benmartens – Page 135 – Studio711.com

Software Engineer

I spent the first eight years at this company with the title of “Software Development Engineer in Test.” A few months back, there was a company-wide change and now there’s no such thing as someone who specializes in testing. We’re all “Software Engineers” and we’re all expected to both develop and test the product in our normal daily work. There are pros and cons to each method, but I think the switch is going to be a good move and aligns us with the current industry trends. The idea is that you’re responsible for your feature from the time it’s planned, while it’s being written, as it’s being readied for shipping, and while the customer is using it (telemetry, etc.) You own it and you don’t get to hand it off to anyone to be your safety net.

So now I’m not only out of the manager track and back in the individual contributor pool, but I’m also a “software engineer” instead of a “software development engineer in test.” They’re both pretty big changes to my day-to-day activities but I’m still loving my job!

benmartens December 16, 2014 Commentary

Work Table

I have a small work area, but I’ve often wished that I had a table I could walk around for easier assembly of projects. I’ve also felt like I should have an outfeed table for the table saw to aid in cutting large pieces of wood. I was able to accomplish both with a single project. The plans come from the November issue of Family Handyman (an excellent magazine!) It’s built out of a single 3/4” piece of plywood so it’s pretty economical. And the plans are cleverly made so that you can cut the plywood into three 32” strips. I had that done right at Home Depot so it was easy to get home and maneuver around on the table saw. Obviously a bigger table would be nice but this has already come in very handy!

I also attempted to make this into a downdraft table (think of an air hockey table in reverse.) it would help catch dust particles from sanding, etc. There are a little over one hunded 5/16” holes in the top (that adds up to the 2.5” hose size). I drilled a hole in the side for the shop vac, but it probably should have gone in the bottom. It turns out not to matter because the shop vac doesn’t move enough air to make this very useful. If I can find an old furnace motor I might try to hook that up. It wasn’t a big loss though. The modifications to the plans were minor to try this. The top was already a box to make it easier to clamp things to the surface.

benmartens December 15, 2014 Woodworking

Table Saw Dust Collection

I’ve been on a mission to get more dust into my shop vac and out of my garage. Previous projects have left a lot of dust on everything. The table saw is a pretty big culprit. I came up with a very simple solution. I cut a few pieces of 1/4” MDF and made a wedge-shaped box under the table saw. It’s all held together with tape until I’m convinced it works and then I’ll glue/screw it together. So far so good. I can use this without a shop vac attached and most of it stays in the box or I can use the shop vac while I’m cutting. A lot of dust still escapes upward from the blade but catching that requires a much more involved system. This is a good solution using parts that were already in my garage.

benmartens December 12, 2014 Woodworking

Christmas Lights

Back in October, I finally decided on some Christmas lights and bought them. I decided to go with really nice stuff and add a little bit each year since it’s a little pricey. Tim came over to lend a hand and we got them up in under an hour. I’m really happy with the end result, but I’m eager to add more next year.

On a side note, I find it interesting that the house lights show up as different shades of white. It’s not very obvious to the naked eye. The three on the left are LED and the one up by the house is still CFL. Looking at it without a camera, it appears that all the colors of white (including the Christmas lights) match which was the intended goal.

benmartens December 11, 2014 Commentary

Fantasy Football – Week 14

The Seahawks defense looked awesome for a third week in a row! The offense wasn’t stellar but in the second half, they finally got the better of the Eagles strong defense and started pushing them around. I’m feeling much better about the playoff picture than I was 5 weeks ago, especially with the unbelievable loss by the 49ers to the hapless Raiders. While the Raiders are definitely rejoicing in their victory, they probably cost themselves the first draft pick. (Though if you’ve read Scorecasting you know that early draft picks are way overrated.)

We finished the regular season with our highest average team score: 141.29! Both Austin and I set our own personal bests and we both could have topped 200 with an optimal roster. Congrats to Luke for starting a perfect roster.

The playoff picture is now set. Defending league champion, Logan, will not be repeating as he lost his game and fell to fifth place. Even if he had won he would have lost out on total points for the tiebreaker. After a season of very close standings, things finally spread out a bit at the end.

