Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Moses Lake for a Weekend

While we did just get back from a great trip, we decided to squeeze one more in before the weather gets rainy. I don’t remember how it started but we have a random family goal of visiting all the counties in Washington together. With that in mind, we headed east. For those of you not familiar with our state, you may picture Washington state as wet and cloudy. That’s true on the west side of the state between October and May but the east side of the estate is a desert. There are literally tumbleweeds blowing around. It’s a dramatic change with just an hour drive east over the mountains.

Our base of operations was Moses Lake, but the drive out there was slower than expected because the I-90 bridge over the Columbia River is being worked on for the next couple months. We sat through a 5-mile, 75 minute backup squeezing down to one lane. Oops.

Saturday morning we headed north for Grand Coulee Dam. Tyla and I have been there before but Elijah had never seen it. Grand Coulee Dam is mind-boggling big. It was originally created to supply a huge part of central Washington with irrigation but now it also supplies power for about 2 million homes per year. There are lots of stats, but suffice it to say the ~1 mile long dam is one of the biggest concrete structures in the world and the 10th most powerful hydroelectric dam (3.2 times more powerful than the famous Hoover Dam.) We got there for the first tour at 10am, but unfortunately the tour has really been neutered even after the initial changes after 9/11. You no longer get to visit the generator area. The tour briefly takes you down to the pumping facility which is interesting but too short. The rest of the tour is a drive across the top of the dam with a stop walk around at the top. I guess it’s still worth doing if you’re there, but don’t make that the key point of your day. Luckily for us, it was just one piece of the puzzle!

After the tour we had lunch at the apparently brand new Billups Sub Co. It was delicious but way more expensive than I was expecting. We got our food to go and ate it at a nearby park that had free EV charging (more on that in a later post.)

After lunch we headed northeast to Koontzville and then east to Highway 21. I don’t think we saw any other cars on that part of the drive and a forest fire had ravaged the area only a couple months before. It was quite a sight. Once on Hwy 21, we headed south to the Keller Ferry. This ferry is tiny compared to the ones we’re used to in the Puget Sound. It only holds 20 cars! The north dock is movable and gets moved upriver to a different spot when the river is too low. There’s no schedule and no fee for the 10 minute crossing. This sounds like a simple part of the trip, but we all said it was our favorite!

From the south ferry dock, we headed straight back to our hotel in Moses Lake for some swimming, food, and rest. Our drive back home went smoothly and we got through the construction in Vantage, WA before it had backed up at all. After getting through that, we did stop at the Thorp Fruit & Antique Mall. It was fun to go inside afer driving by so many times. We came back with a box of apples, but if you’re looking for really good deals, I think you should look elsewhere. It wasn’t bad but it felt like a mildly good sale at the grocery store, not the kind of deal you get buying straight out of a field.

So none of those activities were monumental but it added up to a nice weekend and some more family memories to add to the pile.

benmartens September 26, 2024 Family, Travel

Cruise Tips

We’ve done three cruises now so clearly we are experts and you should get your info from this post instead of the endless barrage of other internet content on this topic. Kidding of course, but here are three things that I think are helpful when planning a cruise, especially your first cruise:

  • Understand the differences between the cruise lines. There is a cruise line for everyone, but not every cruise line is for you. If, for example, you pick the cruise with the lowest price that you can find, you might leave wondering why people like cruises. There are a variety of pages to help you decipher the pack, but here’s one example. We’ve done two cruises with Royal Caribbean and one with Celebrity. The Royal Caribbean ships had a lot more activities and were more focused on families with kids while Celebrity was a little fancier and had an older clientele.
  • Get a balcony. There are generally four categories of rooms: interior, exterior view, balcony, and suite. We have always sprung for the balcony rooms and honestly, I think I’d probably rather skip a cruise than not have a balcony. I suppose there are exceptions to that, but I spend a lot of time reading and napping on the balcony. There are a lot of people on a cruise ship and this is a fairly private place where I can be outside, have a great view, and enjoy myself. For this reason, we also generally get a room as high up on the ship as we can since it usually equates to a better view, especially in ports.
  • Skip the packages. The base fare for a cruise is a pretty good deal. You get the room and access to a bunch of free food 24 hours a day. It’s impossible to beat it if you’re staying in hotels and eating at restaurants. That being said, you can easily spend way more than the base fare. For example:
    • Each ship has restaurants that cost extra money. Are they good? I’m sure! But will you be disappointed if you only eat in the main dining room, the buffet, and the other free snack food places around he ship? No way! The food is one of our favorite parts of a cruise and we’ve only ever eaten the included food options.
    • While the idea of unlimited alcohol seems enticing, it’s shocking to see how many people opt for the drink package. On our latest cruise it was $95/day! Individual beers were around $8 and mixed drinks were about $15. Are you really going to drink 6 mixed drinks a day or a dozen beers just to break even? And are you going to do that for each of the seven days of your cruise? We have never gotten that package and just say that we’ll buy them individually, but we never end up getting anything at all because we’re so full from the amazing food.
    • There’s free WiFi on board that lets you use their app to see activities, reserve things like laser tag, see the food menus, etc, but if you want to access the internet, get ready to pay a bunch of money. On our cruise it was $26/day for a single device and that’s only if you pay for the entire cruise (so that’s $182 for a 7 day cruise to access the internet from one device.) You can also buy a 24 hour pass but you’ll pay in the mid-30’s for that. I love unplugging on a cruise, but on this latest cruise, I didn’t do a good job of that. Since we were going to be in Alaska and Canada, I knew we could use our cell phones in the ports and had planned to connect with people to share info about when we’d be getting back, etc. Seeing the flood of email and texts ended up being a shot of unwelcome stress during the trip and I wish I had just left my phone off the whole time.

