Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Rechargeable Batteries

With our son coming any day now, I feel like we’re about to really ramp up our battery usage. For the past couple years, I’ve been investing in Eneloop rechargeable batteries. They hold a charge very well in storage and can be found at a decent price. I charge them with a La Crosse BC-700. It’s a wonderful little device that gives you detailed readouts about the state of your battery and provides a variety of charging speeds and options to get the most life out of your batteries.

I recently also picked up some spacers which lets me put AA batteries into a device that takes C and D batteries. They won’t last nearly as long as a full C or D cell, but those suckers are expensive so using a rechargeable is an attractive proposition. I suspect it will be a fine substitute in many cases. There are also bigger C and D rechargeables but I’ll need a new charger for those and I haven’t made the commitment there yet.

Based on current Amazon prices, a rechargeable AAA or AA battery is about 4 times more expensive than it’s alkaline counterparty. That means that I don’t generally use rechargeables in extremely low draw situations like clocks, but we use them everywhere else. And I suppose if you look at a big enough time span, even using them in clocks would pay off.

Is there anything you like better than Eneloops? Do you use C or D cell rechargeables?

benmartens June 5, 2013 Gadgets

State Of The Uterus

“You’re still here?” That’s the question I get from people at work who know that Tyla is about ready to pop. There’s no baby yet, but we’re really getting close. The due date is June 6 but we’re about smack dab in the middle of the “normal” window for birth. The national average for first time moms is that they go five days past their due date which would put us at about a week from now. They won’t let her go more than two weeks past the due date so one way or another he should be coming out before the 20th!

While we do talk a bit about enjoying these last few minutes of peace and quiet, we’re incredibly eager to meet this little boy who has been following us around for almost 40 weeks!

benmartens June 4, 2013 Family

Arrested Development On Netflix

Arrested Development was cancelled after only three seasons. The ratings must not have been where they needed to be, but I think the show gained quite a bit of popularity when it came out on DVD. At least I know that’s how Tyla and I got into it. We were both thrilled to find out that years after it was cancelled, Netflix had put up the money for a fourth season! We renewed our streaming membership to get a crack at the episodes when they were released on Memorial Day.

Netflix was really slow that day. A quick check of Twitter indicated that lots of other people were having similar difficulties and I wonder if it was because Arrested Development came out? It’s still pretty big news to have an internet streaming company fund a “real” TV show so it doesn’t seem unlikely that the hype was more than they could handle.

As for the show itself, it’s fun to see all the characters again, but I’d probably rank the fourth season somewhere around the quality of the first season. It’s good, but not as good as seasons two and three. It is really nice to have all the episodes available at once instead of having them doled out one by one each week. I’ll be very surprised if this isn’t very close to the future model for shows. Getting one episode a week with a bunch of commercials in the middle really seems ancient and backward.

Thank you Netflix for funding this project and thanks to Ron Howard and crew for cranking out more episodes.

benmartens June 3, 2013 Commentary

There’s Always Someone Cooler Than You

When you hang out in the same groups and same areas for a long time, it’s easy to think that you’re getting to be a pretty good skier, hiker, etc. Skiing at Crystal always reminds me of this. You can ride up the Forest Queen list and hear people talking about how incredible they are (on blue and green beginner runs), but if you head out to the Northway lift, you’ll see people throwing backflips off cliffs and not bragging at all. Living in the Pacific Northwest, there’s always someone nearby who is infinitely better than you. We have some incredible outdoor athletes around here!

I bring this up because someone just forwarded me an article that blew my mind. When I hiked up to Camp Muir at 10,000 feet on Mt. Rainier, it took me 4 hours and 10 minutes to get up there. We have a guy in our church who is in great shape and can get from Paradise (5400 feet) to the top of Rainier (14,400 feet) and back down in less than 24 hours. The guys in this article did that whole route from Paradise to the summit and back in 4 hours, 19 minutes and 12 seconds! So in the time I went from Paradise to Muir (halfway to the summit), they had done the entire trip. Unbelievable! You can read their full writeup on coastmountainskiing.com.