The power rankings are holding pretty steady for a second week in a row. The only change is that Logan and Jim swapped places. These are also the four teams that are in the playoffs. I’m sticking with my prediction that Austin is going to take it all. He’s averaging over 150 in the last four games! Unfortunately for me, I go up against him first while Tim takes on Jim. I think Austin and Jim will win round one and then Austin beats Jim in a central Indiana championship battle royale. But hey, as the Raiders will tell you, you never know what’s going to happen until you play the game.

Austin (–)
Ben (–)
Jim ( 2)
Tim (–)

Now on to the weekly awards.

Highest Team Score
- This Week: Austin had 187.41
- Season: Previous record was in week 10, Tim had 184.06
- All-Time: In 2013, Tim had 195.50
Lowest Team Score
- This Week: Andy had 118.56
- Season: In Week 3, Luke had 55.04
- All-Time: In 2011, Luke had 47.01
Biggest Blowout
- This Week: Austin beat Luke by 67.16
- Season: In week 8, Austin beat Dad by 103.48
- All-Time: In 2010, Luke beat Andy by 113.02
Closest Win
- This Week: Dad beat Logan by 4.4
- Season: In Week 2, Austin beat Ben by 1.7
- All-Time: In 2012, Jim beat Ben by 0.12
Highest Scoring Player
- This Week: Le’Veon Bell had 44.50 points for Austin.
- Season: In Week 8, Ben Roethlisberger had 56.78 for Dad
- All-Time: In 2013, Peyton Manning scored 60.28 for Andy
Longest Winning Streaks:
- Active: Ben has a 6 game winning streak.
- Season: Jim, Tim and Ben had a 5 game winning streak
- All-Time: In 2011, Micah had an 8 game winning streak
Longest Losing Streaks:
- Active: Andy has a 4 game losing streaks
- Season: Dad, Andy and Luke had 4 game losing streaks
- All-Time: In 2011, Kyle had a 14 game losing streak

benmartens December 10, 2014 Fantasy Sports

Miss Kay’s Banana Pudding

If you watch Duck Dynasty, you know that Miss Kay is a great cook. We tried her banana pudding recipe a while back and it has become a staple for special family occasions. Here’s the recipe. I changed it to skip the double boiler and it works fine, but if you really want the original you can find it here.

Ingredients

2 sticks of butter

2 cups of sugar

1 teaspoon of salt

¾ cup of all-purpose flour

1 12 oz. can of evaporated milk

¾ cup of milk

6 egg yolks

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 bag vanilla wafers and crumbled

3-4 bananas, sliced

Directions

Slowly melt the butter and then add the sugar, salt, flour, evaporated milk and regular milk. Stir with a whisk.

Temper egg yolks (add some mixture to the eggs to avoid them scrambling.) Add the egg yolks to the mixture, constantly stirring until thick. Add the vanilla extract.

Place the crumbled vanilla wafers and bananas into a 9" x 13" Pyrex dish. Then pour in mixture.

Chill before serving.

Warning, it’s super sweet and it kind of sneaks up on you so don’t eat too much in one sitting or you’ll regret it!

benmartens December 9, 2014 Food

DIY Irrigation Winterization

Now that we have an irrigation system, I have one more chore on the fall list: winterization. All the water needs to be blown out of the lines because I sure don’t want to dig them up again! You can pay a company $50-70 to come with a huge generator and blow out all your lines in a matter of minutes. Or you can be a cheapskate like me and do it yourself. I’ll caveat this by saying there a lot of different ways to accomplish this. What you see below is how I chose to do it.

The first piece of the puzzle is an air compressor. The bigger the tank, the better you’ll be. I have an 8 gallon one which is pretty small but worked ok for my yard.

The next challenge was hooking the air compressor up to the irrigation system. When we put it in, Tim installed a quick coupler valve. I went to McClendon’s and built the contraption in the photo below. It’s the quick coupler connector, a ball valve, a reducer and then the quick connect for the air compressor. Shove that into the valve, hook up the air compressor and you’re ready to go.

I used a combination of manually opening the valves and using the control clock. The clock kept me drier but the valve box let me be closer to the action to see when I was done. The basic idea is that you pump air into the lines, open up one zone, and let it blow until all the water is gone. The ball valve on the coupler keeps you from getting water pushed back into the air compressor after the first few blows.

