Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Anniversary Trip

For our first anniversary, we headed out to San Juan Island to stay at States Inn & Ranch. It’s not your typical bed and breakfast, but it was perfect for us. As the name implies, the inn sits on a working ranch, and we were able to roam wherever we wanted. Tyla spent hours and hours watching and petting goats, pygmy goats, horses, sheep, alpacas, chicken and a llama.

We got the explore the island a little bit as well. The remnants of the Pig War fought between the British and Americans are still visible on the island. In fact, the British camp is the only place where the National Park Service raises a non-American flag.

All in all, it was a very relaxing trip punctuated by great food and lots of animal interaction. The California room where we stayed is visible in the picture below. it’s on the second floor and has enormous windows. We had a great view!

I’ve uploaded our favorite photos into the photo gallery under the tag San Juan Island. A few of them have gone into my dSLR Favorites gallery as well.

benmartens April 13, 2011 Travel

South Shore Train Crash NTSB Report

If you don’t know that I was in a train crash in 1993, you should get caught up by reading this blog post. If this had happened 10 years later, the internet would be full of stories and photos about the event, but as it is, it’s almost impossible to find anything. Back in college, I wrote to the National Transportation Safety Board and requested a copy of PB93-916304 NTSB/RAR-93/03. It came to me as 25 photocopied pages. The quality isn’t great, but it’s the best I have to work with. I scanned the whole thing in so you can download the PDF and read it for yourself. (UPDATE 2023-07-17: I see the NTSB has posted it on their website now.) I know many of you won’t be interested in this, but I’m posting it mostly so that other people can find a copy of it if they need it.

These two photos from the document are the only ones I have. (Maybe Mom saved some newspapers?) I’m not positive, but I believe the top picture is the first of three cars on our train and the bottom picture is the third of the three cars.

benmartens April 11, 2011 Commentary

Featured Photo

There is a relatively new (at least to me) website called dailyhiker.com that I’ve been following. The guys who run it are local to the Pacific Northwest but the blog covers hiking around the world. They ran a contest recently for the best lake photo so I submitted my photo of MattM skipping rocks into the Puget Sound (technically not a lake I guess) on last summer’s camping trip. I didn’t win but I did make it into the top 13. Interestingly it’s the only photo in that group that has a person in it. This photo was taken with our little point and shoot. I’m really looking forward to hiking around with the T2i this summer.

http://www.dailyhiker.com/news/best-lake-photos-from-readers/

benmartens March 17, 2011 Links, Outdoors

Deep Snow Safety

It’s time (or too late) for a Public Safety Announcement about deep snow safety. When I moved out to the Pacific Northwest, I learned about something called a tree well. Because of the large pine trees we have around here, snow doesn’t accumulate around the base of trees as quickly as it does on other parts of the hill. Also, normal snow gets packed down by skiers while snow around the base of a tree remains light and fluffy. What you’re left with is a black hole waiting to suck you in and kill you faster than you can ever imagine.

The typical scenario is that a skier falls on a run and slides head first underneath a tree. They fall down into the light powdery snow with their head near the trunk. The more they struggle, the more they become encased in snow and very quickly they suffocate and die.

This was driven home by the recent loss (?) of a Crystal Mountain local. He was an expert skier who didn’t show up at the bottom of a run with friends. Patrol and volunteers have been searching for him for well over a week and have not found him. It’s very likely that he fell into a tree well and won’t be found until the snow melts.

When there is any kind of deep snow, “ski and ride with a friend” is not an optional piece of guidance. Even if you’re with a friend you need to keep a close eye on each other. The last person in any group is always the most vulnerable. A tree well can kill you in a matter of minutes, faster than your friends can climb back up the hill even if they’re lucky enough to see what happened to you. The only real way to be safe is to avoid tree wells entirely. Ski in control and keep a wide berth from the trees.

For more information about tree wells, visit http://www.treewelldeepsnowsafety.com/

benmartens March 15, 2011 Skiing

Windows Media Center LCD Arduino Project

JimM got me interested in Arduinos. They are simple electronics boards that contain almost everything you need to get started with your project. When it arrived in the mail, I connected it to the computer via USB, opened up the development environment, uploaded a small program to the board and boom, I had a blinking light. Simple, yes, but the time to results was extremely low.

