Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History

A few weeks back, KenC mentioned Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast and I listened to one (three hour) episode. It’s incredible! He takes a small slice of history and dives really deeply into it. The story he weaves is deep and really helps you understand all of the complicated forces that combined to shape the event.

He only cranks out a handful of episodes a year and I imagine that’s because each one requires so much time and effort. There are 50 total episodes and starting with show 34, they’re available for free on his website.

If you enjoy history, I recommend that you give one episode a shot. That’s all it took to get me hooked.

benmartens November 29, 2013 Commentary

Elijah At Five Months

Elijah, you’re almost five and a half months old now! On the one hand, it seems like you just came into our lives, but on the other hand, I’m amazed at how much you’ve grown up and changed since we brought you home from the hospital.

Every week you’re picking up new tricks and skills. These days you always want to be sitting up and you smile all the time. When you’re really happy you give big open-mouth smiles and you’ll stick out your tongue and chew on it. If you get near anything, your right hand shoots out and you start scratching it and feeling it’s texture. If it’s mobile, it quickly finds it’s way to your mouth so you can chew on it.

You’re coming off the tail end of being pretty sick for about three weeks and that wasn’t fun for any of us, but it’s so nice to have our happy little boy back again. You’re so good-natured that it’s hard to ever get frustrated for too long, but if you slept a bit better at night, Mom and I wouldn’t complain. We haven’t slept three hours in a row for a month. But it’s ok. I’ll do whatever it takes to help you grow up happy and healthy.

Mom has been busy taking you to lots of activities like a parent/baby group, a mother/child workout program, and Little Gym. The other day Mom said you hung from a bar all by yourself! You’ve mastered rolling over from your back to your stomach and I’m just waiting for you to figure out crawling. I bet it’s not too much longer!

I could go on and on, but the reason I started writing is that I want you to know that on this Thanksgiving Day, I want you to know that I’m thankful for you and our wonderful little family!

benmartens November 28, 2013 Family

Fantasy Football – Week 12

For a while I thought that all three #1 teams were going to lose but Andy ended up winning pretty easily. He now stands along on top of the leaderboard and there are three people tied for second. Andy has 100 points more than his nearest competitor so I feel like he has a pretty good chance at making the playoffs. As for the rest of us, well it’s anybody’s guess.

Now on to the weekly awards:

  • Highest Team Score: Logan had 151.53 (Record, Week 4: Tim had 195.50)
  • Lowest Team Score: Jim had 77.85 (Record, Week 6: Jim had had 72.17)
  • Biggest Blowout: Andy beat Jim by 44.04 (Record, Week 3: Dad beat Andy by 63.83)
  • Closest Win: Tim beat Austin by 4.41 (Record, Week 1: Logan beat Tim by 0.89)
  • Highest Scoring Player: Josh Gordon had 36.70 for Dad (Record, Week1: Peyton Manning had 60.28 for Andy.)
  • Mr. Consistency:  Luke is on a 4 game winning streak and Jim has lost 4 in a row.

Stats mostly via TMQ:

  • Ryan Tannehill has been sacked 44 times.
  • Ohio native Ben Roethlisberger is 16-1 versus the Cleveland Browns.
  • The Houston Texans have followed a 13-4 streak with a 2-10 streak.
  • The Kansas City Chiefs, who a month ago led the league in sacks by/against ratio, are on a minus-12 streak for sacks by/against.
  • Tom Brady is 24-5 when the kickoff temperature is freezing or below; Peyton Manning is 2-6 in those conditions.
benmartens November 27, 2013 Fantasy Sports

Workshop Additions

I recently purchased (used) a few tools which will greatly expand what I can do in my workshop.

I’ve always felt a bit stuck without a tablesaw. Whenever I needed one, I had to drive up to Monroe and bug Tim. That also meant making very sure that I had all my measurements ready ahead of time. The alternative was trying to use my circular saw to make the cuts myself. All that is behind me now!
I never knew I needed a biscuit joiner until I had access to one. This makes it so easy to join pieces of wood together. I used it heavily when I was building my desk and again when I was building the church sign.
When Tim offered to sell me his jointer, I said, “What’s that?” After a quick YouTube search, I wrote him back and said I’d take it. This helps you make two sides of your board perfectly flat and at a perfect 90 degree angle. This will come in very handy when I finally getting around to building some nicer furniture.
benmartens November 26, 2013 Home Improvement, Woodworking

Real Estate Disaster Averted

When I moved here in 2006, I looked at a bunch of condos and townhomes. One that I really liked is right down the street from where our house is right now. It was tall and skinny with three floors, very similar to the townhouse where I lived in Jersey. Since buying this new house, I’ve wondered if we would have moved after getting married if I had bought that townhouse because it’s in the right location and it had three bedrooms. But now I’m extremely thankful that I didn’t buy that townhouse.

In June of 2006, I would have paid about $310K for a unit along the backside of the complex. Today that same condo is worth about $204K. But that’s not the worst of it. The buffer of trees that were behind the complex have been completely removed for the I-405 project. The new ramp from 405N to 522E is going to end up almost directly off the back porch of those townhouses! You can see some of the piers for the ramp in this picture.

I owe my realtor a lot for suggesting that I might not want to buy this townhouse. Even with the trees the road noise was loud, and we weren’t even there during rush hour.

