Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Economic Stimulus Package

I’m happy to announce that yesterday I enacted my own economic stimulus package with the purchase of a brand new motorcycle. It’s a 2009 Kawasaki Concours 14 ABS. The bike is classified as a “supersport touring” motorcycle. It’s based on Kawasaki’s top of the line ZX-14 sport bike but it has a few refinements to make it suitable for very long rides. The seating position is more comfortable, the windshield is bigger, it has a shaft drive instead of a chain, and there are bags on it. It has a 1352cc engine which puts out roughly 140hp. For those of you keeping track, that’s about 85% of the power that my Subaru has and it was less than a quarter of what my car does. Yikes! Needless to say, this thing is crazy fast. My Mustang ran the quarter mile in 13.9 seconds. This bike will do it in about 10.5 seconds. It provides all that speed and power while pampering the rider with smoothness, gadgets galore, and comfort. I compare it to a Bentley. It’s a ridiculous amount of power and luxury that no one really needs, but we all want it.

I got a few accessories with it. I ordered a larger windscreen since I’m a bit too tall for this one to work effectively (it raises and lowers electronically!) I also ordered a rear trunk for even more storage. I’m hoping that Tyla and I can take some weekend trips and have enough room to be comfortable. Each of the three bags will fit a full helmet with room to spare. This is a major upgrade from my last bike.

Thanks to Greg at Waldron Kawasaki for making this deal happen. They are fantastic people, and they have been doing maintenance on my Vulcan since I arrived in Washington. I chatted with a few of the dealers in the area, but they ended up matching my best offer and I was very happy to give them my business. Their service department is absolutely wonderful. It’s great to have a mechanic I can trust.

I picked it up yesterday after dark so I don’t have any good photos, but I have added some photos from my garage. The Vulcan was part of the deal so that is long gone. I have fond memories, but it’s hard to miss it much when I have this to ride instead. The first few trips will be part of the break in period but I look forward to really winding this up and letting it run. This will provide a lot of fun in the months and years to come! Are you ready to ride Tyla?

benmartens February 19, 2009 Motorcycle

One Million Vertical Feet

Since the 2005-2006 ski season, I have been tracking how many vertical feet I have skied with a Suunto watch. I skied a handful of times before that season, but we’ll just stick to that year since it’s when I really started skiing regularly.

Since that time, I have skied over one million vertical feet! I crossed the milestone last Tuesday during racing at Alpental. To put that into perspective, that’s like going 190 miles up in the air and skiing down. That’s just a little bit lower than the space station! Given the average ski slope (as calculated by my GPS data), that means I’ve traveled over 1500 miles on skis. That’s longer than the distance from Seattle to Minneapolis!

Some other stats about the first million vertical:

  • It took 843 ski runs over 59 days to accomplish this.
  • The biggest single day ever was 62,000 on March 8 of last year for the American Cancer Society fundraiser.
  • At just about every resort I visited, the average ski run was between 900 and 1200 feet high.
  • I visited 18 different ski areas.

Here’s to the next million!

PS. That lovely photo is one of the rejects from our photo shoot last winter. Bernard asked us to sign waivers so he could sell the photos and I’m betting that’s one that got picked. Haha I hope it gets used in a magazine sometime.

benmartens February 18, 2009 Skiing

Mint Brownies

If you’ve ever been to a pot luck meal at church, you’re probably very familiar with mint brownies, at least that’s what I associate them with. These are the brownies with a green mint frosting covered in a harder chocolate frosting.

We put our own twist on the recipe and it turned out fantastically.

Mint Brownies

  • Boxed brownies
  • 2 eggs (use 2 instead of 3 to make them a bit more dense)

Frosting

  • 2 cups powdered sugar
  • 2 tablespoons milk
  • 1/4 teaspoon peppermint extract
  • 6 tablespoons butter or margarine, softened

Chocolate Glaze

  • 3 squares unsweetened chocolate
  • 1 square semisweet chocolate
  • 4 tablespoons butter
  • 2 teaspoons dark corn syrup
  1. Bake brownies according to directions on box. Allow to cool.
  2. Prepare mint butter-cream frosting by mixing at low speed: powdered sugar, milk, peppermint extract and 6 Tbs. butter until smooth. Stir in enough green food coloring to tint a pretty green. Evenly spread frosting over cooled brownies. Refrigerate while preparing Chocolate Glaze.
  3. Chocolate Glaze: In a heavy 2-quart saucepan over low heat, heat glaze ingredients until chocolate melts and mixture is smooth, stirring frequently. Remove saucepan from heat; stir frequently until glaze cools slightly. Carefully spread glaze over frosting to completely cover top. Refrigerate until glaze is set, about 1 hour.

The original recipe had instructions for making the brownies from scratch, but we used boxed brownies and it worked just fine. We also skipped the aesthetics of the green food coloring. I also jumped the gun on the chocolate glaze and didn’t let it cool enough. It melted into the peppermint frosting and gave a swirl effect as I spread it around.

