Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Choke Tubes

When Logan and I took the trap shooting class, they suggested that I go two steps tighter on my choke tube. The choke of your shotgun determines how the shot flies out of the barrel. As the shot gets farther from the gun, the area it covers expands. That’s good but if you expand too much then your target might fly right through the middle of your pattern. You can screw different choke tubes into the end of your gun to constrict or free up that pattern. To test the pattern, you can shoot at a piece of paper placed at a specific distance and see what the pattern looks like.

My Remington 870 came with a modified choke which is about in the middle of what you can do with choke tubes. I ordered a full choke. It probably only takes about 4-6” off my pattern size, but it should get rid of some of the holes in the pattern. There have been a few times when I knew I shot perfectly but the bird never broke. Hopefully that won’t happen anymore.

My first attempt at the range went pretty well. In the second round I tied my high score. Hits give a much more satisfying explosion because more shot is hitting the target.

I’m reading a book about trap shooting. The author says it’s easy to get too wrapped up in choke tubes. He says you should pattern your gun, pick a choke tube, and stick with it. “Choke tubes change inches while misses happen in feet.”

benmartens February 22, 2013 Sports

Post Office Cutbacks

It looks like the Post Office is going to cut Saturday delivery to save money. It’s a novel idea: cut costs to balance your budget. No wonder it’s causing so much confusion in D.C. But regardless of the politics or whether it’s even legal for them to do this, I think the Post Office is missing some big opportunities.

What is the biggest asset of the USPS? They employ a workforce that touches almost every household in the country 6 out of every 7 days. How many dotcoms have we watched fail because their service couldn’t handle the costs of a workforce like that? Maybe they really have to cut Saturday delivery to save money, but what else could they be doing to make more money instead of just delivering mail?

Imagine if you could pay a USPS worker to knock on the door of your elderly relative every day and report back to you if nobody answers the door. Or what if you could pay a USPS worker to clean any packages or fliers off your doorstep when you’re on vacation?

It seems that the volume of mail is going to keep declining. Are they just going to keep cutting days of service? Or will they make use of their army of employees to broaden their horizons and change their business model?

benmartens February 21, 2013 Commentary

By The Beard Of Dallon!

In the post about my beard, I mentioned that part of the reason for doing this was that when I was a kid, I saw some pictures of Dad with a beard and thought it was hilarious. It seemed like a fun thing to do for my son too. Mom has embarked on a project to scan in thousands of slide photos and she stumbled across the photos of Dad’s beard. I think it looks pretty good! The shirt in the second photo maybe not so much.

Tyla commented that Mom looks about as thrilled with Dad’s beard as Tyla is with mine. I had to explain that for as long as I can remember (and apparently longer), Mom’s eyes are magically closed in almost every picture! There may be some supernatural forces at work.

But seriously, thanks to Mom for digging up these photos and for spending countless hours in front of the scanner salvaging these slides. It will be an amazing historical record of our family for decades to come.

benmartens February 20, 2013 Commentary

CascadeSkier Architecture

A lot has changed since the last article about the architecture of the CascadeSkier apps. So let’s get geeky and peek behind the scenes.

The ecosystem includes a Windows 7 gadget, Windows Phone app, and a Windows 8 app. With all of these various applications (and more floating around in my head), it made sense to keep the clients as simple as possible. The complicate part is pulling in raw weather data from 11 different mountain sensors, 11 weather forecasts, and various web cams and links for each resort. That all happens on a centralized server. When the clients start up, they pull in a text file that has all the polished data and they display it. It makes it fairly easy to crank out new clients, and there’s a centralized location to make any changes to the data.

A configuration file sits on the server. It has a section for each resort and instructs the data cache how to pull the weather data from the raw mountain sensor feed and how to find the three day forecast from NOAA. It has contains a list of web cams for each resort and a bunch of related links like trail maps.

Every 15 minutes, the data cache refreshes by reading the config file, making about a couple dozen requests to various websites to pull in the data, and parses the data into a format that the clients can easily consume. At roughly the same interval, a tile cache generates live tiles for each resort so that the tiles don’t have to be generated on the phone or in the Windows 8 app. Depending on what parameters you pass in the URL to the live tile cache, you can get the tile with any combination of Farenheit or Celsius and metric or imperial.

Using the two caches also relieves pressure on all the various data sources. I don’t know how they’d feel about thousands of clients pinging their servers multiple times every hour. They probably wouldn’t notice, but this is better overall because the clients only have to make a single call to get the data from the cache and it’s instantly available.

