Studio711.com – Ben Martens

CPL and NRA

Over the last couple weeks, I received my NRA membership card and my Concealed Pistol License from the state. Some people cheer when they hear that and others cringe. Why did I get them? Allow me to explain…

I probably wouldn’t have joined the NRA except that it’s a pre-req for the Snoqualmie Valley Rifle Club. MikeF took me shooting there a few weeks ago and it looked like a place that I want to join. Before I can even attempt to fill out a membership form, they need proof of an NRA membership so I joined. The NRA is like that friend that says things you generally agree with but says them in such an obnoxious way that you cringe a bit. So I’m a member, and I stand with them on just about everything, but sometimes I wish their tactics weren’t quite so divisive.

As for the Concealed Pistol License, there are a few reasons for that:

  • As anti-gun fever increases, I want to add one more to the stats of people who carry guns. It’s a stat that gets quoted in lots of news stories and the more of us there are, the stronger our silent voice is. If only 1 in 1000 people have a CPL, it might seem easy to get at law passed against them. But currently in Washington state, the numbers are more like 1 in 12. KIRO7 has a neat map that lets you see what percentage of your city has the right to carried a concealed pistol. (Note that everyone has the right to carry a gun in the open but you’ll probably end up getting busted for disturbing the peace.)
  • There’s a 5 day waiting period if you want to buy a handgun. If you have a CPL, there’s generally no waiting period. It’s one less hoop for me to jump through and saves me a trip.
  • A CPL relaxes a lot of the restrictions about transporting guns in your car. While I try hard to abide by all the rules when driving to and from the range, this gives me a little cushion in case I get pulled over and I’m accidentally doing something wrong. (This is a bigger deal in other states. Washington has very reasonable laws about transporting firearms.)

Those are the big three reasons. And of course, it does actually give me the option to carry a concealed pistol if I want to. But given that I don’t even own a pistol yet, that’s not going to happen for a while. And even when I own one, will I carry it? Probably not most of the time. I won’t ever carry until I know exactly when I would be willing to pull it out, and I’ll have to do some thinking about that.

For now my gun enthusiasm is targeted (haha) more at sport shooting and less at self-defense. Shooting is a wonderful sport that combines physical preciseness and mental control. I’m loving it!

benmartens May 13, 2013 Commentary

Three Pass Blast

There’s a popular motorcycle ride in this area called the Three Pass Blast. You combine Snoqualmie, Blewett and Stevens Passes for a beautiful ~240 mile ride through the mountains. I’ve done the ride quite a few times before but I decided to give it another shot in the 80 degree weather from last Saturday morning. I went counter clockwise around the loop with an 8:15AM start to try and avoid the various traffic congestion points and it worked really well. I was home by 12:30AM and still had the rest of the afternoon to work on house projects.

With two GoPro’s, I thought I could record the whole ride. The first camera battery died just after getting through Blewett pass, but when I pulled the second camera out of the saddle bag, I noticed that the bumping around had turned the camera on and drained some of the battery. That second battery died after getting through most of Stevens Pass. I still stitched the video together and ran it at 1000% normal speed. It’s not super exciting, but if you’ve never done the loop before, flip through the various points in the video and notice how dramatically the terrain changes over those 240 miles!

benmartens May 10, 2013 Motorcycle, Video

Custom Return Labels

At seemingly random times from seemingly random companies, we’ll get return labels in the mail. It’s usually in conjunction with someone trying to guilt you in to making a donation. Sometimes the labels are decent and sometimes they’re so bad that you wouldn’t even put them on junk mail.

When we were moving to the new house, I found a box that had some blank return labels just waiting to be printed. It seems pretty complicated to get everything spaced out properly, but it’s actually really easy. I’ll explain how to do this with Office 2010 but this feature has been around as long as I can remember so it should be in your version somewhere.

1. Fire up Microsoft Word
2. Click the Mailings tab in the ribbon
3. Click Labels
4. Click Options
5. Choose your Label Vendor (it’s probably Avery) and then choose the product number

From there you just design one of your labels and Word will automatically create a whole sheet full of them with the proper spacing for the blank labels that you purchased. Run it through your printer and you’re done!

If you’ve gotten snail mail from our house, you’ve seen that our labels have a picture of Oskar on them. Go crazy and do whatever you want. Then you can ignore the little guilt trip that comes with using those freebie labels in the mail.

benmartens May 9, 2013 Geek

Garden: Take 2

When we started getting some warm weather at the beginning of April, I jumped the gun and tried to start the garden. A tomato plant and two strawberry plants which I put under a homemade hoop house and some volunteer cilantro and rosemary plants from last year are doing very well, but none of the seeds I planted came up.

It was time to give up on those seeds and start over so a few days ago I planted more tomatos, lettuce, zucchini, beans, another cilantro plant and my experiment for the year: cantaloupe. The garden area doesn’t get much sun so I’m trying to put the tomatoes back against the fence where they can catch some radiant heat. With the ~80 degree weather that we’ve been having for the past few days, I’m hoping the seeds are getting off to a good start.