My overall plan was to build a display for the Media Center PC in our living room. I wanted to be able to easily see when it was recording something or when one of the tuners was being used by one of the extenders. There are some premade solutions that would have probably worked, but this seemed like a great starter Arduino project and I would end up with something that was completely customizable.

In addition to the Arduino, I got a 20×4 character LCD screen and some small supplies like resistors, wire, buttons, and a potentiometer. This is the point where I should show a schematic for the whole thing, but honestly I never drew one. I built little portions of it as I went and ended up with something that works and hasn’t burned down the house yet.

Basically, the Arduino Uno sends power to the LCD and a 10K potentiometer controls the contrast of the screen. The board also sends the text for the screen through four wires along with a couple extra wires for enabling the screen, etc. The board powers the backlight for the LCD but I hooked up a resistor there to dim the backlight a bit. I had originally planned to have the backlight be controllable from software but I gave up after a couple failures trying to get a transistor hooked into the circuit. There is also a simple button hooked in, but I haven’t needed to use that in the software yet.

Once I got it all soldered together, I stuck it into a plastic hobby box from Radio Shack. I had to cut out a rectangular hole in the front for the LCD. That was done freehand with a Dremel and looks pretty bad when you get up close. Luckily it hides in the shadows and you can’t really tell. I have ideas to do that better next time.

The box now sits by the Media Center and is connected to the PC via USB. That cable provides power and communications. A C# application gathers status from the Ceton InfiniTV tuner and sets the display for the LCD in the box. (For the curious, there is a JSON interface to get to the InfiniTV status.) When a tuner is in use, the box displays the channel call sign and the name of the show that is being recorded. I get that info by mapping the channel number from the tuner to a call sign and then looking for the corresponding file in the Recorded TV folder. That file has the show name. When a tuner isn’t in use, it shows the temperature of that tuner. I’ll probably come up with something better for unused tuners in the future.

This was my first real electronics project so I learned quite a few things that are probably obvious to other people:

  • Use a bread board. Soldering everything to see if it worked was a pain.
  • Use header pins so you don’t have to solder directly to the LCD screen.
  • This whole thing could have been done in a couple minutes by buying a pre-made LCD shield that plugs in on top of the Arduino. I’m glad I did it manually the first time, but next time I’ll probably go for the shield.
  • Buy an introductory electronics book.
  • Take more pictures along the way! I was so excited to get this working that it somehow slipped my mind.

What’s next? I have quite a few project ideas but I think the one I’ll tackle next is making a tilt/pan mount for my camera that is controlled by an Arduino and will automatically take big panorama pictures. I’m also going to build an intervalometer into it for time lapse. This project will involve more buttons, motor control, and power from a battery.

benmartens March 11, 2011 Gadgets, Geek, Projects

Tuna Casserole

“Tuna” and “casserole” are not two words which usually excite people, but for some reason it sounded good one night. I must say, it turned out to be quite delicious. The recipe comes straight from allrecipes.com and I didn’t make many modifications.

Ingredients

  • 1 (12 ounce) package egg noodles
  • 1/4 cup chopped onion
  • 2 cups shredded Cheddar cheese
  • 1 cup frozen green peas
  • 2 (6 ounce) cans tuna, drained
  • 2 (10.75 ounce) cans condensed cream of mushroom soup
  • 1/2 (4.5 ounce) can sliced mushrooms
  • 1 cup crushed potato chips

Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil. Cook pasta in boiling water for 8 to 10 minutes, or until al dente; drain.

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F (220 degrees C).

In a large bowl, thoroughly mix noodles, onion, 1 cup cheese, peas, tuna, soup and mushrooms. Transfer to a 9×13 inch baking dish, and top with potato chip crumbs and remaining 1 cup cheese.

Bake for 15 to 20 minutes in the preheated oven, or until cheese is bubbly.

benmartens March 10, 2011 Food

Bacon Wrapped Tater Tots

This is barely a recipe, but I’ll post it anyway because it was so delicious. Take a strip of bacon, cut off part of it and wrap it around a tater tot. I didn’t do this, but it might be a good idea to stick a toothpick through it to hold it all together. You might want to soak the toothpicks in water first so it doesn’t catch fire in the oven.

I used thick cut pepper bacon, but I think the thinner stuff would work better. Cook according to the tater tot directions and then finish it off with a blast from the broiler. Remove when the bacon looks cooked. You can spice it up a bit by adding a chopped jalapeno into the wrap.

