I’ve been writing on this site every week day for almost the last 11 years, but I could seriously see that streak being broken soon. I knew that a newborn was a lot of work, but wow, this isn’t what I expected! He’s a great kid and is doing very well, but the goals I have to set for myself each day are TINY. Thankfully Mom and Dad are staying with us for a bit and have been an enormous help keeping the house from falling apart and giving us some breaks so we can get some sleep. I’ve been trying to add up the little bits of sleep that I’ve gotten each night and I can’t figure out how I’m still able to function. But hey, it works and everyone is healthy so I’m not going to complain.
2013 Season Wrap-Up
I owe this fantastic ski season to my wonderful wife who sat at home baking a baby while I was off many weekends enjoying the snow! Next season will be remarkably different, but this year I got a season pass to Crystal Mountain and made great use of it. It’s the first time I’ve ever had a season pass there, and I absolutely loved it. It’s my favorite place to ski in Washington, and doing it with a pass made it even sweeter.
Highlights of the season include spending a couple days with Jay, getting new skis, and skiing with Tim and Chelsea. There are still a couple amazing runs that I can remember turn for turn. What a season! November and December saw heavy snows before it dried up through February with another return to blizzards in March.
This year ended up tied with 2006-07 for the biggest ski season I’ve ever had. I racked up over a quarter million vertical feet and spent 13 days on the slopes. I had hoped to get a few more days than that but some minor surgery left me on the sidelines for a few weeks in January and February. Luckily it coincided with the dry spell so I didn’t miss any big powder days.
I carried a GoPro camera around this season though I didn’t have it on my helmet all the time. I edited together a few of my favorite clips which you can see embedded below from YouTube.
Digital Memories
My digital life started in 2002. In the years leading up to 2002, I have maybe ~50-100 photos per year. After that I have thousands of photos per year. Couple that with the explosion of the internet in the late 90s, archaeologists are going to know a LOT more about the year 2010 than they will about the year 1990.
I wonder what this is going to be like for my son. He’ll probably have photos from almost every week, if not every day, of his life, but will they be in a useful form? When I think about my own baby photos, I instantly remember a dozen key photos. What will pop into my son’s head? A folder of thousands of pictures that he’s never been able to look through?
There are a few tools around which try to sort through your photos automatically and pick out the best ones, but we’re not quite there yet. Until some magic tool comes along, I’ll keep storing all the data and manually going through a subset of them with Lightroom.
GTX660 Review
When I built my latest PC, I specifically left out a graphics card. I generally don’t play graphically intense games on my computer and I wanted to see how the integrated HD 4000 graphics from Intel worked. That experiment worked well and most of the time I didn’t notice that there was no dedicated graphics card.
With the release of the latest Sim City and Cities in Motion 2, I decided it was time to get a real graphics card. $200 was my target budget so it pretty quickly came down to the GTX660 and the Radeon HD 7870. While the 7870 has slightly better performance, I opted for the NVidia card because I’m still boycotting ATI graphics cards after they screwed me over twice.
This GTX660 isn’t a top of the line card by any means, but it’s a nice fit for my system. I can crank the Sim City graphics settings up to the max at 1080p resolution and the card is still nice and quiet. So far it gets two thumbs up!
Elijah Dallon Martens
On Saturday morning at 2:39am, Elijah Dallon Martens was born! He was 8 pounds 1 ounce and 20.5”. Tyla and Elijah both did great. We came home from the hospital on Monday morning and we’re still trying to figure out how get any sleep.
We’ve been keeping his name a secret the whole pregnancy and it’s fun to say it in public now. The name Elijah was on one of the few names we both had on our individual lists. Dallon is my dad’s first name. So Elijah’s middle name is his grandpa’s last name, just like it is for me and my dad, etc.
While we are thrilled to be home, the hospital was incredible. If we do this again, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose Evergreen a second time. Everyone from the doctors to the nurses to the lactation consultants to the janitors were super helpful and friendly. As first time parents, it was comforting to know that whenever we had a question, all we had to do was push a button on the bed and an expert would walk in to not only give us the answer to that question, but also provide lots of background on the topic. We made good use of those opportunities and asked tons of questions. A lot of this is still a mystery to me, but I can’t imagine being home along with a newborn without the education we received in the last two days over and above all the classes we took.
