Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Transaction Stats

countmoney I’ve been happily using Mint.com to track my finances for the last three and a half years. One feature they offer is the ability to download all of your transactions. I did that, popped it into Excel, and found some interesting stats. Note that these are for 2012-2014.

  • Our two most popular merchants are Amazon (544 transactions) and Safeway (521.) Home Depot (238) is next on the list. This means that we are spending money at Amazon or Safeway an average of once every two days. By the way, our favorite butcher is #14 on the list!
  • Since one of our grocery stores is #2 on the most popular merchant list, it’s no surprise that the biggest spending category (by count) is groceries with 818. Restaurants (332), home improvement (300) and gas (280) round out the top four.
  • What are our most visited restaurants?
    Chipotle (31), Dairy Queen (25), Whidbey Coffee (17), Five Guys (14), Red Robin (14), Papa Murphy’s (13), Brown Bag Cafe (11), Fiesta Mexicana (10), Factory Donuts (7), Mod Pizza (7), Qdoba (7), Sushi Zone (7), Cafe Veloce (6), Jimmy John’s (6)
    This list is a little bit skewed because sometimes another party will pay and then we’ll give them cash, but it’s a good rough idea of where we like to eat.
  • One third of the money we spent ran through a credit card. We average around 1.5% cash back so that adds up pretty quickly. I recommend the American Express Blue Cash card and the Amazon Visa for places that don’t take American Express. (This only works if you don’t carry a balance on your credit cards.)

If you don’t have an idea what your spending would look like in a similar study, I encourage you to at least sign up for Mint and let it start tracking your spending. Knowing where your money is going is the first step towards making important decisions that could dramatically affect your life.

P.S. It might sound a bit crazy that we go to the grocery store every two days. It turns out that going there is a great activity with Elijah. He enjoys it and we can either walk or drive because it’s less than a mile down the street. It also gets us out of the house so Tyla can have some quiet time to herself.

benmartens January 28, 2015 Geek

Garlic Chicken

garlicchickenandcarrotsWhenever Tyla suggests that we eat a really healthy meal, one of my first thoughts is a Garlic Chicken recipe from our favorite low carb recipe site (genaw.com). I admit that it doesn’t sound particularly appetizing when you look at the recipe, but the result is pretty good and it’s all good for you. Pairing it with a nice green veggie like steamed broccoli or peas helps to balance it out visually so you don’t just have a big plate of brown and orange.

Ingredients

  • 6 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped
  • 1 small yellow onion, peeled and sliced
  • 3 large carrots, peeled and sliced thin
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1 1/2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breasts, chopped into stew-size pieces
  • 1/4 cup fresh parsley for garnish, chopped or torn
  • Salt and pepper to taste

 Directions

  1. Combine the garlic, onions and carrots in a wok, and cook until the onions are translucent.
  2. Add the chicken and cook until the chicken is done and the carrots are somewhat soft.
  3. Toss in parsley just before removing wok from heat.
  4. Add salt and pepper to taste.
benmartens January 27, 2015 Food

Blocking Traffic To Azure Websites

dosattackThis is a geeky post but I feel the need to give back to the community and help others who might stumble on a similar issue. Regular readers can feel free to skip this. Tomorrow’s post will return to more normal topics.

After moving my website to Azure and switching to WordPress, I noticed that my site was running pretty slowly. It kept getting worse to the point where a lot of users were seeing timeouts and errors. Bumping up the website to run on a bigger machine helped temporarily but the dual core CPU was still pegged at about 85%. For a site that gets a few hundred hits per day, this seemed ridiculous.

I stumbled onto a great Azure feature called DaaS – Diagnostics as a Service for Azure Web Sites. That tool helped me identify that about a few clients were hitting a link that used to serve up data to the CascadeSkier applications. All of the clients should have been updated by the end of last year, and none of them should ever have been requesting that file 1000 times per minute like these were. I don’t know if a few of my apps had gone wacky or if this was something more malicious. Either way, I had to solve it from my end.

Simply hitting a file that doesn’t exist shouldn’t take that much CPU effort to respond to except that WordPress was configured at the root of the site. WordPress did a bunch of checks to determine that the URL was indeed invalid and then served up a fancy 404 page. To mitigate this, I checked in a very simple file that returned a blank page. This took the average CPU usage from 85% down to less than 5%! I was able to drop back down to the smaller single core machine and save money.