I had some regular tots on the tray as well and they ended up cooking in bacon grease. Delicious but don’t eat too many or you’ll probably revisit them.

benmartens March 1, 2011 Food

Whistler History

While we were bopping around Whistler a couple weekends ago, Jay and I pondered the history of Whistler Blackcomb. Once I got back home to my precious internet connection, I was able to educate myself. Since I love bulleted lists, I’ll present the history in that form. Feel free to read a more detailed version if you like.

  • The area originally gained popularity as a fishing village around in the early 1900s.
  • Whistler Mountain opened for skiing in 1966. It was originally called London Mt but was renamed for a local mountain marmot that whistles.
  • Blackcomb Mountain opened separate from Whistler in 1980 and the two had quite a rivalry to provide the best terrain and most vertical feet.
  • Whistler Mountain Ski Corp (owners of Whistler) merged with Intrawest (owners of Blackcomb) in 1997.

Other random facts I discovered while reading through their master plan:

  • 45% of visitors to Whistler ride snowboards. That has been fairly steady since 2002. The Rocky Mountains have the lowest percentage of snowboarders (25%) in North America.
  • Whistler receives about 25% more visitors than Blackcomb.
  • A really busy day is about 25,000-27,000 visitors.
  • There are roughly 58,705 “bed units” in the Whistler area.

This figure shows future plans for Blackcomb. Red lines are in the next phase of lifts and aqua lines are the phase after that. Most existing to me on Blackcomb are the glacier lift and Ruby Bowl.

And here is a similar figure for Whistler. Phase order is red, purple, yellow. There is quite a bit of lift replacement planned there as well as three new lifts from the based of Symphony. But the really big area is from the West Bowl down to Cheakamus Base (further down from Creekside.) That will open up a ton of new terrain.

Don’t get too excited though. Plans like this can look 20-30 years into the future and might never come to fruition for a lot of reasons. It’s fun to dream though!

benmartens February 24, 2011 Skiing

Mt. Rainier Sees Increase In Visits

We had some good weather to start the summer last year and it translated into a lot of visitors to Mt. Rainier. The 1.19 million visitors was up 3.5% from 2009 and it was the most since 2004. An article in TheSunNews.com speculates that it is a sign of the recovering economy. The article is full of quite a few interesting stats:

  • The 2010 visitor number equaled the 10 year average
  • 64% of visitors are from the Puget Sound area (estimated)
  • ~15% of visitors stayed overnight
  • Backcountry campers were down 5.5% from 2009
  • Overall, National Park visitors were down 1.81% from 2009

I accounted for a couple of those visits with the motorcycle ride around Rainier and the Camp Muir hike. I really want to get down there and do some more hiking (Mt. Rainier or otherwise) this summer.

benmartens February 23, 2011 Outdoors

Skiing With Tyla

Last fall we picked up ski equipment for Tyla at the ski expo, but we haven’t had a chance to try it out until last weekend. January and the first half of February saw almost no snow fall in the Cascades, but thankfully that has ended and it is dumping again. Saturday was the perfect combination of good conditions (snowed a day or two before), perfect blue skies and temps around 30 degrees. Time to go skiing with Tyla!

We used the two free lift tickets that we won from a WildWashington.com giveaway and upgraded them to include gondola access for $8/each. Those gondola tickets proved to be well worth the money as the views were incredible! Visibility was essentially unlimited. We could see Adams, St. Helens, Baker, the Olympics, the Puget Sound, and of course, Rainier. The sun felt good but it wasn’t hot enough to melt anything. We had nice packed powder all day long with no sign of ice.

Tyla will tell you she’s not a good skier, but every time we’ve gone out I’ve been amazed at how quickly she progresses. I’d love to see what would happen if we could ski a few days (or at least weekends) in a row!

When we took a break for lunch, she told me to go take a run by myself so she could rest so I buzzed up Chair 6. The snow was a bit sticker/thicker than I expected but I managed not to tumble over any cliffs with my wife watching.

Pictures are posted in the photo gallery. While we were at the gondola unloading area, I snapped off a bunch of pictures in hopes of getting a good panorama. It’s not perfect, but I liked it enough to make it the new header photo on the site. You can download the full resolution version of it too.

benmartens February 22, 2011 Panorama, Skiing