Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Fantasy Football – Week 2

Ouch. Tough game for the Seahawks. It stands to reason that they weren’t going to run through the season undefeated but I wouldn’t have guessed that San Diego would have taken them out. San Diego played a pretty solid game though aside from some poorly timed penalties. Hopefully Pete Carroll can turn this around and use it to encourage the team.

In our league, two of the four undefeated teams lost leaving the Scherschel brothers to fight it out for first place. Luke currently holds the first spot with the tiebreaker of points but Tim is close behind. There are four teams with one win and then Logan and Andy are still looking for their first win.

Guys, we had a LOT of 0’s on the board this week. There were so many that I didn’t even take the time to see which ones should have been preventable. Get your rosters up to date with respect to injuries, and remember that bye weeks start in week 4.

Now on to the weekly awards. This week I added winning and losing streaks to the list. I don’t have prior history for this one so we’ll just keep track from this season forward.

  • Highest Team Score
    • This Week:  Jim had 137.41
    • Season: In Week 1, Ben had 137.85
    • All-Time: In 2013, Tim had 195.50
  • Lowest Team Score
    • This Week:  Dad had 88.37
    • Season: In Week 1, Jim had 82.00
    • All-Time: In 2011, Jim beat Luke by 83.79
  • Biggest Blowout
    • This Week: Jim beat Dad by 49.04
    • Season: Previous record was in Week 1, Luke beat Jim by 41.27
    • All-Time: In 2010, Luke beat Andy by 113.02
  • Closest Win
    • This Week:  Austin beat me by 1.7
    • Season: Previous record was in Week 1, Dad beat Austin by 27.16
    • All-Time: In 2012, Jim beat me by 0.12
  • Highest Scoring Player
    • This Week:  Aaron Rodgers had 34.64 for Tim.
    • Season: In Week 1, Matt Ryan scored 37.42 for Dad
    • All-Time: In 2013, Peyton Manning scored 60.28 for Andy
  • Longest Winning Streaks:
    • Active: Tim and Luke have 2 game winning streaks
    • Season: Tim and Luke have 2 game winning streaks
  • Longest Losing Streaks:
    • Active: Logan and Andy have 2 game losing streaks.
    • Season: Logan and Andy have 2 game losing streaks.

There’s no shot of the opposing QB feeling dejected after playing the Seahawks this week. The Seattle D did not live up to their reputation this week.

benmartens September 17, 2014 Fantasy Sports

Front Yard Plan

My neighbors have had to look at quite a mess for the past couple months. The back yard is beautiful but all we did in the front yard was tear out all the plants and leave 4-5 yards of dirt piled up in the side yard. We took a break from that project to give Tim time to put new siding on his house. The siding is done so it’s back to the yard project!

The front yard should go much quicker than the back yard did because we’re doing a lot less work. Here’s what is on the agenda:

  • Scrape off all the sod and the top ~6” of dirt
  • Bring in new dirt
  • Add downspout drains out to the street
  • Extend the back yard irrigation system into the front yard.
  • Install new sod

If all goes according to plan, we’ll be done in two weeks. I can hear you laughing now. When’s the last time Tim and I worked on a project together and had it go “according to plan”?

benmartens September 16, 2014 Home Improvement

Sharing Big Files

So you need to share a big file or a bunch of files that add up to a lot. This problem has been around since time began and it’s often still easier to hand someone a physical piece of media like an SD card or a CD. But there are (free) ways to do it online and they aren’t terribly difficult. I can think of a dozen different ways to do it off the top of my head, but I’m going to pick one and yes, it’s a Microsoft solution. What did you expect?

  1. You probably already have a Microsoft account (hotmail.com, live.com, outlook.com, etc), but if you don’t go sign up for one.
  2. Visit OneDrive.com. You have a bunch of free space to store and share files.
  3. Create a folder for your files that you want to share.
  4. Upload the files into this folder.
  5. Go back to that folder, select it and then click Share.
  6. Choose “Get a link” from the left side. “View Only” should be selected by default on the right and that’s probably good.
  7. Click Create link.
  8. A link is generated and you can email that to the people you want to share it with. Anyone with that link will be able to get to the files you shared.

Cue the “The More You Know” music.

benmartens September 15, 2014 Geek

CascadeSkier Telemetry

As I ponder moving all of my web stuff from GoDaddy to Azure, one of the big pieces is the backend infrastructure for the CascadeSkier line of apps. There is the Windows 7 gadget, Windows 8 modern app, and Windows Phone app, each with slightly different but mostly similar requirements.

Moving the code over is actually pretty simple, and this is a good opportunity to clean up a lot of things. However, one major difference is that GoDaddy gave me free unlimited bandwidth but I’ll have to pay for it on Azure. So how much data was I using from GoDaddy for these apps?

