Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Crystal Mountain Avalanche

After a very dry start to the winter, February was one of the snowiest Februarys on record. Then, in the first week of March, we got more rain than we normally get in the entire month of March. Contrary to popular belief, rain doesn’t do much to melt snow. It takes almost an inch of rain at 40 degrees to melt an inch of snow. Most of the water goes into consolidating the snowpack and greatly increases it’s overall weight. So after all that rain, we had a huge amount of new, heavy snow on top of a sheet of ice from the limited snow we had in the first part of the season. The avalanche danger was extreme.

The ski patrollers at Crystal are always setting off bombs to create controlled avalanches. They regularly bomb inside the ski area, but for areas that see lots of skiing, it’s pretty rare to have a big slide. The skiers compact the snow and increase the stability of the snowpack. But this time was different.

On Monday after the ski area closed,  the patrollers set off a charge that triggered an enormous slide which ended up taking out the base of the High Campbell chair lift. This chair has been a source of frustration (and fun) for skiers for years and was scheduled for replacement in the next five years. Those plans have now been accelerated.

One of the owners was in the ski patrol group that set off the charge and you can read her account on KUOW and an even better account on the ski patrol blog. There is also a good video on Vimeo showing the carnage, but it doesn’t show the actual slide itself. I don’t think anybody got video of that since they were all hunkered down in safe positions.

It sounds like they’ll be auctioning the chairs off for charity but it will take them a while to get that settled out. I already have one of the Mt. Baker chairs in the backyard. I wonder if I can convince Tyla that we need another one?

benmartens March 17, 2014 Skiing

RC Radios

One of the most confusing parts of getting started with RC airplanes was trying to figure out which radio to buy. First of all, you don’t even have to buy one. You can just buy planes that come with cheapo radios. I knew I didn’t want to go that route because it ends up costing more and you don’t get to use a quality radio along the way.

If you decide to buy one that can work with lots of planes then you have to figure out which brand you want: Futaba, Hitec, Tactic, Spektrum, etc. Not knowing much about the differences, I assumed they were all kind of the same. Wrong. In general, each brand only works with it’s own brand of receivers and if you want to hook two radios together for teaching purposes, they have to be the same brand.

The simulator I bought came with a Tactic radio (Tactic TTX600.) While there’s nothing inherently wrong  with this radio, I later realized I want to invest in Spektrum. A huge number of Bind And Fly models come with Spektrum receivers in them. So if you have a Spektrum radio, you’re good to go. That meant that I ended up rebuying a similarly inexpensive Spektrum radio (DX5e) and then later on I’ll get a nicer computerized model (DX9?)

The detour through the Tactic radio only cost me about an extra $70 but it’s still something that you can avoid. Take some time to understand the differences between the brands, talk to friends who fly, look at planes you want to buy, and then make a brand choice. Simulators can work with a variety of brands.

It sounds like people sometimes end up with multiple brands of radios as they progress in the hobby, but to start with, you probably don’t want to keep spending money on radios.

benmartens March 14, 2014 Radio Controlled Flight

Throwback Thursday – Serious Business

I laughed out loud when I stumbled across this photo. I look like an old man watching the news. And look at that old remote! We had that for a good chunk of my childhood and by the end you had to really mash the buttons down to get it to work. Sometimes it was easier to just get up and hit the button on the TV yourself.

benmartens March 13, 2014 Throwback Thursday

Sidewalk Repairs

I’ve written many times about how I believe it’s a lot more useful to be involved in local politics than national politics. Here’s a good example about how much more responsive your local government can be.

Safeway is a little less than a mile down the road from our house so we frequently take walks down there. Tyla also runs along that sidewalk sometimes. There was one stretch that was getting destroyed by tree roots. It was so bad you almost couldn’t push a stroller over it anymore. It’s right on the boundary between cities so it took a while to figure out who owned the sidewalk, but after I found the right government, it was fixed in less than a month!

The end result looks a lot nicer and is much safer! You can see the before and after photos below. Thanks to the Woodinville maintenance crew for such a prompt response! I’ve had a similarly positive response with them for some traffic light maintenance. In that case they were out the SAME DAY to fix it.

benmartens March 12, 2014 Commentary

Customer Service

Tyla has a Christmas village from the Thomas Kinkade collection. She feels like she has enough big pieces but was interested in a couple accessories so back I decided to order her something for the Christmas of 2012. There’s only one website where you can get this stuff (other than used on eBay.) I placed my order and was told it would be 6-8 weeks. Oops. Well that’s ok, I’ll wait. After 3-4 months and a couple postcards with status updates, I was told that they would never ship my order. Ugh. For the Christmas of 2013, my mom decided to order Tyla some little accessories. The exact same thing happened to her!