This is the sixth ski season for the Cascade skier family of apps and it’s still going strong. The phone and Windows 8 apps are some of the highest rated and most downloaded apps in their categories. There’s even a line of clothing if you’re a superfan (or if you’re my mom.) In the grand scheme of things, this app is just a blip on the radar, but I’ve had a blast with it and it’s fun to hear from people who use and love the apps!

benmartens February 19, 2013 Geek, Projects

Crystal With The Scherschel’s

Five years ago, Tim and Chelsea gave snowboarding a try. That didn’t really stick so this year they decided to give skiing a try. Tyla decided that skiing while pregnant wasn’t a great idea, but she still came along with us and hung out in the lodge. After a few laps on the bunny slope, Tim and Chelsea were ready for the Chinook lift and after lunch they advanced to Forest Queen. They did a great job and made huge improvements throughout the day. It was fun sharing lift rides with them and seeing them enjoy a sport that I love too. Hopefully they’ll head back out to the slopes again soon!

benmartens February 18, 2013 Skiing

Beer Bottling

A couple weeks ago, Don, Logan and I made two full batches of beer at Gallagher’s. Last weekend it was done and ready to bottle. Each batch makes about 140 12oz bottles so we had a lot of work ahead of us. Thankfully Ken and Tim showed up to help.

We had been saving enough bottles so we didn’t need to buy any at the brewery. We did, however, have to sanitize them before starting. Note that this is sanitization, not cleaning the bottles. Don took charge of running that machine and keeping us stocked with bottles. Logan and I took turns filling the bottles while Tim and Ken took turns capping the bottles and putting them in the boxes. We all shared the responsibility of drinking some of the beer. We ended up with about 11 cases of beer and we bottled it all in under two hours. Half of it is like Redhook ESB and the other half is a hefeweizen. I’m not a huge fan of the hefeweizen but it’s good and I love the ESB.

Once ski season is done I’d love to get in a more regular habit of making beer there. The final cost for our beer was about $1.15/bottle which isn’t bad at all. That’s about what I pay at the grocery store. So far we’ve made three of their 50 or so recipes. I want to come up with my own concoction, but I don’t know enough about how the flavors work together. I guess I need more practice!

benmartens February 15, 2013 Commentary

Master Bathroom Remodel

When I wrote the “before” post for our bathroom remodel, I said I’d have finished pictures in a couple weeks. That was being very generous in case there were mistakes that I found to have them clean up, etc. I’m happy to report that the job is finished and I will make the final payment tomorrow. This room is perfect! As a reminder, here’s the before photo:

And here’s what it looks like now!

It’s difficult to get good photos in such a small space but hopefully you get a decent idea of what it looks like now. Everything is in the same place and the cabinets are the same, but everything else is new. You’ll notice that we didn’t pay the contractor to paint for us. We’ll do that ourselves later. Tyla also wants me to point out that the “ugly curtains” are being replaced too. Here’s a list of some of the more visible changes:

  • We had a half wall between the shower and the tub. That’s gone now.
  • The tub deck juts into the shower creating a little ledge for bottles or to help Tyla shave her legs. That’s actually where the wall used to be but now it’s even with the top of the tub so the shower floor is the same height. That extra ~6” of space makes the shower feel quite a bit bigger.
  • The frameless shower glass is probably my favorite feature and one of the bigger splurges in the project. Three brackets and two hinges hold the hole thing together! The door swings both ways and auto-centers when it’s within 20 degrees of center.
  • You already know the story behind the tile. I’m thrilled with the way this looks. I was really trusting the designer on the first round of tile, but I love what we ended up with and I feel much more confident that it will still look nice in 15-20 years.
  • The countertop was another good score. The original plan was to use a product called Caesarstone but the counter guy suggested another product that was half the price and about the same. (The difference is that it’s not from Italy and it’s not as eco-friendly.) Because of the size of our counter, we had to buy a full slab so the cost savings was enormous.
  • We went with undermount sinks. Tim and Chelsea put those in their bathroom and I love the look. They should be easy to clean too.
  • All of the plumbing fixtures and towel bars are new. They are the Moen Brantford line in brushed nickel. Tim suggested that we wide mount the sink faucets given the length of our counter and they look great.
  • There’s a door to the bathroom! It’s one of the changes that’s easy to overlook because it seems like it should have been there all along, but it’s new.

