Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Barclay Lake

We’ve had an incredible spring in terms of weather. Normally we are in the midst of “June gloom” where it might not be super wet, but it’s 100% cloudy for weeks on end. Instead, we’re in a stretch of warm weather and clear blue skies. We don’t usually get this until July. I’ll take it!

When you get nice weather in the Pacific Northwest, you better take advantage of it, and that’s just what we did. We loaded up the car and headed to Barclay Lake for a hike with Nancy, Megan, Mandy and Ike. Our previous attempts at hiking haven’t been super successful because Elijah ends up getting tired of riding in the backpack and wants to walk. Walking turns into a game of endless distractions that doesn’t result in us moving down the trail.

This hike went a lot better, and it might be because Ike and Elijah could both see the other one riding in a backpack. The hike was not too difficult, but it ended at a very nice lake. Elijah and Ike spent their time throwing rocks and mud into the lake while the rest of us had a picnic.

Ike and Elijah both fell asleep in the backpacks on the way back to the car and the hike was a success! The only downfall was that I had underestimated the traffic that would be coming back through the pass on Memorial Day. It added about 90 minutes to our 90 minute drive. Ouch.

Two thumbs up for Barclay Lake though. There were a lot of very nice potential camping spots around the lake and I could see it being a good spot for a first overnight trip with Elijah when he’s older and able to carry his own pack.

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benmartens June 12, 2015 Outdoors

The Martian

Last summer, I wrote up my thoughts on The Martian by Andy Weir. It’s an awesome science fiction book based almost completely in the realm of actual science. (The author admits to one intentional deviation in the first few pages to make a better story.) You could quickly summarize the book as “MacGyver on Mars.”

The buzz around this book is ramping up again because trailers for the movie are starting to come out. It’s directed by Ridley Scott and stars Matt Damon. I really enjoyed the book and have high hopes for the movie.

If you’re at all interested in engineering, space, or science fiction, this is one to keep on your radar. I don’t know whether it’s better to read the book or watch the movie first, but personally I’d say you should read the book first because it’s your only option right now! Here are a couple links to get a taste of what you’re in for. Don’t worry about spoiling the book by watching these. He gets stranded on Mars. Surprise! That’s the whole point of the book and you learn that in the first couple pages.

XKCD has a comic this week about the movie too.

benmartens June 11, 2015 Commentary

Berlin Wall

The Microsoft campus has lots of art in all of the buildings. There’s so much of it, that it’s easy to walk right by without paying much attention. But if you walk into the main conference center, take a minute to stop and look at that huge, graffiti-covered cement wall. It’s an original piece of the Berlin Wall! The piece was a gift to Bill Gates and he has it on display in the conference center.

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benmartens June 10, 2015 Commentary

Forecast Accuracy

forecastadvisorlogoDo you get your weather forecasts from The Weather Channel, Weather Underground or Accuweather? There are so many options out there, and often they can differ by quite a bit in their forecasts. There’s a website called Forecast Advisor that compares the accuracy of a variety of sources for your specific location.

I always thought The Weather Channel was kind of watered down basic stuff for general audiences, but it turns out they are the most accurate forecast for my location. Weather Underground is a very close second and they’re my personal favorite so I’ll probably keep using them.

Check it out for yourself, and also check out the Cliff Mass blog post that alerted me to this site.

benmartens June 9, 2015 Links

Motorcycle Sale

concourshawkAlmost exactly ten years ago, I bought my first motorcycle. Six years ago, I sold it and upgraded to the Kawasaki Concours. I loved both bikes and have a flood of good memories with them. I took Tyla for a motorcycle ride on our second date, I took a three day trip through Canada with Doug and Frank, and I saw countless beautiful sights.

As of Friday, those memories are all I have left of my motorcycle*. I sold it. The bike had been on consignment in Seattle for eight weeks but didn’t sell. After I got it back, I talked to a local Kawasaki dealer and found out they do consignment too. I should have just gone there first. After talking numbers, I decided to just sell it to them.

I told myself I couldn’t get a truck until a few things happened and one of them was selling the bike. Check.

Why sell it? I averaged about 3000 miles per year until Elijah was born but in the last two years, I’ve only managed 1000 miles total. Most of those were spent in traffic commuting to work. I just have other things to do with my free time these days.

I’d love to get another bike later in life once Elijah has other things to do with his free time, but for now, I’m going to enjoy this as one more simplification of my life.

*Not actually true. I still have to get rid of all my gear and a spare rear tire. Let me know if you’re interested.

benmartens June 8, 2015 Motorcycle

Limited Time

backtoworkcoverOn a recent episode of the Making It podcast, Bob Claggett recommended episode 220 of the Back To Work podcast. In that episode, Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin discuss how you manage requests from other people. Their talk covers ways to manage notifications from your phone (turn them off!) to managing the flood of email that you get each day. If you listen to the episode, it takes a few minutes for them to get into the topic and then they wrap it up around the one hour mark.

It’s well-worth a listen if you spend most of your day in front of the computer because there are seemingly infinite distractions. I feel my phone vibrate and need to look to see what it is. I see emails popping up in various email folders and feel the need to get that count back down to zero. People start email or IM conversations and impose their own expectations on my time. If I don’t respond right away, I’m being rude. All of these things mean that it’s easy to spend my entire day context switching between 30 second tasks when in reality, they are not all of equal priority.