When I asked the Azure team about blocking specific IPs, they said that isn’t supported for the Azure Web Site product, but they do support blocking based on the number of concurrent requests and the number of requests in a period of time. I’ve set this up to help protect against potential related issues in the future.

The net result is that my little website is now consuming an appropriate amount of resources and the average time to serve a page has dropped dramatically. If you’ve been visiting the site over the last week, you can probably see the difference.

benmartens January 26, 2015 Site News

Workbench TV

A lot of my projects have how-to videos on YouTube so it’s not uncommon to have my laptop sitting on the workbench while I work. That’s not terrible, but it would be nicer to have a more permanent installation. After a chat with KenC and some swapping, I ended up with a 32″ LCD. It’s a bit bigger than my initial thought but it ended up working quite well.

He included a mounting bracket with the pile of goodies and since the studs are bare in the garage, mounting was a breeze. The next concern was protecting it a little bit from the saw dust. Using scrap lumber, I whipped up some shelves to cover the top and the sides. They’re not beautiful but I didn’t have to buy anything extra to build them so the price was right.

I’ll have a future blog post with more details but to get content to the TV, I’m going to be using an Amazon Fire TV. For the sound, Ken mentioned that the speakers weren’t great, and indeed, they are not. They would be sufficient for this purpose but I’m going to try to hook up some old computer speakers to the headphone port and see if that sounds better. They can sit right inside the new shelves.

Thanks Ken for helping me upgrade my shop!

tvoverworkbench

benmartens January 23, 2015 Gadgets, Home Improvement

Elijah’s Vocabulary

There are so many times during the day when I stare at Elijah and wonder what he’s thinking. He jabbers all the time, but what is he telling us? He picked up some baby sign language pretty early on (“more”, “all done”, “milk”) but now he’s building up his verbal vocabulary too. Here’s a list of what he has under his belt so far:

no apple cracker
thank you juice water
two hi car
truck tractor trash
diaper bye bye uh oh
oh no shoes cheese
slide ball keys
eye Jesus What’s that?
tree  Ike

In fairness, some of these words are only distinguishable in context by Tyla and I but others are decipherable by the general public.

The list of words he understands is much bigger. I’m always talking to him, and sometimes I’m amazed at the complicated instructions he can actually follow. For example, one day I said, “Can you please pick up this piece of paper and throw it into the trash can?” I turned my back not expecting him to do it and when I looked again, he was toddling over to the trash can across the room. One of our favorites is that he understand “May I please have a hug?” Sometimes he’ll say “No”, but that’s fine because it just makes the hugs more enjoyable.

benmartens January 22, 2015 Family

Point Defiance Zoo

Over Christmas break, we took a trip down to the Point Defiance Zoo. It’s farther away than Woodland Park but Elijah and I had never been there and it had been a long time for Tyla. Unfortunately the day we picked turned out to be extremely cold (well for Seattle anyway) so we didn’t stay super long, but we did enjoy ourselves. It was nice having an aquarium right inside the same park so that we could spend time inside. Elijah was interested in some of the animals but the best part was the big slide on the playground.

Normally I’d carry our big Canon dSLR on a trip like this, but I decided to only use our new Lumia Icon phones and see how that worked. I was extremely impressed! I missed not having the depth of field options to work with, but the photo quality was more than passable. The Icon takes 43 megapixel images which is kind of silly, but the point is that there is a lot of detail there so you can crop the photo and sort of get an analog to an optical zoom. The Icon also saves images in both JPEG and DNG (a RAW format) which made it nice for editing later in Lightroom. While none of the photos turned out spectacular, I didn’t regret leaving the dSLR at home this time.

Note that with this new website platform, you can now click on any image to view it full screen.

One of the first animals that Elijah learned to mimic was the elephant.

Two monkeys

He spent a lot of time watching the tigers.

I'm not sure if Tyla or Elijah enjoyed the petting areas more.

benmartens January 21, 2015 Family, Photography, Travel

Red Hook Tour Updates

redhookfalsestartA couple year ago, Red Hook in Woodinville did a big remodel of their bar and restaurant. I’m guessing around the same time is when they also made changes to their tour. Most notably, the price is now $5 instead of $1. It’s still worth the money, but it kind of takes the fun out of going multiple times in a row. Maybe that’s the point. You also now drink out of plastic cups and get your souvenir tasting glass at the end. The content has changed a bit too. There’s less trivia and more storytelling, but that could have been a style preference on the part of our guide. All the key parts are still there though.

