Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Organ Recital

If you came to our wedding, you know that we have some extremely talented musicians in our congregation. The lady who played the flute is in the Seattle Symphony and the man playing the organ just completed his Masters Degree in organ. He asked me to help record his recital, and I, of course, accepted.

The recital was held at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle. I don’t know much about organs but this one looked and sounded very impressive. I overheard somebody saying that this was one of the most impressive organ installations in the United States though I have no idea how authoritative the speaker was.

The audio recoding was being handled by an audio engineer, so all I had to do was take care of the video. I just got the recording in my hands and it will take a while to edit it all, but for now I can share some of the photos that I snapped. The best way is to check out the PhotoSynth.

benmartens July 7, 2014 Music

Fourth Of July

Happy Fourth! Here are some fun trivia facts to annoy your friends and family:

  • John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe all died on the Fourth of July.
  • Calvin Coolidge was born on the Fourth of July.
  • Most people didn’t sign the Declaration of Independence until August 2, 1776.
  • The final signature on the Declaration of Independence didn’t come until January of 1777 when Thomas McKean put his name on it.
  • 31 places in the US have “Liberty” in their name. Iowa has the most with 4.
  • 1 in 6 backyard BBQs contains meat from Texas.
  • Though we fought them for independence, Britain is now our 6th leading trade partner.
benmartens July 4, 2014 Commentary

Yard Project Update 5

These updates are coming fast and furious now. Lots of items are getting crossed off the list which feels great! So much of the work up to this point has been digging and doing early stages of tasks.

The sod that Tim put in by the front cherry trees is looking really healthy. The irrigation was all connected so I went out morning and evening and turned the valve by hand to water that section. A few days later, we hooked up the irrigation controller so now it’s all done automatically on a timer. The back yard irrigation is done and wired too. All the nozzles are in. We tested to make sure coverage was good and it was such a joy to see the whole area get perfectly covered with water. I used to spend so much time dragging sprinklers around and trying to get it all aligned correctly!

I finished putting up the fence rails and most of the planks. There’s a timelapse of part of that work below. Then Ken and Logan came over on Saturday to help me cut the final boards and attach all the tops rails. I also got all the post tops chopped off and the caps put on. The next phase there is staining and hopefully I’ll be doing that this week. That’s a tricky proposition though because I have to be really careful about overspray. If it isn’t feasible then I’ll be hand rolling the fence which isn’t the end of the world.

A couple other smaller tasks got crossed off too. I connected the sump pump to the drainage system, installed metal flashing along the fence that borders the neighbors yard to keep their higher dirt/pine needs from coming in direct contact with the bottom ~8” of fence, and I dug out part of our old rock pathway where we will now have sod.

Remaining tasks are adding a few more pickup loads of dirt to level out the yard, planting trees, installing sod, and building the gates.

 

Links to previous updates 1, 2 , 3, and 4

benmartens July 2, 2014 Home Improvement, Timelapse

The Price Of Legos

Yes, I know the plural of Lego is Lego, but in my world, the plural is Legos. Deal with it. The other way sounds too pretentious. It’s like calling that fancy sports car a “Porsch-uhhhhh.”

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about the price of Lego pieces (see what I did there?) There are entire websites devoted to the economics of Lego sets. One good example is brickpicker.com. There are also some great breakdowns of the average price per piece by year and also by Lego genre. My parents will notice that when they were buying me lots of Legos, prices were coming down from their peak of $0.40/piece. Note that these numbers DO account for inflation. Today, a good rule of thumb is $0.10/piece is a good deal. Some sets can still be quite a bit more than this.

When you’re buying used Legos at a garage sale or thrift store, it’s probably easier to think in terms of weight. Advice varies a bit here, but in general if you shoot for $5-7/pound, you’re getting a pretty good deal.

Tyla shops at our local thrift stores pretty regularly to find clothes and toys for Elijah. I went with her once and was excited to see a small bag of Legos for sale. Ever since then, she’s been on the lookout and has had some small scores. Last week she sent me a photo of an entire wall of bags of Legos! We had a hard time deciding how much was “too much”, but it was such a good deal, we didn’t want to miss out. She ended up grabbing twenty bags for about $75.