There are also some great changes that aren’t quite as obvious:

  • The shower uses a Moen Posi-Temp pressure-balancing valve. They say that it won’t let the water temp vary more than 3 degrees if someone turns on a sink or flushes a toilet. From our limited testing so far it seems to work very well.
  • The shower is built for a big man! In almost every shower I use, I have to duck to wash my hair, but not in this one! The bottom of the shower head is 6’6” off the shower floor and the shower glass is extra tall too so I don’t splash over the top.
  • We swapped out our noisy 50 CFM vent fan for a super quiet Panasonic 110 CFM model. It’s so good that it makes me want to replace our other fans with this model.
  • Our other big splurge on this project was a heated floor. It’s on a 7 day programmable timer and feels wonderful.

The project all went remarkably according to plan. They finished a couple days before planned and our total overrun was less than 2%. The only surprises in the project were:

  • The vent pipe for our fan was a smaller diameter than normal and just ran to a soffit vent instead of going through the roof. I kept this one simple by having them put on a reducer and leave the pipe as it was. I can fix that separately if needed, but it will probably be fine the way it is. Since I kept that simple, it didn’t cost any extra.
  • The old shower head was never lined up with the shower drain and the new shower pan made that even more obvious. Of course there was a stud in the way so they had to carefully remove it and do some new framing.
  • When they plumbed the supply lines to the tub, they went from 1/2” to 3/8” and back to 1/2”. The plumber fixed that up. The tub was also not set in mortar or framed in. It was simply hanging about 3” off the ground. I can’t believe it never cracked! The nice part was that we were able to reuse the tub since it just pulled right out. The next people who remodel won’t be so lucky because it’s now set in a mortar bed.

Now that the project is done, I can give a 100% recommendation for Ron Palmer Construction. He was not the cheapest bid, but he was super detailed. The other contractors gave one page bids. Ron’s was 9 pages with only one page of boilerplate content. Everything was completely broken down so I could see exactly what he was charging for each task. We had a schedule listing what they would be doing every single day. His whole team was very professional and friendly. We had no problem leaving them a key to work in our house each day. From day 1 until they end, they did a marvelous job of protecting the rest of our house and cleaning up after themselves. They had plastic down on the carpet all the way out to the front door, padding on the hardwood floors, and even a huge plastic sheet with a zipper door separating our bed area from the bathroom dust. And as I said before, he was almost spot on with his cost estimate and beat his schedule. Once we save up our pennies for the next remodel, I’ll have a hard time picking anyone but Ron.

So there you have it. The project we talked about the very first time we saw the house is done! Given the same budget, there’s nothing I’d do differently.

benmartens February 13, 2013 Home Improvement

Calendar For Couples

Early in our relationship, Tyla and I set up a joint calendar. There’s so much going on that without it, we’d be constantly confused about our upcoming schedule. It’s so useful that it seemed worth sharing. There are many calendar apps you could use, but we use http://calendar.live.com. I created the calendar on my account and then shared it with her. Not only can we access it through a browser, but it shows up on our phones and even in my Outlook calendar at work. Tyla is really good about keeping it updated so whenever we need to schedule something, we know that if we check the calendar, we can grab any open slot. If you have trouble planning with your friends or family members, give this a shot!

benmartens February 12, 2013 Links

Martens Pilsner

Late one night a few years ago, I discovered a Martens Brewery in Belgium. For a 255 year old brewery, they have an embarrassingly bad website that stymied my attempts to learn more about them. Here’s what I do know. The brewery is in Bocholt Belgium and it was founded in 1758. Their signature beer is the Martens Pilsner, and like me, it’s tall. It’s sold in 16.9 oz cans. I don’t know how big they are, but they do seem to be distributed around the world since I found a Taiwanese commercial for Martens beer. But that’s about where my research ended. I couldn’t figure out how to buy any.

When Andy and Stephanie showed up to watch the Super Bowl, he had a four pack of Martens Pilsner! Apparently they sell it at a local Whole Foods, and after checking the Total Wine website, I think they might have it too. I was so excited to finally get to try it! At the risk of offending my namesake brewery, the beer isn’t anything to special and is reminiscent of a Coors Light. Then again, I’d say that about a lot of pilsners. Yes I realize they’re different types of beer, but they’re so different from my normal beer that they kind of blend together in my memory.

So now I have a source for Martens beer. My quest continues to find t-shirts, hats, neon signs, pint glasses, or anything else from the brewery. This might require a trip to Belgium.

benmartens February 11, 2013 Commentary