It will be interesting to see what happens to the property values as this project continues.

benmartens November 25, 2013 Commentary

Church Sign

Many moons ago we embarked on building a new sign at church. The masonry and the main sign were installed earlier this year along with all the landscaping and irrigation. The final step was to build a reader board below the sign to hold acrylic letters. Tim and I met up a few weekends back to get the sign built and it didn’t take too long. We used some cedar and got it all put together. Then I spent about a week putting coats of primer, paint and clear coat. Hopefully it’s fairly waterproof at this point but only time will tell. Logan met me at church to help get the sign mounted. It looks pretty good! I wish we could have matched the colors of the sign, but the sign company just mixed paint to get the colors and couldn’t give us any paint codes. Getting an exact match from a photo or something like that seemed like an impossible task. Black and white should work fine. The only thing we might have to still do is add a piece of plastic over the sign with a lock to keep people from messing with the letters.

benmartens November 22, 2013 Projects

Worldwide Causes of Death

Bill Gates posted a great graphic on his Facebook page recently showing what causes deaths around the world. If you watch the nightly news, you might think that wars are a majority of the chart, but nope, that’s only 0.05% of all deaths. The biggest killers are heart disease and stroke. They combine for over 25% of all deaths. I’ve spent a lot of time just staring at the chart and being surprised by it. For example, did you know that diarrhea kills more people than car accidents? Or did you know that brain, pancreactic, cervical, breast, and throat cancers each kill about the same number of people as whooping cough?

Bill’s foundation is focused on eradicating huge chunks of this chart, specifically malaria. It’s is one of the biggest killers of children and it’s completely preventable. I’m really interested to see this same chart in 20 years.

benmartens November 21, 2013 Links

Fantasy Football – Week 11

After my pathetic low score this week, first is now a three way tie between Andy, Dad and myself with Andy claiming the top spot with his big point total. We’re 11 weeks into the season and 8th place is only 3 games behind first place. There are three games left in our regular season to decide the top four teams who will advance to the playoffs.

Now on to the weekly awards:

  • Highest Team Score: Dad had 146.27 (Record, Week 4: Tim had 195.50)
  • Lowest Team Score: I had 80.73 (Record, Week 6: Jim had had 72.17)
  • Biggest Blowout: Dad beat Jim by 33.62 (Record, Week 3: Dad beat Andy by 63.83)
  • Closest Win: Luke beat Austin by 3.23 (Record, Week 1: Logan beat Tim by 0.89)
  • Highest Scoring Player: Ben Roethlisberger had 39.88 as a free agent. (Record, Week1: Peyton Manning had 60.28 for Andy.)
  • Mr. Consistency:  Luke is on a 3 game winning streak and Jim has lost 3 in a row.

Stats mostly via TMQ:

  • The Philadelphia Eagles won at home for the first time in more than a year.
  • New Jersey quarterbacks Eli Manning and Geno Smith have combined to commit 39 turnovers.
  • The Detroit Lions have not won at Pittsburgh in 58 years.
  • At the half versus Cleveland, the Cincinnati Bengals had more touchdowns (four) than first downs (three).
  • Geno Smith finished with a 10.1 passer rating. If every attempt hits the ground incomplete, under the NFL formula a quarterback receives a 39.6 passer rating.
benmartens November 20, 2013 Fantasy Sports

Email

I’ve been using GMail for about 10 years. Yes, it looks like you send mail to @studio711.com and receive a reply from there, but in the background, it’s getting sent to GMail. That’s not a huge deal but I’ve always felt a little guilty for not using my own company’s offerings. Plus, with the updates over the last few years, Outlook.com is at least on par with GMail, if not a little ahead.

So why didn’t I switch? It’s nerdy, but here you go. My old email DNS records were hosted by GoDaddy and all they did was forward email from all of my domains to GMail. I’d set up my mail clients to receive email from GMail and send through GoDaddy. Sending through the GoDaddy SMTP servers meant that I could send mail from my Studio711 domain. I was unable to replicate that in Hotmail because I couldn’t figure out how to set up an account that receives from Hotmail (which uses Exchange Active Sync) but send through a custom SMTP server. However, I recently discovered that in addition to EAS, you can access Hotmail through POP or IMAP. So I was able to forward all my email to Hotmail and then use a similar setup in Outlook except I point to the Hotmail IMAP servers instead of GMail.

Microsoft also offers to take over all mail handling for your domain. This lets you sign in to Outlook.com with [email protected]. You can send and receive just as you would expect without any extra hassle. Ideally I’d just have them handle all the Studio711 email and then I wouldn’t need such a complicated setup. The stopper is that the domain solution does not allow catch-all email accounts. Right now you can email anything @studio711.com and I’ll get it. I rely on that heavily. Whenever I sign up for a new website, I give them a custom email address so I know if they sell it to anyone. It also makes it really easy to filter out junk mail that just won’t stop. So if I let Microsoft manage my mail records, I’d have to manually create an account every time I hand out a new email address. Since I already have hundreds or thousands in the while, this was a non-starter.

Are you asleep yet? I imagine there are maybe two people who actually followed all that. If you didn’t, don’t worry. The bottom line is that I’m now running all my email through Microsoft servers instead of Google servers. I’m obviously biased, but I trust Microsoft more with that information than I trust Google.

benmartens November 19, 2013 Geek

Motorcyclists Make Better Drivers

If you’ve ever driven a motorcycle, you are familiar with the heightened sense of awareness that comes with it. You develop a sixth sense that helps you avoid accidents. “I bet that guy waiting to make a left turn is going to try to squeeze through the gap in front of me.” “I bet that SUV with screaming kids in the back is going to merge into me because traffic is slowing ahead.” It’s a survival instinct. You either get it or you crash.

Most of you riders will also agree that this extra sense also translates to driving a car and makes you a better driver. Now there is some data to back that up. Insurance companies are one of the biggest aggregators of statistics since it affects their profit margin and an insurance company is now saying that a car driver who also has a motorcycle is 23% less likely to make a claim on their car. I hope this translates into some lower rates for me!

http://www.visordown.com/motorcycle-news–general-news/motorcyclists-23-better-behind-the-wheel-of-a-car/23971.html

benmartens November 18, 2013 Commentary