I was really frustrated at this point so I emailed customer service. I tried to be very nice in explaining my situation and asking what we’re doing wrong. Is there a better time of year to order? The reply was “We regret to inform you that the item has been retired.” Huh? I didn’t mention any item in my email. It was a general question. I replied “Did you even read my email?” The second email was a bit longer but it was still a canned response that didn’t answer my email. In the vain hope that a human who cared was actually reading, I replied once more and ended it with “You don’t need to reply to this. You’ve lost me as a customer.”

I’ve been reading the Ford book about Alan Mulally so I guess I have CEO on the brain. I believed that there must be somebody in the company who cared about treating customers properly and would want to know about an experience like mine so it could be corrected. A little searching revealed the CEO’s name. I guessed what his email address probably was and forwarded my customer service chat to him along with a note. I said that if I was in his shoes, I’d want to know about something like this. I wasn’t looking for any retribution. It was simply for his information. I figured that would be the end of it (whether he actually received the email or not.)

The next morning, my phone rang and it was someone from the company! I guess they looked up my number from my previous order. She said the CEO had forwarded my note on to her and she apologized for my situation. She then stated a couple things she had done to get some fixes started (removing retired items from the website, scheduling a meeting with the manager of the email customer service group, etc.) She thanked me multiple times for emailing and I apologized for ruining her day by getting the CEO involved. She insisted on giving us something for our trouble so if it all works out, Tyla should have a small gift arriving in the mail.

It was a wild story but I’m happy to know that the senior management does seem to care. This isn’t how I normally recommend lodging complaints against a company, but in this modern world, there are some extremely affective tools available if you choose to use them. They did regain my business and I’ll give them another shot.

benmartens March 11, 2014 Commentary

Computer Security Series: Part 3

So now you’ve failed Part 1 or Part 2 of this security series and you have a virus. What should you do? The best thing is to stop everything. Turn off the machine and call your favorite geek. Offer them cookies and ask nicely. Remember that the virus warning might be fake and there’s nothing wrong with your computer.

If it’s legit and your computer is actually infected, your favorite geek is going to ask two things:

  1. Do you have all your data backed up? Good grief people, the answer better be a resounding yes. I’ve blogged about this so much. Here’s the test to see how good your backups are: if I walk into your house, throw your computer out into the street and drive over it, what is your reaction? If you’re only mad because of the money loss then you have good backups. If you start crying because of all the pictures and memories that you’ve lost, then YOU NEED TO BACK UP NOW. There’s no excuse for it. Go to http://www.crashplan.com and sign up. It’s stupid simple, nearly free and it will protect your precious memories without you having to think about it.
  2. Do you have the discs to reinstall all your software? Take all those discs that came with your computer and throw them in a bag for safe keeping. If you buy physical software, add the discs to that bag. If you buy software on the Internet, save a copy of it somewhere (not on your computer) to be reused later. Don’t forget to keep all the product keys with the discs too. If you’ve lost the product keys to Windows or Office, check out Magic Jelly Bean (or this open source version). It’s a nifty tool that helped me out recently.

They want to know these answers because the best way to remove a virus is to wipe the computer and start over. The time it takes to do that will almost certainly be less than the time it takes to try to surgically remove the virus. And when it’s all over, wiping the computer is the only way to make sure the virus is really gone.

benmartens March 10, 2014 Geek

Computer Security Series: Part 2

Part 1 covered attacks through your browser. Part is is about attacks via email. We just had a mandatory training for all employees at work because somebody had this happen to them on a work machine and it created a ton of trouble. You really have to be on the lookout.

The first rule is to never click any link that you get in an email. If you always follow that rule, you are extremely unlikely to have any problems.

Ok, we both know that rule will be broken. So what should you think about before clicking on a link in an email?

  1. Assume it’s a scam, a virus, or both.
  2. Are you expecting to receive a link from the sender? Did your buddy call up and say “hey I have this hilarious YouTube video, I’ll send you a link”? If so then you’re probably good to go.
  3. Does it look like something the sender would normally send you? Did your relative who normally writes you long text-only emails suddenly send you an email that only has a single link in it? Just leave it alone. Wait until you know that it’s something they really sent you before you click it.
  4. Is some entity like PayPal or your bank telling you that you need to view something on their website? I NEVER click links like this even if I’m completely convinced they are fake. The penalties for being wrong are too great. If my bank says I have an important message about my account security or PayPal says I need to adjust my account settings, I don’t click on the link. Instead, I open up a browser and manually type in the address for my bank. If it’s a legit message, it will also show up somewhere in my account on their site. This is an important guideline to follow with phone calls too. If I ever get someone asking for any personal information, red flags go off. For example, when my credit card company called and said my card had been stolen, they started asking for my social security number, etc to verify some things. I politely asked for the caller’s name and extension, hung up, called the number on the back of my credit card and got back to talking to that same person. That convinced me he was legit and I continued. It’s too easy to scam people this way! I’ve caught people in the act like this too. Just the other day I had someone calling to collect money for the “King County Police” (which is an imaginary org) so I asked for his name and badge number so I could call him back to verify he was legit. It was a scam and it was funny to hear him squirm. (I later reported it to the sheriff’s office though it probably doesn’t do much good.)