They have a new seasonal beer there called False Start. It’s only available at the brewery but you can get a growler filled. It was created to be a good football-watching beer. It apparently took a long time for the lawyers to work out the name with the Seahawks (hence one of the meanings for “False Start”) so now it’s a just a generic “yay my favorite sports team” beer that just happens to be blue and green and have a name that brings up thoughts of Century Link Field. Try a glass or two when you’re there before it’s off the tap list.

benmartens January 20, 2015 Commentary

Sucked Out On The River

kearsegamewinningIn poker, there is a term called “sucking out on the river.” It means that a player who has almost no chance gets super lucky on the very last card played and comes back to win. Usually that player jumps up in surprise, screams in victory, and then sheepishly turns to the opponent and says “… sorry.” You know you got away with something you didn’t deserve.

That’s what the Seahawks did yesterday against the Packers. Neither side played great, but Seattle was the worse of the two for the first 55 minutes. They had FIVE turnovers and their offense was pathetic. With just under 5 minutes left in the game, they were down by 12 and the only points they scored were from a fake field goal by their special teams. The Seahawks then rattled off some combination of very lucky and very skilled plays that will be remembered for a long time by fans on both sides.

I, and other fans in the house, had come to grips that the Seahawks were going to lose. It stunk but ok, whatever, it’s just sportsball. The painful part was watching them go out in such a horrible way. This wasn’t the team that had gotten to this point in the season. They were down to their last card and they sucked out on the river.

So congratulations Seahawks. Sorry Packer fans. This game was a hot mess all around, but for most of the game, Green Bay was less of a mess. At least there were no bad calls that decided the game this time.

The Seahawks head to Phoenix to face the Patriots. If the Seahawks didn’t get this all out of their system, they are going to get annihilated. They better spend these two weeks taking a hard look at what went wrong and figure out plans both to stop Tom Brady and also to wring some points out of their meh offense.

bostick

benmartens January 19, 2015 Sports

More Blog Books

This blog has been running every (week)day since July of 2002. Along the way, I’ve been collecting the posts, the moblog/Instagram photos, and the tweets into books which cover one year each. I just finished off the books for 2012-2014 and this is getting to be quite the pile of dead tree. Most of the recent books are around 600 pages each. As I’ve said before, I don’t really think anybody is going to buy their own copy and probably they won’t even be read, but it’s kind of fun for me to have them sitting on my shelf. If I keep this blog up for the next 30 years, this is going to get a bit ridiculous though.

But imagine opening a trunk somewhere and finding a daily journal from one of your great great grandfathers. That would be pretty cool right? Unfortunately my descendants will be a bit disappointed when they read some of the drivel here, but still, there might be something that makes them read a few posts.

Or will books just be a novelty at that point? Would it be better to save these off as PDFs? How on earth would you make sure that a PDF file got handed down to your great great grandchild? How do we even pass this stuff down to our kids? I have 3.2TB of data backed up to CrashPlan right now. Is Elijah really expected to sift through that and find the good parts? I have no good answer to this. Instead, I offer you pictures of my custom dead trees.

book2014 bookshelf2014

benmartens January 16, 2015 Books, Site News

Pantry Organization

We have a bunch of boxes for the various sizes of plastic bags, ceran wrap, aluminum foil etc. They used to reside in a drawer but that drawer got taken over with safe toys for Elijah so he has something to pull out and mess around with. That moved all of our boxes to the top shelf in the pantry and it was difficult to find the one you wanted. We also ended up buying more when we already had some that were just too hard to find.

Tyla flipped around on Pinterest a bit and quickly found some ideas to solve this problem. I looked at the ideas and said “I could build that.” So then I kind of had to back it up. Luckily it’s a super simple project. Basically I just built what look like magazine boxes (open, sloped top) and screwed them to the wall.

While it’s a simple project, it’s incredibly convenient. I made six of them to hold the various types of bags and wraps. They work great! Some day I might paint them white but more likely they’ll probably just remain as-is.

pantryboxes1

pantryboxes2

benmartens January 15, 2015 Woodworking