Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Thank You Veterans

Happy Memorial Day! The first thing that might pop into your mind is beer and barbeques, but don’t forget to thank a veteran today.

Memorial Day has a long history dating back to the 1800s when people would decorate the graves of fallen soldiers. There’s a lot of controversy about exactly how it started, but it was declared an official Federal holiday in 1967. At that point it was moved from always being on May 30 to being the last Monday in May. Can you imagine what would happen if they changed the date of a holiday now?

benmartens May 26, 2014 Commentary

Flite Fest

I’ve blogged quite a bit about the guys over at FliteTest.com. They’re almost my sole source of information as I’ve leanred the RC hobby. Over the last 6 months, I watched every single one of their 400+ videos on YouTube.

There are lots of radio controlled plane/helicopter airshows around the country. The Flite Test crew travels to a lot of them, but they also decided to start their own this year. They decided to fund it with a Kickstarter and timidly asked for $5000. The hordes of fans smashed down their doors waving money in the air and they were fully funded in less than a day. They kept adding stretch goal after stretch goal. At the halfway point of their month of fundraising, they were at $32,651!

They wisely had quite a few options for fans to back them even if they couldn’t make it to Ohio for the Flite Fest event. I joined that group and pitched in some money. I can’t make it this year but I would absolutely love to visit them sometime in the future. It also got me excited to look at local RC airshows and possibly visit one here in Washington.

So kudos to the Flight Test guys on a massively successful Kickstarter campaign! I’m hoping that this outpouring of support will convince them to sign up for something like Patreon.com to help fund their twice weekly videos too. I’ve written to them about it and it sounds like they’re investigating. They provide us so much value that we’d like to give them some value in return!

benmartens May 23, 2014 Radio Controlled Flight

Throwback Thursday – 1981 First Haircut

Elijah got his first haircut recently so I thought it was fitting to show the first time that I had my haircut. It’s hard to make that first haircut for your child. Mom and Dad got some help from Aunt Sandy and Uncle Dean to make those first snips of my hair. It looks like it was a surprise attack in the middle of a croquet game.

benmartens May 22, 2014 Throwback Thursday

Computer Build Retrospective

The other day I was marveling at how quickly my desktop computer at home was plowing through a video encoding task and realized that I built the computer almost 2 years ago! I think this is the best that a computer has ever withstood the test of time. I don’t even know what I’d really do to upgrade it at this point. I’m very happy with it. The only thing I added to it after the build was a mid-range graphics card.

I’m less happy with the computer I built 4 years ago, but that’s mostly goes back to my frustration with buying a cheap case and a few mistakes that I made because it was my first build. But in fairness, that one is still doing a great job too. It runs 24/7 in my network closet and acts as our file server, media server, cloud backup machine and VM host for an instance of Windows Home Server to manage daily PC backups of every computer in the house.

It’s nice (and odd) to feel so content with a computer after two years.

benmartens May 21, 2014 Gadgets

Chug

I first saw Zane Lamprey on a show that began in 2006 called Three Sheets. He traveled around the world learning about local alcohol and drinking customers. It was educational, intoxicating and funny all at the same time. The MOJO HD network got canceled and the show ended with it. The reruns fluttered around on various networks like FLN, Travel Channel and Spike but never got picked up for new episodes. You can still watch most of the episodes on Hulu for free.

His next show was called Drinking Made Easy. It was a similar idea except that this one featured a lot more of his friend Steve McKenna and it seemed more about drinking and less about education. I watched all the episodes but it never had quite the same appeal to me that Three Sheets did.

There were 50-60 episodes of each series before they died. Zane did some podcasting for a while but was always trying to find a way to get something like Three Sheets back on the air. It’s apparently very difficult to get TV studios and networks to pony up money for this type of show. So instead, he turned to his rabid and slightly inebriated fanbase in the form of a Kickstarter. The goal was to fund about 6 episodes of a new show he called “Chug.” The name is a reference to both drinking and the trains he’d use to travel from city to city. The funding campaign was an enormous success allowing them to produce more episodes and longer episodes than initially planned. The first episodes are coming out now, but you had to back his Kickstarter to view them. (Lucky me!)

In addition to the crowd funding, Zane put a bunch of his own money into the project too. In the end he had a show that was exactly what he wanted and he started shopping that around to the networks. But this time, instead of asking for money to produce the show, he was selling them the rights to air his program! What a different conversation! National Geographic liked it and will be airing the show. If it does well, they’ll fund another season out of their own pocket.

I’m not only happy for Zane and happy to see the new episodes of Chug, but I love this new model of funding your dreams. You no longer have to convince somebody behind a desk that your passion is worth their time. If your dream really does have a chance, you can prove it all on your own with crowd-funding from a site like Kickstarter. You cut out the middle man and go directly to the people.

I would have been even happier if Zane didn’t try to shop this around to the networks and instead did a completely web-based show, letting the people fund future seasons, but I guess there’s still enough money and distribution left in the networks to make that a worthwhile path. I’d be polishing my resume if I worked at a network though. Their days are numbered.

benmartens May 20, 2014 Commentary

Estimating A Hike Duration

Back when I used to have time to go hiking, I was constantly amazed at how predictable my hiking speed was. This takes a little practice, but here are some rules of them. I didn’t invent them but everyone needs to tweak them a little bit to their own habits.