The total haul weighed in at 14.5 pounds which puts us at $5.17/pound. I counted out a sample of the bricks, weighed the sample and then estimated that she bought about 5500 pieces for a price of 1.4 cents/piece.

The only way this wasn’t a good deal was if Elijah doesn’t like to play with Legos. But even if that happens, we could sell this for a profit. Combined with my Legos that are still in Indiana, he’s going to have an incredible amount of building options at his fingertips!

benmartens July 1, 2014 Commentary

Individual Contributor

At work we have two career tracks: management and individual contributor (IC). It’s a pretty nice setup because you can switch back and forth at will, and the compensation is the same on both tracks. So theoretically you can be an IC that makes as much money as the CEO. You can decide whether your definition of success means climbing the management ladder or becoming a technology expert.

I started my career here as an IC and then moved into the management track about two years later. Now, six years after that, I’m bouncing back over to the IC track. It’s a change that I’ve been pondering for a while, and I jumped on a good opportunity when it appeared. This is really the first big voluntary change that I’ve made at this company so there is a bit of trepidation, but overall, I’m not going that far. I’ll still be working on the Power BI offering, but I won’t be as specifically involved with Power Query. My new role focuses around helping each of the Power BI teams give the best customer experience possible, specifically by giving them the data they need to react to issues with the service and tracking overall metrics to report our service health and usage. It gets me into a lot of big data, data scientist work. It’s new to me, but that’s what keeps work interesting and challenging.

benmartens June 30, 2014 Commentary

Yard Project Update 4

While it might not look that much different than a week or two ago, we’re crossing some major work items off the list. The drainage is completely done and covered up. We dug trenches for irrigation, laid the pipes, installed the heads, and filled in the trenches. All that’s left there is hooking up the controller. We even installed a bit of sod along the driveway. I think we’re going to sod the back yard instead of seeding. It’s a pretty small area so the cost isn’t huge, and it will get us a nice result sooner. Don and Logan stopped by to help me set three more fence posts along the wall.

The biggest remaining puzzle piece is the fence. I’m hitting that hard now and hope to make good progress over the weekend if the weather cooperates.

We are 227 hours into this project and doing pretty well with the budget. It’s a ton of work but it’s fun to see it start coming together. My life right now is pretty much wake up, go to work, come home, work in the yard until 9 or 10, go to bed. Tyla has been great putting in extra hours to take care of Elijah when I’d normally be helping out! We’re both eager for the project to be done so things can return to “normal” and we can enjoy the fruits of our labor. I’m able to list out the remaining work in quite a bit of detail which means that we’re getting closer to the end. At least it’s measurable with a pretty high confidence rate.

Links to previous updates 1, 2 and 3

benmartens June 27, 2014 Home Improvement

Throwback Thursday – 1985 Cat

During one of our school devotions in kindergarten (or maybe 1st grade?), Miss Loescher covered Matthew 7:7-11. My childhood brain interpreted the lesson as “I can get anything if I just ask for it!” To test this out, I went home and asked my parents if we could get a cat. They immediately replied, “Yes.” I was stunned. It worked! How far would this go? “Can we get two cats?” “Yes.” WOW! It turns out they had already been talking about this so I just had good timing, but at the time I was pretty amazed at how applicable that particular Bible devotion was to my life.

At the pound, Rachel and I each got to pick out a cat. After we had picked them out, we were told that we had picked two cats from the same litter. Rachel named hers Slinky and I named mine Buttercup. I know Rachel’s was named after the toy, but I don’t know how I came up with Buttercup. I would like to think it was a Princess Bride reference, but that movie hadn’t come out yet and I hadn’t read the book.

Those cats lived to be pretty old. I was in college before either one of them died. That’s pretty amazing considering how much time they spent out in the woods hunting and being hunted.