There is a cruise to fit just about everyone and you can customize each cruise in a lot of ways, but those choices can have a big impact on your experience and your bank account!

benmartens September 23, 2024 Travel

Best of YouTube

It’s time for another “Best of YouTube” post. We subscribe to the ad-free YouTube because it’s the streaming service we watch the most. Yes, there are lots of garbage videos there, but if you want to learn something, there is an endless flood of educational content too.

First up we have a video from Donut. Honestly, this might be one of the last videos I watch from that channel because my favorite hosts left to do their own thing at the new Big Time, channel, but this is still a great video. In 15 minutes (and what appears to be a single take), they explain every part of an engine:

If you have even a passing interest in engineering, check out Stuff Made Here. Every video is a home run, and his most recent video is no exception. He set out to make the world’s smallest bicycle. It’s incredible how much energy he puts into these ideas!

And finally, here’s a shoutout for the Practical Engineering channel. There are so many interesting videos with solid explanations of things that you might take for granted. He recently had a good one that goes into detail about how French drains work which is worth watching even if you already think you know, but for this post, I want to highlight “Why Railroads Don’t Need Expansion Joints.” Think about it… you have a thousand miles of a solid metal bar baking in the sun. That must expand and contract a lot! How do they deal with it?

benmartens September 19, 2024 Links

Kids Bakery Sign

I was approached a few weeks back by a girl at church asking if I could make a sign for a kids craft fair/bake sale that she was entering. She quickly drew a picture of the logo she and her friend had designed. I’m frustrated that I can’t find the original drawing, but I took what she had and made a vector version of it on the computer. I actually started with Copilot to generate some similar ideas and then I combined all the ideas in Inkscape.

I ended up making two identical signs using round, pine blanks from Home Depot. I sprayed them with shellac and then covered them with Oramask the girls wanted to paint them after I was done.

The girls did a nice job painting the signs and it sounds like their bake sale was a hit! After learning a bit more, it sounds like lots of market setups have one day a year where the booths are run by kids. If you have a crafty kid, check for options in your area!

This is the third sign I’ve done on these round Home Depot blanks. They are a great size and relatively inexpensive so they’re a good option, but if you have a good source for other 3/4-1″ thick blanks in different shapes, please let me know. It would be fun to give people options of other shapes too.

benmartens September 16, 2024 Woodworking

Royal Caribbean Cruise to Alaska

For our big family vacation this year, we chose a cruise to Alaska! Tyla and I did two cruises (cruise 1 post and cruise 2 post) before Elijah was born, but we had saved an Alaskan cruise because it was so easy to do. Sometimes those easy/local things get put off for a long time!

This cruise was on Royal Caribbean’s “Quantum of the Seas” ship. We chose it because our first two cruises were with Royal Caribbean and the related Celebrity cruise line. We knew they had good family programs and Elijah was still within the age limit for their kids club.