Pastor Weiser from our church came to visit on Saturday afternoon and baptized Elijah. There was no medical rush for it to happen but Tyla and I both felt a lot better having it done right away instead of waiting a week or two. We’re planning a quick affirmation of the baptism in church this coming Sunday. The service is at 9:30 and you’re all welcome to come!
I will get more pics posted as soon as I find 10 minutes to sit at the computer, but here are a couple to get you started.
Moen Posi-Temp Valve
We’re about four months past the end of our bathroom model and I’m still very happy with the result. There’s not much, if anything, that I would change if we were doing it again. One of my favorite features is turning out to be the Moen Posi-Temp shower valve. I didn’t think much about it when I picked it out, but this thing works wonders.
If you’re in our other shower and someone turns on the hot water anywhere else in the house, you get a shot of cold water and the opposite is true for them flushing the toilet, etc. With the Posi-Temp valve, you can’t tell at all! I’ve been searching for a good diagram to show how it works, but this is the best answer I’ve found so far:
The balancing spool may be either within the cartridge or in a separate spool cartridge. If the pressure of water coming in on the cold side suddenly drops it will cause the spool to shift and reduce the incoming hot water thus balancing the pressure (and the temperature).
I’d love to take one of these apart some time and see how it’s put together. But regardless, this thing is magic and I highly recommend it if you’re changing out your plumbing valves.
Speedy Caterpillars
Last spring I wrote about a YouTube channel called Smarter Every Day. It continues to be one of the best web video series that I’ve found. The last episode about caterpillars was pretty incredible. Imagine you’re a caterpillar and you want to move as quickly as possible. There’s only so fast that you can walk by yourself, but what if 100 of your friends are walking to the same spot? How could you walk faster as a group than as an individual?
Watch the episode to find out:
And while you’re at it, I also recommend the Minute Physics channel. In each video he very quickly breaks down a complicated physics topic.
Xbox Will Never Be A DVR
A week or so ago, we caught our first glimpse of the Xbox One which will be launching later this year. This was the first speech in a three part rollout and it focused mostly on the TV and entertainment options in the box. (Part 2 is E3 for games and then part 3 is Build where they’ll talk about developer stuff.) With all the talk about TV, the internet was once again buzzing about the possibility that the Xbox will be a DVR or that it will allow you to connect tuners to it.
I have no inside information, but there’s no way this is ever going to happen. First of all, those of us who are willing to connect to cable TV with anything but the box from the cable company is extremely small. On top of that, DVRs are a stopgap measure for a dying medium. Do you really think that in 10 years we’re really going to have to cache content locally? It’s ridiculously inefficient for cable companies to simultaneously pump 100s of channels to millions of individual consumers who then put that content back on hard drives to watch it later. Sooner or later (and we’re already making big strides in this direction) we’ll just pick the content we want to watch and it will appear on our TV. Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon are showing us what that might look like and the cable companies will either jump on board or they’ll die a slow death.
So with that future ahead of us, why would Microsoft, a company that also sells TV and movies digitally, want to invest any time in a solution that’s not going to be needed before the Xbox One hits the end of it’s lifecycle?
Streaming TV
Now that we’ve restarted our Netflix streaming membership thanks to Arrested Development, I think we’ll probably keep it going for a while. This gives us access to more online streaming content than we had with just our Amazon Prime membership and Comcast streaming options. So now the problem becomes how do I figure out which service has the content I want? That’s exactly what canistream.it aims to answer. Type in a TV show or movie and it will search Netflix, Amazon, Hulu Plus, XFinity and a bunch of other streaming options as well as places you might be able to purchase the show. It’s pretty handy!
BioLite CampStove
If you’re building a campfire to cook your food, there’s a lot of wasted energy. A company called BioLite has come up with an ingenious device that converts some of the heat from your campfire into power to recharge your cell phone or other small USB devices. It also uses that power to power a small fan that helps keep your fire burning strong. It’s only $130 or you can spend an extra $60 to get a grill attachment for it. There’s no fuel canister to carry around. You just stuff it full of twigs and leaves. The fan helps keep it burning hot so there isn’t a lot of smoke. What a great idea!