Short answer: delicious. We give this one a 3/3.

benmartens February 17, 2009 Food

Nacho Chicken and Rice Wraps

Over the last half year, Tyla and I have been trying all kinds of new recipes. Some have bombed. Some are on permanent rotation. It seemed like good blog content, so I’m introducing a new post category: Recipes. So without further adieu, I present Nacho Chicken & Rice Wraps. (On a side note, wouldn’t it be great if “adieu” contained an “o” too?” The shortest word that contains all five vowels is “aeirious.” Now you know. Oops, I think this qualifies as more adieu. Oh wait, it’s “further ado”, not “further adieu.” Adieu means goodbye which makes no sense, but ado means fuss, trouble or excitement. Back to the food!)

Nacho Chicken & Rice Wraps

  • 1 can (10 3/4 ounces) Campbell’s Condensed Cheddar Cheese Soup
  • 1 cup chunky salsa or picante sauce
  • 1/2 cup water
  • 3/4 cup uncooked regular long-grain white rice
  • 1 pound skinless, boneless chicken breasts, cut into cubes
  • 1 small can of mushrooms
  • 5 flour tortillas (10-inch)
  1. Stir the soup, salsa, water, rice and chicken in a 2 quart slow cooker.
  2. Cover and cook on LOW for 7-8 hours (or high for 4-5 hours) or until the chicken is cooked through.

From: Campbell’s Slow Cooker Recipes Cookbook (modified by us)

The original recipe is twice this, but it said it made 10 servings. We cut it in half and got 4 servings out of it. I find that my servings are always bigger than the cookbooks suggest. I’m a big boy. We also added the mushrooms because I had them already and Tyla loves them.

I had low expectations for this, but it ended up being quite good and I look forward to making it again. When we make recipes from the cookbook, we label them with two pluses for fantastic, one for good, and a minus symbol for things we wouldn’t make again. For blog purposes, we’ll use a scale of 1 to 3 where 3 is the best. This one gets 2/3. Tyla said she’d add sour cream next time and maybe use a little less salsa. I put green tabasco on mine and loved it the way it was.

Oh, and that picture doesn’t do this justice. We’ve already discovered that we don’t know how to photograph food. Get used to it. Also, the observant among you may notice that my slow cooker is a different color in various photos. I bought one that has three bowls (2, 4 and 6 quarts.) Each one is a different color so it will vary depending on how much food we’re making.

benmartens February 13, 2009 Food

More Big Sky

There were a few more things about Big Sky that I want to share with you. First of all, I mentioned some great lines that we took down from Lone Peak. This photo shows a couple of the runs down through the Gullies and hints at one down the side of the mountain. We had many more runs down, but I don’t have a good picture to show them.

 

I also made a panoramic photo from the top of the peak. It’s not quite 360 degrees, but it’s pretty close. We could see all the way down to the Grand Tetons! Click on the image for the full file (8MB) or view the nicer HDView version.

And finally, I took a bit of video on the snowmobile tour through Yellowstone. Riding one handed is a bit difficult so please pardon the shaky video. The first portion of the video is just a normal part of the ride. The last 20 seconds or so show us passing a herd of bison. While this looks very close, we actually came much closer to another herd, but I wasn’t able to get video because I was too busy trying not to die.

benmartens February 5, 2009 Skiing, Travel, Video

Ski Geek

Somehow, every activity I participate in is turned into a geek project. Skiing is no different. This season, I have been carrying around the Garmin GPS that I purchased earlier in the year. It keeps a signal inside my coat and dutifully tracks my position every few seconds.

I can load this into my National Geographic topographical map program and get an interesting view, but I wanted more. I want to know my top speed, how much time I spent in the lift lines, how fast the lift was moving, which lifts I rode the most, etc.

To that end, I’ve started writing a program to analyze the GPS data. The raw statistics are fairly simple and I was able to get a display churned out pretty quickly. Lately I’ve been stuck on trying to automatically figure out when I was on a lift. On the surface, it seems easy: you’re on a lift when you’re going up. That’s not always true. Runs have rises in them and lifts have dips in them. So then I tried to say that any time I’m heading in the same direction for X miles and Y vertical feet then I’m on a lift. Even that has problems. What happens when you get off a lift and keep skiing straight down the backside of the hill? What happens when you get a couple errant GPS points that aren’t in line with the lift? There is enough drift in the data to make it very complicated. If I can’t get the automatic solution figure out, I’m going to have the user tell me where the lifts are the first time and then I’ll save that data. I want to move on to getting either a 2D or 3D map working next. After that I’ll work out a good way to display all the statistics about the day and each individual run.

If you’re interested in seeing the code and/or helping out, it’s all available on codeplex.

The picture below shows the track from my last ski day at Crystal Mt in the National Geographic software. My software will end up looking something like this but with more data and information on the screen.

benmartens January 28, 2009 Gadgets, Geek, Projects, Skiing

Big Sky, MT

Today marks the start of my big winter adventure. For the past few months, JayA, AndyC, MikeDu and I have been planning a ski vacation in Big Sky, Montana. I’m driving to Spokane tonight and then I’ll meet them at the Bozeman airport on Wednesday around noon. Thursday and Friday we’ll ski Big Sky and then Saturday we’re going to take a snowmobile trip into Yellowstone to see Old Faithful. We have reserved a condo right by the lifts so this should be an incredible trip.