We had four stops on this cruise:

  • Icy Strait Point, Alaska – This isn’t really a town. It’s a purpose-built cruise port and the small fishing village of Hoonah is nearby. We didn’t schedule an excursion here and just ended up walking along the shore about halfway to the town before returning. The popular activity here is a giant zipline. It was cool to set foot in Alaska for the first time, but the port didn’t wow us. While we were parked in the port, we spotted a few whales!
  • Skagway, Alaska – We were excited for this port because it was a bigger town and because we had booked a zipline excursion. (The most popular excursion is a train ride up into the Yukon.) Unfortunately, we never got to stop there! The winds were gusting over 40 knots, and they were blowing the ship around so much that it couldn’t dock safely. The captain tried twice but it didn’t work out so the rest of our itinerary was slightly modified. We were bummed to miss the port but thankful that we booked through the cruise line, so our excursion was immediately refunded.
  • Endicott Arm and Dawes Glacier – This wasn’t really a stop, but it was a “view from the ship” destination. We drove through the narrow fjord called Endicott Arm. It’s only about a half mile wide so getting a giant cruise ship through there is a bit of a feat. The Dawes glacier is at the end of the fjord and there are an increasing number of icebergs along the way. We were excited to spot seals on one of the icebergs as we went by. We went as far as we could before the icebergs got too thick and then the captain spun the ship around so we could all view it easily.
  • Juneau, Alaska – Our modified itinerary gave us a full day in Juneau instead of just the afternoon. We got off the ship in the morning and spent a couple of hours walking around the shops near the port. After lunch back on the ship, we got off again for our Jeep excursion. This was basically a 4.5 hour car rental. The Jeep came preprogrammed with waypoints and a related audio guide. The best stop was the Mendenhall Glacier. We stopped at the main visitor center area and did a 2 mile hike out to Nugget Falls. It was pretty rainy all day, but we were prepared, and the Jeep was stocked with extra umbrellas. It also had gold panning equipment, but we only discovered at the very end that the gold panning spot wasn’t in the default waypoint list. We added that to our trip and spent a few quick minutes realizing that understanding the concept of panning for gold is a lot different than remembering how the different tools work in the cold rain while you’re in a hurry to get back to the ship! After returning the Jeep, we had about half an hour before they pulled up the gangway so Tyla and Elijah were kind enough to let me stop into Alaskan Brewing and have a beer.
  • Victoria, British Columbia – There’s a US law that says a cruise cannot leave a US port and return to a US port without stopping in another country unless it is registered in the US. That would have huge tax implications for the cruise lines so there’s always at least a token stop in another country. In this case, we arrived in Victoria at 5pm and left at 10pm. Unless you’re eating dinner on shore and exploring in the dark, this isn’t really an ideal stop. We didn’t schedule an excursion but we did get out and walk around. We headed east out of the port along the coast and found ourselves out of the crowd and enjoying sunshine for one of the first times on the trip.

With the skipped Skagway stops and the two ports where we mostly just walked around, a lot of our time was spent on the ship. Thankfully the ship had a ton of things to keep us busy!

  • SeaPlex – There was an indoor area on the top decks called the SeaPlex and we spent a lot of time there. Aside from the usual staples of ping pong, foosball, cornhole, etc, they had a big sports are that would change throughout the day. Over the course of the trip we used that area for bumper cars, roller skating, laser tag, soccer, and dodgeball. It was quite impressive and they did a good job of knowing which events needed to have a pre-registration so you didn’t have to wait in line for a long time.
  • iFly – There is a chain of indoor skydiving places called “iFly” which is basically a cylinder on top of a giant fan that lets you practice free falling. The ship had one of these too! We pre-paid for an extended session which got us extra instruction and two 1-minute flights. One minute sounds short but it felt plenty long when we were in the tunnel. All three of us did that initial session. Later we discovered that we could also sign up for a single flight for free. I’m glad we did the paid session first because the free one included very little instruction. Tyla was nice enough to stand outside the tunnel and take pictures and video of Elijah and I flying!
  • Rock climbing – There was a two-story rock-climbing wall on the side of the ship with a wide variety of routes for different skill levels. The wall was closed most of the time because of wind and rain, but Elijah got to spend about an hour there our last full day on the ship.
  • Pools – The ship does have an outdoor pool, but it wasn’t used a lot on this cruise because of the weather. The indoor pool got a lot of use but somehow never seemed overly crowded. Elijah spent a lot of time in there and especially enjoyed it when the water was sloshing around during the rockier days at sea.
  • FOOD – My main challenge on a cruise is figuring out how I’m going to be hungry enough for my next meal! The two basic choices for food are the main dining room and the buffet. We chose to eat our breakfasts and lunches in the buffet and then ate dinner in the dining room around 7 or 8pm every night. We chose the “My Time Dining” option which gave us a private table and the option to move our dining times around. We were very lucky to get a window table and the same great waiters every night. They would usually end up encouraging us to order multiple appetizers, entrees, and desserts so that we could sample many different items. Aside from all that great food, there were also endless ice cream cones, pizza, and hot dogs available. There are a lot of specialty restaurants that cost money, but we were more than happy with the included offerings.
  • All Access Ship Tour – We paid for a 2.5-hour tour of the boat and got incredible behind the scenes access to backstage of the theater, galley, laundry, engineering, food storage, and even the bridge! They provided little speakers that hung on your ear which made it easy to hear what was going on. It’s amazing to see everything that needs to happen to keep 4000+ guests fed and entertained. There are people working extremely hard for long hours with no days off so that you can enjoy your time napping and overeating.