Some zones only took a tank or two while others took three or four. This is a two beer job so get comfortable. You don’t want to rush it and leave water in the lines.

benmartens December 8, 2014 Home Improvement

Free Money At Safeway

Around this time of year, it literally pays to watch the gift card section of Safeway. They regularly have deals for 2-3x gas reward points when you buy gift cards. That’s a reasonably good deal, but until 12/9 they have an even better one: $10 off your next visit when you buy $100 in gift cards.

Amazon is included in the list and since we normally spend a lot of money there anyway, I threw a $100 Amazon gift card into my cart. Including the extra gas rewards, that means I just got ~$12 in free money. Sure it’s not a lot, but for almost zero effort, it’s worth it. All I had to do was come home and type the code into my Amazon account. Easy!

I didn’t see any limit to the number of times you can do this.

benmartens December 5, 2014 Commentary

DIY Dent Removal

We were carrying a box through the garage and accidentally dropped one on the Subaru. Bummer! It’s not a huge deal on an 8 year old car with lots of other dents and scratches, but since I’m hoping to trade it in some day, I thought it would be nice to try and fix it, but I wasn’t willing to pay a shop to do it.

Some quick searching around online revealed that most of the “as seen on TV” dent remover kits are really just hot glue and some pressure. So I headed to the garage, chopped a spare 3/4” dowel rod into a few short pieces, and ran a screw through them to give me something to grip.

I started with an old dent on the passenger side door made someone’s by an errant golf shot. I cleaned the area, hot glued the dowel to the car and then waited about 5 minutes. When I pulled on it, it came off very quickly leaving most of the glue on the car. So I heated up the glue on the car with a heat gun and added a little fresh hot glue too. I waited five more minutes and this second attempt stuck MUCH better. The dowel eventually popped off under my pulling but not before removing most of the dent. It was enough success to try it on the front fender.

The same process repeated itself with the first attempt pulling off too easily. The second attempt stuck so well that I decided I’d gotten it as good as I could get it and the dowel never popped off. I was concerned about pulling any harder on the sheet metal because it was starting to pull up from the headlight area and I didn’t want to break anything. After using the heat gun to melt the glue and get the dowel off, I used the heat gun and Goo Gone to remove the rest of the hot glue.

The pictures might not show it perfectly, but it greatly reduced the size of the dent. It’s FAR from perfect. There’s still a dent though it’s probably 70-80% smaller and there are still scratches in the paint, but it’s good enough now that I’m going to leave it alone.

If I had a nicer vehicle, I wouldn’t try this, but for an older beater, why not?

benmartens December 4, 2014 Commentary

Fantasy Football – Week 13

Seahawks! Two excellent defensive games in a row with enough offense to win. I’ll take it. The road doesn’t get any easier but these last two wins were critical and they now control their own destiny. This weekend they will be on the road in Philly. I’ve been making big points off the Philly defense this season so we’ll see how the “meh” Seahawks offense stacks up.

In our league, we had another very high-scoring week. Tim has locked in a playoff spot, but everything else is up for grabs. You couldn’t script this final week much better. There are four teams who basically can win and make it into the playoffs but are in jeopardy if they lose and none of them play against each other. Every game in our league is critical for determining the playoffs! Austin, Jim, Logan and I all still have a pretty equal chance to grab the final three spots. Since none of us play each other, there are a lot of possibilities. Here’s how it works out:

Ben – Win and I’m in. Lose and I need one of the other guys to lose OR I need to have more total points than one of them (unlikely but possible)
Austin, Jim and Logan – If only two of these guys win, those two will make it. If all three win, one of them needs me to lose so they all make it if they have more points than me. Everyone except Logan is pretty much a lock for winning the total points tiebreaker.

Austin and Jim look pretty good because of their high point totals. The last playoff spot is definitely up for grabs between Logan and me, and I have a slight edge since I don’t need the tiebreaker if I win this week. But then again, I have a much tougher game ahead of me than Logan does. It’s too close to call… just the way I like it!

The power rankings keep Austin on top while Jim and I swapped places between second and fifth. This aligns with what I’ve been saying for weeks: watch out for Austin. He started slow but since week 5 he has been averaging more than 10 points more than anyone else in the league! This week he could have had over 180 points if he started his optimal roster.

Austin (–)
Ben ( 3)
Logan (–)
Tim (–)