To calculate the time it will take to do a hike:

  1. Add 20 minutes for every mile
  2. Add 30 minutes for every 1000 feet of vertical

That’s it! So if you’re going on a 4.5 mile round trip hike that goes up 2000 feet and then returns to the starting point, that would be 4.5 miles * 20 minutes + 2  thousand feet * 30 minutes = 2.5 hours. You don’t need to count the down part. The 30 minutes that you add for going up takes the down into account.

The flat ground timing is extremely accurate. The elevation can be more variable depending on the steepness of the slope. And of course you need to factor in how much time you’ll spend enjoying the view at the top.

I wonder how this will apply with an 11 month old boy on my back?

benmartens May 19, 2014 Outdoors

NFL Draft Day

The NFL Draft has come and gone and I’m surprised at how little the league is embracing big data. Statistics and data show that it’s actually a detriment to take one of the top picks because you pay those players much higher salaries with no guarantee that they’ll actually live up to the hype. Seattle consistently traded down to lower picks which is the statistically good move. You get more picks at lower pay rates and therefore have a better chance at getting a great player. The book “Scorecasting” has a great chapter on this and you can read an excerpt about the draft on their site.

Here’s a summary of Seattle’s draft showing how they apparently used this data analysis to their advantage. They traded away their earlier picks and got three extra picks compared to what they started with.

1. #32 to Minnesota for second round (#40) and fourth-round (#108)
2a. #40 and fifth-round (#146) to Detroit for second-round (#45), fourth-round (#111) and seventh-round (#227)
2b. Paul Richardson (13, 45) WR Colorado
2c. Justin Britt (32, 64) T Missouri
4a. Cassius Marsh (8, 108) DE UCLA
4b. #111 traded to Cincinnati for fourth-round (#123) and sixth-round (#199)
4c. Kevin Norwood (23, 123) WR Alabama
4d. Kevin Pierre-Louis (32, 132) LB Boston College
5. Jimmy Staten (32, 172) DT Middle Tennessee
6a. Garrett Scott (23, 199) T Marshall
6b. Eric Pinkins (32, 208) DB San Diego St.
7. Kiero Small (12, 227) FB Arkansas

The NFL media machine really hypes up this event, but it’s going to be interesting to see what happens when all the teams wake up to the Moneyball approach.

benmartens May 16, 2014 Sports

Time Left In Chapter

One of the great features of the newer Kindles is that they tell you how much time is left in your chapter and in the book. It calculates this based on how fast you are reading. It’s one of the great features you can add when you’re reading digitally instead of with dead trees.

Unfortunately, for some reason the calculated time remaining isn’t always accurate. If you find that it’s not quite right, you can tell the Kindle to re-sample your reading speed and make a new calculation. To do this, click Search while you’re in the book and then search for “;ReadingTimeReset” (without the quotes.) Voila!

benmartens May 14, 2014 Gadgets

Elijah Update

It’s been nine months since I wrote the last “Elijah Update” post! I’m not even going to attempt to recap what has happened since that last post, but I’ll give you a summary of what’s going on in his life recently.

Tyla and Elijah keep pretty busy throughout the week. The main scheduled activities are Parent/Baby group, Stroller Strides, and Little Gym. They’ve also started swimming a little bit and will be starting swim classes later this year.

He’s gaining new motor skills every week and on Sunday he took his first steps! Tyla’s family happened to be at our house when Elijah let go of his little push toy and took about 5 tiny steps toward the grill. That’s my boy! You can see him thinking really hard about each movement to take a step and he still needs to build up his confidence, but I bet he’ll make rapid progress in the coming days and weeks. Lots of people says “Keep him as a crawler as long as you can” and stuff like that but I’m excited to have my little man walking! Yes, it’s more work, but by now I’ve figured out that being a parent isn’t something you do because it’s easy.

Elijah was really quiet for his first few months but now he’s always making some kind of noise. There was a period of shrieking which (I hope) is passed, at least for now. He loves to babble and make seemingly random noises and will sometimes even imitate our coughs and achoos. When he’s really excited, he kind of turns his tongue sideways and makes a sucking sound.

Milk is still the main food of the day but he’s experimenting with other foods that Tyla and I eat. He sits in his high chair for most of our meals and does some combination of smearing it on his face, dropping it down his bib, and putting it in his mouth. I don’t think he’s quite made the connection that this type of eating will also solve his hunger pains.

Night times are still a battle though we’ve kind of settled into a workable truce for now. We’re going on 11 months of not sleeping more than 3-4 hours in a row except for a couple somewhat random stretches when he was very young. This is probably the single most painful part of parenting for me (and I’m not even the one who has to stay awake to feed him!) and I’m praying that we get to a better spot soon.

We’re very blessed to have such a wonderful child in our home!

benmartens May 13, 2014 Family