Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Switching To Outlook.com

Last November, I posted that I was switching my email from GMail to Outlook.com. It didn’t affect anyone because it just meant that my @studio711.com email forwarded to a different site, but it was a pretty major change for me.

I did it in large part because I want to dogfood the solutions that our company provides in hopes of fairly representing them and offering feedback to the teams that wrote them. I thought it would be a bit of a downgrade, but wow, I’m really impressed. Outlook.com is a fantastic mail service. First of all, their junk mail detection is just as good as GMail. Where they really shine is their interface. Outlook.com loads faster and is subjectively easier to use, especially if you’re on a touch-enabled device. The web client looks and acts very similarly to the Windows 8 app so the continuity is a plus. I manage all my email in the desktop version of Outlook, but their web client and Windows 8 apps are so good, I’m thinking dropping the client version of Outlook.

This wasn’t the side-step (or even downgrade) that I expected. It’s pure win. If you’re frustrated with your email service or just looking for a change, give it a shot.

benmartens July 9, 2014 Geek

Yard Project Update 6

Tim and I put 2 more yards of dirt and leveled out the yard. It’s sitting for about a week to compact and get ready for sod. I got the fence stained (see the timelapse below). Don and Logan came over on Saturday to help set the remaining three fence posts. There’s one short fence that sticks out from the east side of my house with a gate on the end and then the other post was for the gate on the west side of the house. I got the short fence built, posts cut off and capped and started building the first gate.

This is an exciting week as we’ll be putting in trees along the back fence between our house and the neighbors (same basic type that were there before) and then we’re going to put down sod! The original plan had been to seed but given the small size and our desire to be DONE we are just going with sod.

I did some calculations and we in more than doubling the amount of grass we have in the back yard! The new grass area will be about 250% of what we had before.

Links to previous updates 1, 2 , 3, 4 and 5

benmartens July 8, 2014 Home Improvement, Timelapse

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