When in doubt, don’t open a link. If you have to open a link, assume it’s a scam or virus and don’t open the link. If you REALLY have to open the link, see if you can get to that site without clicking on the link. And if you REALLY REALLY have to click the link, make sure that the sender actually intended to send it to you.

Only the paranoid survive. Everyone else gets a virus.

benmartens March 7, 2014 Geek

Computer Security Series: Part 1

A laptop recently landed on my desk full of some lovely viruses. I won’t say who it was, but really, you shouldn’t be too embarrassed. These virus writers are good at what they do and it’s easy to be tricked. As I fixed up the laptop, I thought about a short series of blog posts that might be of interest to many of you readers, not just the household that got hacked. I’ll cover how virus writers try to get you through your browser, how they attack via email, and then what to do after you suspect you’ve been hacked.

The most common viruses get onto your machine because you clicked something. It’s pretty difficult to have a computer sitting idle with no human in front of it and get a virus. We are the weakest link. So when hackers try to attack you via websites, they’re going to present you with something that is out of the ordinary, but just plausible enough that you’ll click on it. These popups might seem fairly legit. Here’s an example:

A geek will look at this and know it’s fake, but to the general populace, this seems like something serious that should be fixed by clicking Accept and Install. How can you tell it’s fake? That’s tricky but some basic ways are that this installation box is inside of a browser window. That’s your first red flag. What video player is it trying to update? If it’s going to install something, it should be pretty specific. If you have questions you could take that product name and search for it.

But really the best way to defend against this type of thing is to know the legitimate ways you’ll be warned about this type of thing and then be incredibly suspicious of anything that tells you to install something or “click here to fix your computer.” These days, nearly everything that is needed to fix your computer happens automatically in the background via Windows Update. You might see some notifications from Microsoft Security Essentials when you haven’t run a scan in a while but that’s about it.

You should also have Windows User Account Control enabled. Whenever a program tries to install on your machine or access protected areas of the operating system, it will pop up a warning dialog that asks if you’re sure you know what’s going on. Unfortunately if you believed something like the image above then this probably won’t stop you, but it’s a good backstop to really think about what you’re doing.

So if you get a popup that says you have a virus or that is asking you to install something unexpected, just stop. It’s probably a lie, but just in case it’s legitimate and Microsoft Security Essentials is trying to save you, snap a photo with your phone and email it to your favorite geek. Ask them if it’s legit and what you should click. You might save yourself a lot of trouble.

benmartens March 5, 2014 Geek

Hobbies

Having a child has made me realize that I have way too many hobbies. Or rather, I have too many hobbies to sustain. When we transfer to new groups at work, the tradition is to send out mail introducing yourself and talking about your hobbies and interests. I included skiing, hiking, motorcycling, target shooting, phone and Win8 development, wood-working and RC airplanes. Even then I felt like I left some out! If there are 52 weekends in the year and a big chunk of them are taken up with family plans, there’s not nearly enough time left to devote to all of those.

I’ve been re-evaluating the time I spend with hobbies. Things like skiing or motorcycle riding are hard to justify because they pull me away from my family for a big chunk of the day. In addition to normal hobbies, my TV and movie watching has dropped to probably about 10-20% of what it used to be. I’ve barely touched video games since Elijah was born, but that had already started to taper off when I got married.

This is one reason that I decided to get into RC airplanes. In theory, we can all go to a park, spend time together, and I can fly a plane for a few minutes while we’re there. I’ve also heard that it’s an excellent parent-child hobby so if I’m still doing it when Elijah is old enough, it’s something he might really enjoy too. That would be a great launching point for learning about engineering, physics, technology etc.

It’s kind of a relief to admit that it’s ok if I don’t go skiing 10 times a year, go on a big multi-day motorcycle ride, or watch every episode of a TV show. And while I believe it’s still important to be involved in a hobby or two, I’m happy to have more time to spend with Tyla and Elijah!

benmartens March 4, 2014 Family