If all goes well with the yard remodel, next year the garden should get a lot more sun. I’m also thinking about working in an easy way to cover the garden in a simple greenhouse during the early part of the year.

benmartens May 8, 2013 Home Improvement

Tulips

Last year, Mom and Dad were out here during the tulip festival so we headed up that way. I purchased a few tulips in a pot for Tyla who wasn’t able to come along with us. When I purchased them, I asked if they could be replanted. She said there wasn’t much chance of that working because they were raised in a greenhouse, yada yada yada.

I decided to try to plant them anyway so I followed the various instructions I found online. After the flowers died last spring, I trimmed off the stem, pulled out the bulbs and placed them in a paper bag which I kept in the garage. In October I put the bags in the fridge for about 30 days and then I planted them out in the yard.

Much to my surprise, about half of them actually came up and produced flowers this year!

We’re planning a big yard remodel and I think I might try to work in a section of tulips. Nothing is as beautiful as those endless fields of tulips up north, but it’s a good reminder of the fun times we’ve had up there.

benmartens May 7, 2013 Home Improvement

Tulip Ride 2013

Approximately 3 hours after we signed up for a baby class, the annual Tulip Ride was scheduled on the same day. Thankfully we ended up taking a different class and Tyla was ok with me going on the ride without her this year.

This was my fifth time on the Tulip Ride. The first time I went it was about a dozen bikes. This year we topped 200 and raised over $5000 for charity before any company matching! There were police escorts both in Redmond and in Tulalip along with media coverage leading up to the event. It’s turned into a big production!

This was also the first year that we had some celebrities on the ride. Tricia Helfer and Katie Sackhoff of Battlestar Galactica fame were there riding some Harleys donated by Eastside Harley and taking pictures with a bunch of motorcycle riding geeks. And yes, I asked Tyla’s permission before taking a photo with Tricia.

On a sidenote, that’s probably the first time I’ve ever had my picture taken with a celebrity, at least that I can remember. It’s weird. I’m not sure I like it. “Hi, we both know I’m here just to take my photo with you and then we’ll never talk again. We both have jobs and yours just happens to put your face on TV, but we could argue about who’s job has a bigger impact on people’s lives. There’s nothing I can say that you haven’t heard a thousand times before and given the long line of people, you must just want to get this over with.” And then seeing the photo isn’t too encouraging either. Sometimes I look in the mirror and think I’m not that ugly. But then I look at the picture and it’s not hard to figure out who gets paid to look good for a living.

But back to the ride…

We started at Blazing Bagels in Redmond. Tyla and her family surprised me by showing up to watch us all leave. They weren’t alone as we drew quite a crowd of onlookers wherever we went. About 120 bikes left Redmond and we made our way up to Tulalip without staying in a super tight group. At Tulalip we picked up about another 80 bikes and then held the pack together for most of the way to the tulip fields before a car pulled into the middle of the pack and then let enough cars get in front of them that we completely lost touch with the pack. Thankfully between the four or five of us at the front of the second pack, we were able to remember the way to the tulip fields.

It started to rain near the end and since I’ve seen the majestic tulip fields many times before, I drove right past and headed home. It was a fun day but it I missed having Tyla along!

I geeked up a perfectly good motorcycle by putting two GoPros on the bike facing forward and backward. You can see the video on YouTube or embedded below. In most places it runs at 1000% of normal speed. I posted some of my photos to Flickr to share with the other riders.

I wonder if my son will want to go on one of these rides with me in the future?

benmartens May 6, 2013 Motorcycle, Video

LED Light Bulbs

Shopping for CFL or LED bulbs instead of incandescent light bulbs can be confusing. Do you want bright white, warm white, or one of the other white colors? Forget the names. There’s a more precise way to know what you’re getting and it’s called the temperature of the color. Color temperatures are measured in kelvins. A standard incandescent bulb is between 2700 and 3300K. So if you want a CFL or LED bulb that matches that color, look for the color temperature on the box. Some of the bulbs are much whiter, and to my eye they’re very unpleasant.

LED bulbs have been around for a few years but they’ve been cost prohibitive. They’re better than CFL and incandescent in pretty much every way. They use less power, warm up instantly, produce less heat, are dimmable, and last forever (or ~25,000 hours, whichever comes first.) You can find good LED bulbs for $10-15 each at your local store so there’s still a pretty big premium.

On Earth Day, my employer teamed up with PSE to off us a four pack of LED bulbs for $10. It seemed like a good way to test the waters with LED bulbs. I put one of them in the lamp in our living room and three of them in our outdoor lighting since those are the lights that are on the most in our house. It’s really an anticlimactic event. I excitedly screwed in the bulbs, they work, and we rarely think about them.

But it got me to wondering, are they finally getting cheap enough that I should be replacing all my bulbs with LEDs as the old bulbs die out? What’s the break even point? It’s time for some math!