None of us have been to Big Sky before, but it has a great reputation for challenging terrain and very short lift lines. They also have a tram up to the top of Lone Peak so I’ll get to add that to my list of lift technologies that I’ve experienced. If you want to know more about the ski area, check out this article from Powder magazine. (It’s the same one I linked to a couple months ago.)

benmartens January 27, 2009 Skiing, Travel

VHS to WMV

We never had a camcorder when I was growing up, but we have a couple dozen VHS tapes in my parents’ basement from various childhood events. I’ve always worried about losing those memories since VHS isn’t a very stable format. I was personally responsible for taping over at least a couple of them in the past.

The last time I was home, we sorted through them all and decided which ones we wanted to save. Mom shipped them out to me and I started the process of transferring them to the computer. As with my photo scanning project, I’d recommend that you pay someone to do this rather than doing it yourself, but if you only have a few to do, this isn’t a bad solution.

Here is the basic workflow:

  1. Break the write tabs on the VHS tape to make sure I don’t screw it up. Insert it into the VCR.
  2. The video out on the VCR was connected to the inputs on my camcorder. The camcorder was then connected to the PC via Firewire. The camcorder is just digitizing the signal for me. A capture card could have done the same job if I had one.
  3. On the PC, I ran Windows Media Encoder. I pressed record on the PC and then play on the VCR.
  4. Once the tape was finished, I’d stop recording on the PC. This left me with a fairly large WMV file.
  5. Don’t stop there! The files aren’t much safer now than when they were on VHS tapes. To protect them, I copied them onto my Windows Home Server where a combination of software RAID and offsite backup will guard them.

My original plan was to make a big montage of the best moments from all the tapes, but it has been over a month and I haven’t even started that yet. There are some hilarious moments from my childhood, and one of these days I’ll get around to editing them all together.

benmartens January 26, 2009 Projects

City League Racing

I joined the Microsoft ski racing team again, and Tuesday night was our first race of the season. If you look at the results, you’ll notice that I’m the only one of our 12 members who wanted to ski. I guess we’ll start off the season at the bottom of the points which is good. We wouldn’t want anyone to get their hopes up.

The mountains have been dry for a couple weeks so the snow was hardpacked. Thankfully the groomers had taken care of some of the runs so it was actually a lot of fun. The racing was fast and the course held up well. I lost both my races but I was fairly happy with my times. I placed in about the 43rd percentile which is up 10 points from my average last year. Since you get moved up or down weekly depending on how fast you ran, you’re basically guaranteed to win 50% of your races. My goal is to move up in the overall time rankings.

There is an old news segment on YouTube which shows what the racing is like. It’s over 20 years old so the gear and skiing styles are a bit goofy.

benmartens January 22, 2009 Skiing

Crystal Clear Skiing

We have been in a dry spell recently. Strange weather has given us 50 degree temps at the top of the mountain and temps below 40 in Seattle (6000 feet lower.) This has resulted in rock hard conditions on the mountains after they freeze overnight. Sounds like a terrible time to ski, right?

Wrong. On Saturday, I headed to Crystal Mt. with ClemensK. I was a bit nervous to be there with someone who grew up skiing in Austria, but thankfully I don’t think I slowed him down too much.

We started off on Forrest Queen for some fresh groomers. The hard snow challenged us to make good use of our edges, and we had a blast bombing down the runs. Next we spent some time in Green Valley. After the sun had a few hours to beat down on the south facing slopes under Rainier Express, we headed over there to explore some stuff off the groomers. We found nice soft bumps and had fun playing over there. After a quick stop in the lodge, we ventured up the High Campbell lift. Ski patrol was at the bottom questioning our skills before we headed up the experts only lift. They were right to do so because it was really nasty up there. We picked our way down one run and decided to finish out the day under Rainier Express. Unfortunately I never got to show him the Northway Lift. There are not many south facing slopes over there and it must have been like a hockey rink. We left around 3:30 as the shadows started covering the mountain and freezing up our favorite runs.

All in all it was a great day. The skies were an amazing shade of blue and you could see FOREVER. We spotted Baker to the north, Adams to the South, the Olympics an Puget Sound to the west, and we could even see over the Cascades into eastern Washington! Here is a map to show you just how far we were seeing. The red dot is Crystal Mountain.

I was able to snap a 180 degree panoramic photo from the top of High Campbell which gives you a little idea of what we were looking at or better yet, view the panorama with HD View. Click on the image below for the full size view. If you look far off along the horizon, you will see two peaks. The one closest to Rainier is Mt. St. Helens and the other is Mt. Adams. You can see more photos in the photo gallery.

All week I heard people whining about how terrible the conditions were. I’d like to thank each and every one of them for staying home and keeping the lines short for us. We racked up just over 29,000 feet which ranks as my second biggest ski day behind only my ski marathon last spring. It was a great workout and much better day than either of us were expecting.

[UPDATE] I like this panorama so much that I made it the header photo on the site.

benmartens January 19, 2009 Panorama, Skiing