PS. While writing this I also learned that there is now a web cam at Camp Muir!

benmartens May 31, 2013 Outdoors

Chug

At the beginning of this month, I mentioned that Zane Lamprey is trying to fund his new TV show through Kickstarter. He did get an impressive amount of money, but with only a few days left, he only had about $350K of his $500K target. The way Kickstarter works is that if you don’t hit your goal, nobody pays a penny. Amazingly enough, he blew through his target with about a day to spare! He’s said that for $500K he can do five shows and for every $100K over his goal, he’ll add another show. He posted a pretty thorough breakdown of where the money goes. Here’s part of his post from http://chug.tv 

Someone posted on my Facebook yesterday questioning how it could possibly costs $100,000 per episode to “follow you around with a camera”.  I explained to him that $500,000 six ways is actually $83,000.  But, there is also a 5% cut that Kickstarter takes and another 5% that Amazon takes to handle the thousands of transactions.  And, we have to fulfill all of our obligations to you, the Kickstarter backers. We’ll still have to buy, print, and ship thousands of t-shirts, hoodies, medallions, posters, DVDs, Blu Rays, as well as the travel, food, and venue rentals for the dinners and parties that we’ll be doing in LA, NYC, and Chicago.

And while that may still be a lot of money to have a camera follow a guy around to bars, it’s a very small budget to make an actual network quality TV show.  With Chug, as we did with Three Sheets, we’ll have over a month of planning and pre-production where the producers will need to lock down locations, hire fixers (international translators and location scouts), get shooting permits, carnets (certificates that allow us to ship our gear in and out of the country), coordinate travel, and get insurance (which alone is about $25,000).  Then, while shooting, there are: two camera guys, (with expensively rented cameras, gear, and lights), a sound guy, (with expensive rented gear), two producers, and the executive producer. This is aside from hidden daily costs like the flights, rental cars, train tickets, hotels, per diem, and food.  Then, as we’ll end up with dozen of hours of raw footage, we’ll need to hire editors, assistant editors, a post production supervisor, motion graphics animator, writer, and producers to put the show together.  And, during the several months that the production will be on-going, all of those people will obviously need to be paid… except me.

The money raised by Kickstarter, in fact, won’t be enough to fund Chug.  No money that comes in from the Kickstarter campaign will go into my pocket. I’ll actually be putting in my own money to get the show made to the quality that you should expect from a TV show.  The fact is that I am gambling on the idea that I can sell Chug to a network after the show is made and after the Kickstarter backers have all been given their rewards.  Even though they’ve all said “no” already, I have faith that some network will see what an amazing show we’ve made, be surprised by the dedicated fan base, and hire us to make more episodes.  That’s my contribution and dedication to the show.

It’s interesting to note that he’s not making a penny off this and is using it as a way to produce some episodes and attempt to sell them to a network. It’s a lot less risky for a network to buy episodes that are already done than to fund production and hope to make their money back. Then if the episodes do well on TV, they might buy more!

Congrats to Zane and his team for surpassing their goal and thanks to them for making more episodes! I’m excited to see them!

benmartens May 30, 2013 Commentary

Bathroom Paint

To save some money during our bathroom remodel, we decided to do the painting ourselves. The contractors left three months ago, but it took us a while to get to the painting. But now it’s finally done! We were shooting for a straight gray color but it definitely has a blue tint to it now that it’s on the wall. It looks good though.

I also had to paint the ceiling (white) because of some drywall repair they did when installing the new vent fan. That turned out to be a bit tougher than anticipated because of the sky light. It’s really hot up there when the sun is shining!

The last piece of the puzzle is some kind of drape or valance for the window. Tyla had one picked out but when we put it up, we decided it was a little too short so we’ll look for something else.

benmartens May 29, 2013 Home Improvement

Why People Fear Guns

As I’ve started to get more involved in shooting sports over the last couple years, I’ve been thinking about why people view it any differently than golf. Whether you go to a gun range or a country club, you’ll be surrounded by retirees joking around and having fun. It’s a very similar environment. Somebody could use either a golf club or a gun to kill you, but most people don’t have an irrational fear of golf clubs. Why?

One theory is that people generally only see guns in the news or a movie. That image is usually showing something that is illegal. Unfortunately, that represents the vast minority of gun use in the world. Just about every round fired through a gun has a happy sport shooter behind it. While it’s always good to have a healthy respect for any device that can injure you if used improperly, there’s no reason why a gun should be immediately correlated with violence.