There’s no easy answer but the podcast covers a lot of ideas in the area. In the past I’ve had great success with keeping my email closed and only looking at it during defined periods of time. This podcast encouraged me to start that process again and I also disabled a whole bunch of notifications on my phone. We’ll see how it goes.

 

benmartens June 5, 2015 Commentary

Milling Logs

YouTube is an incredible resource for learning a new hobby (or expanding the horizons of your current hobby.) Case in point: Matt Cremona. He doesn’t just go to the lumber yard to buy wood for his projects. He walks through the woods, cuts down a tree, slabs it with a chainsaw mill, lets it dry and then takes it into his shop to finish milling it for a project. While this isn’t something that I’ll probably ever get to do, it’s really fun to see how it works. Check out this video demonstrating his chainsaw mill:

benmartens June 4, 2015 Woodworking

Boat Auto Pilot

Trying to launch a boat by yourself is a tricky project. I don’t own a boat, but this product almost makes me want to buy one. Drop your boat in the water and the computer gizmo box drops the trolling motor to keep your boat in a holding pattern until you’re ready to have it come over to the dock. Brilliant!

benmartens June 3, 2015 Gadgets

Windows 10 Notification

If you’re running Windows 7 or Windows 8, you may be noticing a new notification down by your system clock. It gives you the option to update to Windows 10, reserve your copy, etc. What is that all about?

Windows 10 is going to be released on July 29. For the first year, it will be a free upgrade for existing Windows users and it sounds like this might be the “last version” of Windows 10. That probably means that they’re just going to keep updating Windows without having major version releases and it probably also means that the future updates will be free. I don’t know how firmly any of that is decided or announced though.

If you’re really interested, you can get it now. I’ve been running it on one of my extra machines at work and it’s just fine. However, even though they say they’re getting finished with the final production code, PLEASE remember that if you upgrade early, you’re potentially putting your sanity at risk. Personally, I won’t put pre-release software on any critical machine and for me that, that means my main home and work computers, my phone or anything that Tyla uses. The cons far outweigh the pros in my book, but you can decide for yourself. The odds are that it will work fine for you.

The Windows 10 update notification also gives you the option to “reserve” your copy of Windows 10. It appears that this just sets a flag to download Windows 10 in the background and then notify you once it’s ready later in July. I’ve done this on most of my machines and it’s probably a good idea unless you’re super paranoid. For example, I’m not doing this on our main file server. I’ll wait a month or two before upgrading that one.

The new features in Windows 10 are pretty nice. You can easily find articles about them on the web, but here are a few:

  • The start button is back and it brings up a start menu that looks more like Windows 7. I think that on a tablet you might still get the full screen Windows 8 style start menu, but otherwise, it will look more like what you had before. (At least that’s the default, I think you can change it to Windows 8 style all the time if you love it.)
  • Cortana is in your PC now. You can ask her questions straight from your desktop and get answers from your local computer, the web, etc. You can tell her to do things like “move my appointment from 4pm to 5pm” or “remind me in 20 minutes to check the oven.” It’s pretty convenient on the phone so hopefully it will translate well to the computer.
  • There’s a new web browser called “Edge”. Internet Explorer will still be there but it won’t be the main browser. Edge is more comparable to Chrome and Firefox (in good ways) so expect a faster browsing experience and better security.
  • There have been some cool announcements about plugging your phone into your computer and using your keyboard and mouse with the phone that is now displaying on the screen as well as some announcements about interactions with an Xbox. I haven’t dug too deeply but I’m interested.

To sum it up, everyone should update to Windows 10 but you can wait until later this summer to do it. Just make sure you do it before next summer or else you might have to pay for the privilege.

windows-10

 

benmartens June 2, 2015 Commentary

Card Catalogs

library_card_catalogAs a parent, I now spend a lot of time thinking about how differently my son will grow up than I did. For example, instead of a 30 minute car ride planned days in advance, Elijah can see his friends from his back yard. Instead of living in the woods, the woods are a place we visit.

But being a nerd, most of my thoughts center around his experiences with technology. My generation is the last one who ever wrote a school paper using both a card catalog and something online (or from the Encarta CD-ROMs.) It was completely valid to hear someone say they looked up a topic in the book because nobody had written about it on the internet yet. And I vividly remember a world with no internet at all. That’s going to sound like making fire with sticks to my kids, not to mention my grandkids.

I also wonder how much every parent feels this way. I feel like my generation was pretty lucky to have experienced the world with no internet, but still be young enough to quickly adopt it as it grew. What other generations have had experiences like this? Our grandparents rode horses and buggies when they were young but transitioned to cars. That’s probably comparable but it was stretched out over a much bigger chunk of their lives.

And as I wrote about a couple weeks ago, what really blows my mind is to think about what tech is going to be like in 30 more years. Remember, technology advances exponentially, not linearly. Think about tech 30 years ago and compare it to today. Now double or maybe event quadruple that difference and that’s what 30 years more will look like.

I wonder if I’ll still be blogging.

benmartens June 1, 2015 Commentary