I finally set up a bit of telemetry for my apps on the server side, logging every request that comes in. That gives me a bunch of interesting stats:

  • The most popular resorts that people subscribe to are unsurprisingly Crystal, Stevens and Snoqualmie. Those are the resorts that are closest to the main urban areas.
  • Almost nobody cares about the Oregon resorts that I have in my app. If I was out to make money, targeted advertising in those areas would probably pay off.
  • Only about 30 people are still using the old desktop gadget.
  • While I’ve sold a few thousand copies of these apps, it looks like only about 400-500 of them are in regular use right now. Then again, given that it’s still summer time, maybe that’s more impressive than it looks. I wonder how these numbers will change in the winter?
  • Right now I’m using about 150MB of data per day to service these applications. Azure gives you the first 5GB of traffic for free so that would just fit under the cap. I expect it to increase in the winter but I’m not going to be blowing through terabytes of data or anything like that.

If/when I do move the service over to Azure, I’ll probably take the opportunity to update all the apps and add even more telemetry so I can see which features people are using, etc. My job at work now focuses heavily on our telemetry pipeline so it has me asking lots of questions that I can’t answer about my own application.

benmartens September 11, 2014 Site News

Fantasy Football – Week 1

Welcome back football fans! It felt great to see football on TV again, especially with the Seahawks delivering a solid victory over the cheese heads.

Our league did not continue the way it ended last year. Logan and Andy finished first and second last year with pretty dominating seasons. They started out this year with a loss. It looks like I’m starting out the season on top with Tim, Dad and Luke also winning their games.

Now on to the weekly awards. You’ll notice that I added a new bullet point for our league record to help put this season in perspective.

  • Highest Team Score
    • This Week: Ben had 137.85
    • Season: In Week 1, Ben had 137.85
    • All-Time: In 2013, Tim had 195.50
  • Lowest Team Score
    • This Week: Jim had 82.00
    • Season: In Week 1, Jim had 82.00
    • All-Time: In 2011, Jim beat Luke by 83.79
  • Biggest Blowout
    • This Week: Luke beat Jim by 41.27
    • Season: In Week 1, Luke beat Jim by 41.27
    • All-Time: In 2010, Luke beat Andy by 113.02
  • Closest Win
    • This Week: Dad beat Austin by 27.16
    • Season: In Week 1, Dad beat Austin by 27.16
    • All-Time: In 2012, Jim beat me by 0.12
  • Highest Scoring Player
    • This Week: Matt Ryan scored 37.42 for Dad
    • Season: In Week 1, Matt Ryan scored 37.42 for Dad
    • All-Time: In 2013, Peyton Manning scored 60.28 for Andy

I’m also adding a new weekly section for Seahawks fans. I need a good name but basically it’s going to be a shot of the opposing QB looking dejected after the Seahawks defense makes a great play. Last year both Manning brothers had great “Mommy!!!” faces that inspired this.

benmartens September 10, 2014 Fantasy Sports

Stages of Learning

Having just switched into a new role at work, I’m keenly aware of the various stages of learning that I’m progressing through. I think it can be broken down into three stages:

  1. What? I look at this list of things you want me to do and I have no idea what any of them even mean.
  2. How? Ok, now I understand what you’re talking about but I don’t know how to make progress on these tasks.
  3. Why? I’m a productive member of the team, but I don’t really understand the history and philosophy of why we’re doing these tasks.

I’d say with my job right now I’m generally in stage 3 (though there are some areas where I’m still borderline 1/2.) Jumping into a brand new group is disconcerting, but it sure feels good to learn new stuff!

benmartens September 9, 2014 Commentary

Woodworking Plans

There is a site for everything on the internet. It’s nearly impossible to come up with an idea that doesn’t exist already. But I’ve got one and I’m giving it away for free. As best I can tell, there is no good website that has downloadable (either free or for purchase) woodworking plans along with user reviews of the quality of each plan. Think about having a shopping experience like Amazon.com except it’s all woodworking plans. You could have customer submitted images of each project, reviews saying how good or bad each plan is and a catalog that is both browsable and searchable. Creators could upload their plans and get money from people who buy the plans.

There are actually some sites out there that attempt to collect plans but they are ancient at best and generally they’re indistinguishable from spam sites. They’re flooded with dead links.

Why doesn’t this exist? Somebody please take the idea and run with it! All I want in return is a link to the finished site so I can use it.

benmartens September 8, 2014 Commentary

Birch Bay Camping

Tyla’s family was camping up at Birch Bay State Park over Labor Day weekend. They had their trailer parked at the state park and had also reserved a room at their timeshare/condo place down the street. Tyla and I ended up staying there with Elijah at night and then hung out at the campsite during the day. It’s not exactly the most hardcore camping trip I’ve ever had, but it’s a nice area and we had better weather than expected, and it was nice to get away from the house for a while. There was a pretty nice sunset the first night too.

benmartens September 5, 2014 Outdoors

Throwback Thursday – Tyla

This is the last Throwback Thursday for a while. Next week I’ll be starting the fantasy football recap and I don’t need two scheduled posts per week so we’ll drop these photos. And since it’s the last one, I decided to mix it up and show a picture of Tyla instead.I don’t know much about this photo except that she appears to be on a horse.

benmartens September 4, 2014 Throwback Thursday