This cruise was quite different from our previous cruises.

  • It was obviously much cooler and wetter than our Caribbean trips.
  • In the Caribbean, we barely remember ever feeling the ship move, but the movement was impossible to ignore on this trip when you were walking around or lying in bed. It never bothered us or kept us from doing anything.
  • On the first cruises I remember lots of naps and downtime where we would kill an hour or two just reading or staring at the ocean. With an 11-year-old in tow, that didn’t happen as often and we had to spend a lot more time figuring out how to keep him entertained and fill time. I once heard someone say that as a parent, you don’t take vacations, you just play tour guide for your kids. So my love of cruising so I don’t have to worry about logistics didn’t play out this time, but it was still worth it.

With the missed port and the different dynamics of having three people’s wishes to coordinate, I would say that this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I booked it, but it turned out differently great. We have a lot of wonderful memories together and we’re all dreaming about doing it again!

benmartens September 9, 2024 Uncategorized

Data Logging Changes

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

I’ve been running the TeslaMate service since the first day we got our car. I have data points from our cars complete life at a resolution of multiple data points per minute. There are dozens of sensors recorded in every data point. It’s a mountain of data and the TeslaMate dashboards do a great job of making use of that data. For a data nerd like me, it has been amazing.

One of the key takeaways I get from it is the ability to get an extremely accurate measurement of what a gas car would have cost me because I take my daily miles and the cost of gas at the local gas station every day. I can compare that with my energy cost and voila, I know my savings over the life of the car.

There are also some fun aspects like seeing a map of every road we’ve ever driven, calculating exactly which counties we have visited, knowing our longest stint without stopping for the bathroom, and the list goes on and on.

But for the last week I’ve had the data logger turned off. It’s gotten to the point where background work of keeping it running, making sure the data is backed up, etc just doesn’t feel worth it anymore. Plus, our car has never done a great job of falling into its low power sleep state and I wonder how much of that is related to TeslaMate (even though the devs say it’s highly unlikely to matter.) The Tesla app has slowly improved over the two years of ownership to the point where, other than the data logging, all my scenarios are covered by the app.

Furthermore, I’ve noticed that while I initially learned a lot from the data, it’s not really teaching me anything new now. I’ll still keep track of daily gas prices and even with fewer recorded mileage checkpoints, I’ll still be able to get a very accurate estimate of our total cost savings. Barring a major repair bill (so far our total is still $0), I’m highly confident that this car will end up being cheaper than what we would have got instead. I liked having the data to really prove it to people who don’t believe me, but meh, it’s not my job to change their minds, and if they hate EVs, my data isn’t going to convince them anyway.

As a data hoarder, it’s hard to let this go, but I’ve gotten to the point in life where I feel the need to simplify. Some of that is physically getting rid of stuff and some of that is letting go of commitments and projects. Maybe this is a healthy step in the right direction, or maybe I’ll reget it in the future! I’m going to leave everything hooked up and I’ll turn it on every once in a while so I still have some data points, but for the most part, this will free up some head space.

benmartens August 27, 2024 Electric Vehicles

Coat Rack

We generally use the entry door from the garage but there’s no easy place to hang up coats near that door. After more than 10 years of living in the house, I finally bought a cheap coat rack and screwed it to the wall. It worked but I wanted something a bit nicer.

While the design is almost exactly what you’ll see from many internet shops, the advantage of building it myself is that I can make it fit our space perfectly. For example, when the door opens, it hits the door stop just before it hits the wood. I was also able to put the mounts on the back directly in line with the studs but still have the shelf be centered in the wall.