Also, that’s an awesome belt buckle.

benmartens June 26, 2014 Throwback Thursday

Tips For Building A Fence

I am far from an expert on fence building so after reading a bunch of articles on the web and enlisting some help, I built one wall of my fence before starting on the rest of it. This turned out to be a good decision because I could make all my mistakes on a smaller scale and then move more quickly on the rest of the fence. Here are some of the tips I picked up along the way:

  • I used 10ft pressure treated 4x4s. You can get away with shorter posts but you have to be really careful about the depth of your hole. I prefer to leave them long and then saw off the tops at the very end of the project.
  • Set the corner posts first. This allows you to string a line between them and make sure the interior posts are all perfectly aligned.
  • Once you’ve determined where your posts sit (roughly every 8 feet), dig a hole that is roughly 10” in diameter and 3 feet deep. Dig so that the post will be centered in the hole once it’s lined up with the string.
  • Put a few inches of pea gravel or clear aggregate at the bottom.
  • You’ll need two people to line up the post. Attach a cheap 8ft piece of wood to the post, pound a stake in the ground and then screw the wood to the stake while holding the post perfectly straight in that direction (use a 4ft level.) Repeat for the other direction. Do this all the way down the line.
  • Mix your concrete and pour it in being sure to push the concrete around the post and work out any bubbles. Let them dry for at least a day before continuing.
  • I bought pressure treated wood for the rails, but you can probably get away with something else if you want to save money.
  • String two lines between your corner posts at the height of each rail. The bottom rail is about a foot off the ground and the top rail is right at the top of your planks.
  • Make sure you get those rails level or you’ll have a goofy looking fence. I used a nail gun to attach the rails to the posts. I was able to do this step by myself because I screwed in a temporary board on the opposite post to hold the rail in roughly the right spot until I attached both sides.
  • Attach the planks. This is where a nail gun really comes in handy. I’m using a 15-gauge finish/trim nailer with 1-1/2-in. galvanized nails.
  • If your planks but up against trees or bushes, consider staining that side of the planks before installing them. Some sites recommend staining ALL of your boards before you install them but I’m not going that route.
  • Once everything is installed, let it sit for a week or two. The boards will dry out and shrink quite a bit. You should have installed the planks so they were tight against each other but after they dry, there will be 1/8-1/4” between them.
  • Stain! I won’t give any tips since I haven’t stained the fence yet, but my plan is to use a sprayer with a semi-transparent natural cedar color stain. I’ll have to rig up some tarps to avoid overspray in our tight quarters.
benmartens June 25, 2014 Home Improvement

Yard Project Update 3

It’s hard to see a lot of change since the last update, but we’ve been working hard! The major accomplishments last week were installing French drains, installing downspout drains and getting the first part of the irrigation in the ground. That meant a LOT of trenching and some of it was through some incredibly compacted dirt. I took the day off Wednesday and spent a good portion of the day with a pick axe breaking through it. I was sore that night! It feels great to have this all in the ground and hidden away though. Our back yard should be significantly drier now. It had previously been a swamp any time it rained, but a majority of the water that falls on my property will now be piped away. And I’m very excited to have irrigation! Given the layout of the yard and the water lines, we actually started with the parts of the yard that need irrigation the least but that’s ok. We’ll get to the rest of it.

And I should also mention that Don came over three days last week to help me set fence posts. Thank you! We put cardboard tubes in behind the wall to hold back the rock and give us a place to set the posts. Those cardboard tubes started to fail a bit in the rains so Don helped me get them set. There are only three more posts to dig and set before I can start building most of the rest of the fence.

Our neighbors have been super nice during this project, and that’s a good thing since we feel a lot closer to them with this fence removed! They even asked Tim to come take a look at their back yard when he’s done. We had another neighbor stop by and ask for Tim’s card too. He does great work and people are noticing.

The next steps will be finishing the irrigation in the other half of the back yard, filling in all the trenches, setting those posts and then building the fence. The majority of the work is behind us but there’s still plenty to do.

Update 1 and Update 2

benmartens June 24, 2014 Home Improvement