With our fancy GPS-based outdoor light timer, I know that my lights are on specifically between sunset and sunrise every day, even as those times shift. I looked up a full table of rise and set times for Seattle and then calculated how long the sun is up. That in itself was interesting. It turns out that in Seattle over the course of a year, the sun is up 51% of the time. But for our purposes, we just need to know that the sun is down for 4290.75 hours in a year.

Here are how 60 watt equivalent bulb costs would play out over the course of 10 years. Note that I’m prorating the cost of the bulbs that are used so the cost of the remaining lifetime of the last bulb is not included in the total cost.

I didn’t know what to expect when I started those calculations, and I’m impressed that the LED bulb came out ahead! It takes many years for the LED to overtake the CFL, but eventually it at least breaks even. Also note that I was basing the LED numbers on this bulb. Different bulbs have different power requirements, but this is a respectable model/brand.

So from all this we can conclude that at the current prices, CFL and LEDs are just about a break even on cost at least with the models and prices I used in my calculations. In terms of actual use, the LEDs come out ahead because they don’t have the same warmup period as the CFL bulbs and they are dimmable. And the cost tradeoff will vary depending on what you’re comparing. The other caveat is that I don’t know if these bulbs are rated for the temperature swings associated with outdoor use so it will be interesting to see how long they last.

Don’t go running around the house throwing away CFL bulbs since that’s a waste of money, but as they die, you can replace them with LEDs and know that you’ll get your money back over time assuming the LED bulbs live as long as the makers claim. If you want to see it for yourself, check out one of the many online bulb price calculators. We have a stockpile of various sized CFL and incandescent candelabra bulbs, but as those run out I think we’ll be switching to LED.

benmartens May 3, 2013 Home Improvement

Yellow Pages

You know that feeling of guilt/frustration you get when those yellow pages come to your door and you drop them straight in the recycle bin? It’s such a waste of energy and resources. I just learned about a site called YellowPagesOptOut.com. Just as the name implies, you can opt out of the various phone books that you receive. Type in your zip code and the site will show you which directories are normally delivered. For our area, there were six books on the list! I opted out of all of them and hopefully it means that there will be one less thing getting tossed out at our house.

benmartens May 2, 2013 Commentary

Zane Lamprey’s New TV Show

For those of you who were fans of Three Sheets and Drinking Made Easy, there’s good news: Zane Lamprey is attempting to launch a new show! It will be in the same vein as the previous shows. He travels around the world, enjoys local alcohol, learns a bit about the culture, and has fun doing it. He’s a got a good formula and it’s been frustrating to see him have such a hard time getting a network to support him.

He’s finally given up (?) on the networks and decided to fund this effort through Kickstarter. The show is called CHUG and they’re trying to raise $500K. It’s a lofty goal so I hope you’ll join me in pledging a few bucks to help him out. If you’ve never done a Kickstarter project, it’s pretty easy. The site lists out what you’ll receive for giving various amounts of money and you only pay out if the project hits it’s fundraising goal. There’s no guarantee that you’ll actually receive any of the rewards though! It’s possible that whatever you’re sponsoring will go belly up and fail completely so keep that in mind. I don’t have any fear of that with Zane’s project as he’s a pro at this and has been doing it for a long time.

Starting a project like this also means that once he reaches his goal, he can walk into a network and say “Look, I’ve already got the money to produce the show. All you need to do is pony up the cash to promote it and give me a time slot.” That’s a pretty interesting offer, especially with all the new Internet networks that I blogged about yesterday.

Good luck Zane!

PS. If you are a fan of Zane, be sure to listen to his weekly podcast!

benmartens May 1, 2013 Commentary

New TV Channels

We’re all familiar with CBS, ABC and NBC, but the new “TV channels” are shaping up to be Amazon, Netflix and YouTube. All three companies are purchasing exclusive content for their sites. And these are some pretty big deals with names like Kevin Spacey, Bill Murray, and John Goodman. When you stop and think about it, if you have a Roku box or some other way to watch these sites on your TV, there’s very little difference between watching a show on Amazon or watching a show on NBC. House of Cards was released recently on Netflix and got great reviews. There are a lot more shows in the pipe including a new season for Arrested Development which I’m thrilled about.

Looking ahead 5-10 years, it’s pretty easy to imagine this type of “TV” taking over the traditional television model. On Netflix, Amazon and YouTube, producers can create the exact show they want. There’s no need to break at specific points for commercials or create a 1 hour show that is exactly 42 minutes long so that all the commercials fit. Plus, all the episodes can be released at once which is increasingly how people like to consume a series.

It’s all very intriguing and there are plenty of people cutting the cable cord to consume their TV completely online. While I love the idea and do consume content from the web, I’m still happy with cable TV for the sheer ease of use. Cable comes into my house, gets recorded by one of the four tuners in my Windows Media Center PC and then gets streamed out to the various TV’s in our house, computers or even our phones. Doing something similar without a cable subscription requires us to remember which app we open to watch which show and right now it’s not worth the hassle for our household. Kudos to those of you who are blazing a trail for the rest of us!

benmartens April 30, 2013 Commentary