I don’t know if that will ever change, but if you’re interested in seeing the most common use of guns, I’d be more than happy to take you along to a range where you will see normal humans enjoying a fun sport. Even if you decide it’s not a sport you enjoy, at least you’ll have one other picture that might pop into your head when you hear about a gun.

benmartens May 28, 2013 Sports

Browning Buck Mark Camper UFX

While I’ve sent quite a few rounds through both a rifle and a shotgun, I haven’t spent much time with handguns. I decided to add one to my collection but which one to buy? I ended up with a Browning Buck Mark Camper UFX. It shoots .22 LR bullets which some view as kind of wimpy, but the big upside is that each bullet costs less than a nickel. If you’re shooting a 9mm, .45, or one of the more popular big sizes, you’ll be paying ~$0.40-0.60 per bullet. I read more than a few websites that said everyone should own a .22 handgun because it’s so cheap to shoot. Why spend lots of money learning with more expensive ammo? If you figure you’ll shoot 1000 rounds to learn how to shoot a handgun, you can buy a .22 handgun, 1000 .22 rounds AND a 9mm handgun for the price of a 9mm gun and 1000 9mm rounds.

I bought the gun at Cabela’s. Washington state imposes a 5 day waiting period on handguns but waives that if you have a Concealed Pistol License since you’ve already been through a huge background check. For some unknown reason, the quick background check that they always do when you buy a gun raised a little flag (maybe somebody fat-fingered data along the way?) so I had to wait two days to get the gun, but that wasn’t a huge deal.

Ammunition of any kind is difficult to find right now, but they sold me a box of 525 bullets that they keep in the back room for new gun owners. Score! It just so happened that 800 12-gauge shotgun shells that I had ordered two months before had finally arrived too so I walked out with quite a haul!

I look forward to getting to the range to try this gun out!

benmartens May 27, 2013 Sports

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome

In one of our recent classes, the teacher talked for a while about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS.) I had heard it in passing before, but I didn’t know much about it. The SIDS website defines it this way:

SIDS is the sudden death of an infant under one year of age which remains unexplained after a thorough case investigation, including performance of a complete autopsy, examination of the death scene, and review of the clinical history.

I was surprised to find out that this is basically a catch-all answer for “we have no idea why your baby died.” Wow! In the year 2013, babies are still dying and science can’t figure out why. That’s incredible! All they can do is offer tips for things that seem to correlate with lower numbers of these deaths. A lot of these tips were discovered by studying cultures with higher than normal SIDS rates and understanding what’s different about their culture. Here are some things that lower the risk:

  • SIDS occurs less when parents have babies after their teenage years and when they wait at least 1 year between the birth of a child and the next pregnancy.
  • Infants should always sleep on their backs.
  • They should sleep on a firm mattress in a crib with nothing but the baby (no pillows, no covers, no bumpers, no toys, etc.)
  • Avoid exposure to tobacco smoke.
  • Breast-fed babies have a lower risk of SIDS than formula-fed babies.
  • Offer a pacifier to the baby.

It’s nice to know that there are things we can do to help lower the risk, and hopefully some day they’ll understand what causes this. It turns out that there is an adult version of this too, though it appears to be much less likely.

benmartens May 24, 2013 Family

Baby Purchases

There is a deluge of product information available for a pregnant couple, and as a first time pregnant couple, we didn’t even know what types of things we should be buying, much less which specific brands and models we should look at. Rather than researching everything individually, we decided to pick one overall book and stick with it, for better or worse.

The book we picked was called Baby Bargains. The book is organized as a big list of all the things you should consider buying and then for each item, the book discusses what to look for, how many you need, and which brands might be the best fit for you. While I’m sure you could take any one item and have a long argument about it with someone who likes a different brand better, we knew that following the book should lead us to a pretty good option.

Even with all that background, we still had a big task ahead of us. Our gift registries were carefully crafted as a list of items we thought we needed, so after the baby showers (THANK YOU!) we headed to Babies R Us and walked out with three carts full of stuff. The UPS man arrived later in the week with endless boxes that completed our Amazon registry. I’m sure there will be plenty of surprise trips to buy something we didn’t think of, but I feel like we have a pretty good start.

We did waffle a bit on our car seat decision. We started with the new Graco 40 which is supposed to hold a child up to 2 years/40 pounds. When we got it home, we discovered that it was too wide to fit in the middle seat and it was a couple pounds heavier than most carriers which seemed unnecessary. We ended up getting a slightly smaller Graco model which saved us quite a bit of money and also fit the car better. Only time will tell if it was a good decision. I’m sure we’ll have a lot stronger opinions about these purchases in a year!

benmartens May 23, 2013 Family