu shots and other vaccines, but other than flu and COVID, Tyla and I were behind on some. As an adult, nobody says “Hey, have you had a DTaP lately?” There has been an outbreak of Pertussis (whopping cough) at Elijah’s school, and I was thankful that all three of us had gotten that particular vaccine updated in the last year.
  6. I love all the previously in-person meetings that are now online. I get to skip a lot of rush hour/evening drives for church leadership meetings and daytime meetings like school and doctor appointments take so much less time when you just hop online for a call.

These small changes have enhanced my life in unexpected ways, but the continued toll of COVID-19 shows the need for ongoing research and vaccine promotion. We can’t afford to let misinformation shape our actions. We have to prioritize education and getting information from trustworthy sources to handle inevitable future emergencies more effectively.

benmartens March 13, 2025 Commentary

Painting 3D Prints

I don’t know what inspired it but I decided to try my hand at printing 3D prints. We had just watched Inside Out 2 and I found a model of Anger on Printables.

My first attempt used red filament and then I used some of Elijah’s acrylic paints with brushes. Never having done this before, I had no idea what I was doing. The end result was pretty rough. I hadn’t done anything to fix the layer lines in the print, the paints very thick, and the brushes were cheap/damaged. It turned out so badly that I wanted to try again. (And I just now noticed that I forgot to paint the mouth.)

For the second attempt, I took more time. I started by doing four or five layers of filler primer with endless sanding in between. I bought some new (but still cheap) acrylic paint and brushes. The new brushes and paint worked so much better than my first attempt, but I still lacked skill and I was never able to get a brush free appearance, but this was a significant improvement from the first attempt.

The red and the black colors hid the brush strokes pretty well but it’s very obvious on the white parts. Maybe next time I’ll have to get a basic air brush setup and give that a shot?

benmartens March 6, 2025 Maker

PSE Flex Program Review

As I mentioned previously, our electricity rates are increasing, but our power company is also rolling out some interesting programs to help people save money and reduce load on the grid. I recently enrolled in one called “PSE Flex“.

There are multiple ways to enroll:

  1. They send you a message before a “flex event” and ask you to reduce your power consumption. You get paid $1/kWh that you save and $15/year just for being in the program.
  2. If you let them remotely adjust your smart thermostat, you will get $40/year.
  3. If you let them control your EV charging, they will give you $0.50/kWh saved during Flex events.
  4. If you have a battery storage system, you get $500/year if you let them use power from it during Flex events.

I signed us up for the first item and after one month of usage, I’m very happy to report that we’ve already saved the initial $25 sign up credit plus an additional $43.21! There were nine Flex events in those 30 days. I don’t know if that’s normal or if it was ramped up because of the very cold weather we had. Either way, that’s a pretty significant savings.

As someone who spends a lot of time with “big data” I immediately had questions when they said they would credit me for power that I didn’t use. How can you measure something that doesn’t happen? They obviously had to guess and I have two ideas about how they are guessing:

  1. They look at how much power I used during the same timeframe in the days leading up to the event.
  2. They look at how much power I used in the hour before and the hour after the event.

They’re probably doing some combo of this but from my experiments, the second one seems to be the stronger signal. And with a giant electricity storage device sitting in my garage (the Tesla), I can really take advantage of this. I make sure to charge the car for the hour before and the hour after the event and whenever I’ve done that, they’ve said that I’ve saved roughly the kWh that I would have used if I had kept charging that whole time.

In most places, you power is coming from a mix of powerplants. You can see where our power is coming from by looking at the Bonneville Power Authority charts: BPA Balancing Authority Load and Total VER. Most of our power comes from hydro. That green line is wind and solar. Coal/natural gas and nuclear are at almost exactly the same level.

I had a hard time understanding why we were having Flex events when we weren’t also having peak power consumption periods. While they probably do have Flex events to reduce peak power usage, there is another reason: it can be cheaper to pay you to $1 kWh to not use power than it is for PSE to BUY the power! There’s a great explanation of this scenario in a Reddit thread but as a very quick summary, the price that PSE pays per MW can fluctuate from $40/MWh on a normal day up to $2000! Those of us on the west coast can see minute by minute pricing on this website: California ISO Price Map

I’m sure the whole story is way more complicated than what I’ve understood so far, but for now, I’ll be very happy if I can keep saving $40/month on my power bill!

benmartens February 27, 2025 Electric Vehicles, Links