The project went together very quickly. The white part is poplar with some rattle can white paint and then the top is walnut with David Picciuto’s experimental finish. On the back, I routed an insert for some metal keyhole hangers. The project was quick but it made use of a bunch of previous Christmas and birthday gifts such as dividers, self-centering drill bits, and plug cutters.

We’ve always had a photo hanging on that wall (a sunset from Camp Ticawa) and I can’t decide if it fits with the new coat rack. Perhaps a different frame would look better or maybe I need to move it completely.

I was happy that the rack installed level without any drama. I used a laser to make sure everything was aligned. Now we’ll see how it holds up to a school year full of heavy book bags!

benmartens August 22, 2024 Woodworking

Check Status Without Waking Up

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

It’s been a while since we’ve had one of these updates, but I’m still loving the car and looking for excuses to drive it. We have 48,000 miles on it and we’re still on track to meet my goal of having this car cost the same or less over 100k miles than the car we would have purchased instead.

The topic today is a quick one with a big impact. Previously when you opened the app, it would immediately wake up the car. When the car is awake, it consumes a percent or two of battery just sitting there. Ideally it falls back into a very low power sleep mode quickly but sometimes that can take hours to happen. (Side note: why does it take so long? I wish I could push a button and force it into sleep mode.) TeslaMate let me easily see if the car was asleep without waking it up, but a recent change to the Tesla app now does the same thing. If I open the app while the car is asleep, it will stay asleep until I issue it a command.

benmartens August 20, 2024 Uncategorized

Election Year

Are we going to make it through the next few months? Even a quick peek at the news for the last four years reveals an angry torrent of people screaming at each other or worse.

Watching from the sidelines, there are so many similarities between politics and sports. In politics and sports, both sides cheer for their own team and some people take it way too far. The difference is that at the end of the day, the sports fans usually know it’s just an ephemeral game. The people glued to their team’s news source haven’t figured that out.

Have you ever thought about how there are always about 50% on one side and 50% on the other side? The political teams don’t take permanent, principled positions. Rather, they are two riverbanks following a meandering course of public opinion and fighting to control their half of the river. They would have you believe there are only two opinions, and if you question anything about their side, you must be part of the other team. Can we please get more people who freely admit that not everything from the other team is wrong and that there might even be a third or fourth answer to a particular question?

A country where people are quicker to argue than to listen doesn’t bode well for our future. How would things be different if we only talked about politics when people asked our opinion? Hateful, predatory internet culture has now somehow become what we expect from our political candidates instead of rational, respectful discussions between people who happen to disagree on the best way to solve a problem. Political debates and speeches frequently sound like people trying to fit in the name-calling and zingers that will make their team yell “OOOOO! They got you!”

So if you do tell me about your political viewpoints, expect me to change the topic or just make my way out of the conversation even if I’m voting for your candidate. I’ll do my own reading and research before I vote. If we do have a chance to talk, I’d rather have a conversation about Jesus than about a political candidate. Imagine what our country would look like if all the Christians focused as much time on the Bible as they do on their news source.

benmartens August 15, 2024 Commentary

Changing Guidelines

Our family had a brush with COVID again, but thankfully it was extremely light, and we wouldn’t have even suspected it if we weren’t being overly cautious and testing before visiting with some highly susceptible people. I was surprised to see how much the guidelines had changed since the last time I read them. Due to some unknown combination of herd immunity, vaccines, improved scientific knowledge, and political pressure, there’s no more mandatory 5-day isolation, 5 days of masking, etc. My stance on this has always been to follow what the experts are saying because I don’t have access to as much data and knowledge as they do. But that means I’m aligning myself with guidance that will change. It’s great when guidance changes because more data has become available, but regardless, the guidance still changes.

As I was processing all that, it struck me how many people in this world do the same thing with their religion. They base it on what the leaders of their religion are saying today. Some churches even put out a regular magazine just to keep up with all the changes to the religion. Current rules and guidelines can disagree with what was said before and now you’re just expected to change your life view and align with the new writings.

You know what never changes? God’s Word. My faith is based on what is written there, not on what any human says or writes. That document has been unedited and unchanged for thousands of years. I’m thankful to be a part of a church body that bases all its teachings directly on the Bible. Teachings today are directly in line with what was taught hundreds or thousands of years ago. I don’t have to wonder if the core foundation of my life is going to get shifted by what a human decides when they wake up tomorrow.

Interested in learning more? Or just interested in free burgers and hot dogs? We’re having our annual outdoor worship service and cookout this Sunday at 9:30am in Bellevue.

benmartens August 8, 2024 Commentary