Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Dominion

There are a lot of board game fans at work. They buy pretty much every game that comes out and give it a whirl. A year or two back, I asked some of them what would be a good next game now that we’re getting a bit played out of Settlers and Carcassonne. The common answer was Dominion. This was our first foray into card-based games and the first couple times we played it were pretty rough, confusing and slow. But lately we’ve really grown to love it and have been choosing it more and more. Every game is different depending on which 10 action cards you use for the game. That’s fun and frustrating at the same time. We’re not yet good enough to read the cards and know what strategy will fit them best. If we play two games with the same deck of cards, the second go-round usually has a lot more intentional play behind it. If you’re looking for a good game to add to your collection, consider Dominion!

And if that all seems a bit too much, some of our other favorites are Bohnanza and Alhambra.

benmartens March 24, 2014 Gaming

FT Delta Maiden Flight

My second RC plane is an FT Delta built from a kit from the FliteTest.com store. This one uses the same “power pod” as my first plane. The power pod consists of most of the electronics – motor, speed control, receiver, and battery. The pod just pops off the first plane and straps onto the second plane. That saves a lot of money and makes it really easy to try multiple planes.

This plane only has two control surfaces at the back of the wing. They’re either ailerons or elevators depending on your perspective, but on the transmitter, you set the two to be combined. It’s called “elevon mixing.” So whether you’re going left, right, up or down, those two control surfaces do whatever they need to do to point you in the right direction.

While building this one, I covered the whole thing with Minwax to protect it from getting wet and also filled in the edges of the cut foam with hot glue. I made an attempt at painting the plane too. It looks ok from a distance.

So how did the first flight go? I made it about 10 feet and crashed. Second flight? Same thing. Turns out I had left and right reversed on my setup and didn’t notice it. Luckily this plane is a tank and other than some broken props which are cheap to replace, the plane was completely fine. I crashed a few more times that day. Some of them were because I was trying things I wasn’t ready for (like inverted flight) and later in the day the prop seemed to be popping off. My theory is that the motor got some mud in it and wasn’t spinning properly so I took it home and gave it a good cleaning.

Hopefully I’ll get this back out to the park soon and spend some more time with it. It’s significantly faster than the FT Flyer and it’s a lot more nimble too. It’s a good next step in my RC learning process.

benmartens March 21, 2014 Radio Controlled Flight

Throwback Thursday – Busch Gardens 1985

I’ve only been to Disney once in my life and it was back in 1985. I don’t remember a lot from the trip except that it was neat that I got to do my homework in a hotel, the hotel had a pool, a new Shamu had just been born, and I rode It’s A Small World and Peter Pan. Mom scanned in quite a few good shots from that trip so I think I’ll use them for the next few weeks, but here’s the first one that triggered a new memory. Dad and Mom should correct me if I’m wrong, but I think I’m crying in this photo because when we hit the water, Dad slid forward and crushed me. Ha! I obviously survived and mostly forgot about it. No harm no foul. And yep, that’s cousins Tim and Wendy in the front. Uncle Dean and Aunt Sandy came with us too.

benmartens March 20, 2014 Throwback Thursday

OneNote Is Free

We make heavy use of OneNote which probably isn’t much of a surprise, but Tyla and I also use it a lot at home. We both have our own sections where we keep all kinds of notes and then we have a shared section where we keep the grocery list, ideas for gifts for friends and family, lists of doctors, and much more. It’s a great tool for getting rid of miscellaneous pieces of paper and for keeping in sync with other people.

OneNote used to be a paid product but now it’s completely free. You can get it on Windows Phone, Windows, Mac, iPhone and Android. The Office blog has more information and links to download all the freebies.

benmartens March 19, 2014 Links

Homemade Baby Gate Part 2

After the success of the first baby gate, it was time to start the second one. Construction was almost identical to the first except for two improvements. First, I cut all the frame pieces just a bit too long. After everything was glued together, I used the jigsaw to trim them flush and then sanded. That fixed a problem I had the first time where some of the boards ended up being ~1/8” too short after it was glued up and I had to do a lot of sanding to get things to sort of look right. The second process improvement was really sanding down the ends of the dowel rods so they sat freely in the holes. This made it easier to glue the whole thing together without getting lots of forces trying to twist the gate. Getting 17 rods to line up without that sanding work would have been nearly impossible.

I’m happy with the way this second gate turned out. We decided to mount this one flush with the carpet for added stability and to reduce the strain on the mounting points. It drags on the carpet when you open and close but I think it’s a net win. The only downside is that it looks slightly different from the first gate which was mounted off the ground but oh well.

I didn’t plan this, but when you open both gates, they come together PERFECTLY with about 1/4” between them. We could, in theory, add another latch and have the two doors connect together to wall off a smaller part of the room and leave the walkway free. I don’t think we’ll do that, at least at first, because it’s not very stable.

The final total for both gates was just over $100 which is about 50-70% of what we would have spent to buy pre-made gates. I like the look of these and it was a fun project so I’m happy we did it this way.

benmartens March 18, 2014 Projects, Woodworking

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