Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Fantasy Football

If you're not playing fantasy football, you should be. No excuses. For those people who are in my league, I've set up a nifty little RSS feed that I think you'll enjoy. I wrote a program that logs into Yahoo every once in a while and pulls the latest standings, transactions, and scoreboard for our league and spits it out into an RSS feed. The URL is https://www.studio711.com/fantasy/700level.xml so feel free to add that to your favorite RSS aggregator. And if you're not a fan of RSS, you can go straight to a summary page for the league: https://www.studio711.com/fantasy/read.aspx.

Most likely I'll pay the $10 for the live scoring so that this feed will be updated more often (instead of every night) and you can all mooch off of me.

[UPDATE 9/27] By the way, my team name is Hot Route. You can see I'm having a stellar season.

Poker Table Project

I finished up the poker table project last night. I probably would have finished it on Saturday night except that we lost power. We had a incredibly intense storm come out of nowhere. It knocked out trees, dumped a bunch of hail, and generally left the entire neighborhood a mess. The weird thing is that five minutes later it was gone. Unfortunately we lost power for a couple hours and it was right in the middle of my poker project. But regardless, the poker table is now done and ready for some action. I'm tentatively thinking of a tourney at my house on Sept 30 or Oct 1. Let me know if you're interested and if you have a preference.

The project didn't come out as well as I had hoped, but it's not too bad for three days of work. There are quite a few things I'd do differently if I was doing it again, but I documented all those on the project page for those of you who are interested. You'll find a link to it in the gray nav bar on the left or by clicking here.

Tent

There's rumor going around about a camping trip for the weekend of October 8 so I figured I should buy a tent. I did some shopping around and found one I liked at LLBean but it wasn't cheap. I decided to head over to SportsAuthority to see what they had and boy was I surprised. They had a Coleman 12'x7' tent for $50. This was normally a $100 tent (I have seen it listed online for as much as $200.) I decided to go ahead and buy it. When I got up to the register, I found out they were having a 30% off sale on most of their tents so the final price was $35. Not too shabby considering I had been looking at a $160 tent from LLBean.

On Saturday, I set it up at home to make sure all the parts were there before I trecked off into the wild. One of the poles was broken so yesterday I took it back to the store. I asked them if I could just exchange the pole because I didn't want to try to cram that whole tent back into the box it came in. Apparently the guy decided it was too much work to undo the bag that the poles came in so he just gave me the whole bag. They didn't take my name. They didn't look at my receipt. They just gave me a complete new set of poles when I showed them one broken pole.

I don't know how these people stay in business, but if you ever need any sporting equipment, their prices are hard to beat. And if you just stand there long enough, they'll probably just start handing you free stuff to take from the store.

New Project

Yesterday I set foot in a foreign world. The natives call it “Jo-Ann Fabrics.” Being the only male in the store, I proceeded to immediately ask for assistance. “What can I do for you today?” “I'm building a poker table.” That's right fair reader, I have embarked on a new project. I will be constructing my very own poker table. It won't be anything fancy at first but I'm leaving room for improvement later. The basics are a suede surface, a padded rail, and folding table legs for easy storage. I don't know how many times this thing will actually get used, but I found some extra wood in the garage so this seemed like a good way to use it up. Plus it was an excuse to go to Home Depot and buy some toys. I picked up a power sander and an electric staple gun. I'll be taking pictures of the whole thing and writing up a project guide just like I have done for my other projects. I don't see this project taking more than a couple weeks to finish, but then again who knows what I'll run into. Theoretically this will all culminate in poker night at my house so every can take revenge on me for my win a couple weeks ago.

Back to Work

All in all I have to say it was a pretty good three day weekend. I actually stretched it into a three and a half day weekend by leaving at noon on Friday. I'm still happy about pulling out a win in that poker tourney on Saturday night. Hopefully they'll invite me back for another one. My lack of projects from a couple weeks ago has completely gone away. I now have plenty of stuff to keep me busy and good ideas for future projects. Right now I'm mainly focused on getting my site completely operational on GoDaddy and getting Jay moved over as well. That's getting pretty close to completion. I'm also reading again. This weekend I made it about 70% of the way through the second Harry Potter book. We had such perfect weather this weekend that I spent some time reading outside on the back deck and put about 250 miles on my motorcycle. It's good to be busy with fun stuff again.

And finally I'll leave you with my thought of the day: "Mondays aren't so bad when they're Tuesdays."

Saturday Morning

Whatever happened to the days when I didn't wake up until 1 or 2pm on Saturday? It's 8am and I'm wide awake. On the positive side, it really is nice to get up early on the weekend because it makes your weekend feel so much longer.

Today I'm heading out on another ride with the Lockheed motorcycle gang. We're a fearsome bunch. I'm not sure where we're going but it will be somewhere up towards New Hope and the Delaware water gap. For anyone who has a motorcycle and is looking for a good place to ride, I stumbled across this site last week: http://www.motorcycleroads.us/

Hope you all enjoy your Labor Day Weekend!

Arcade Machine For Sale

I've decided to put the arcade machine up for sale. I'd prefer to sell it to someone locally, but if you really want it and you're not around here we could work out some sort of shipping arrangement. Please spread the word to anyone you think might be interested. It's still in great condition and functions perfectly. In fact it was just being used by some people tonight. I'm only selling it because I don't use it much anymore and I could use the extra cash. I'm asking $575 OBO. If you take a look on eBay you'll find that most arcade machines start around $1000 and go upwards quickly from there.

Rainy Day

It's a pretty gloomy day here in Jersey, but that's ok since I haven't had much time to look out the window. I've been too busy answering my phone and email. Apparently there was a patch applied to a bunch of servers and it simultaneously destroyed every one of the applications I support. Yada yada yada…

But on to more serious issues. I find myself bored at home. This is the first time in quite a while that I haven't had a project. Going back to the spring of 2004, here are the projects I can work on (the big ones that I remember anyway): the arcade machine, moving to the new house, the home theater, [break for a couple months for skiing], car iPod setup, motorcycle license, and the Ticawa shirts. I've been thinking for the past couple weeks and I just can't come up with a new project that really grabs me. I have a couple programming ideas but nothing that has really grabbed my attention yet. Poker has been a good diversion but I only play that for an hour or so every night. (I started with $50 and I have about $62. Not bad.) What I really want is some snow. I want to ski! Last year the first day we skied was December 18. Assuming a similar start date that means I have 4 months to wait.

Anyone have an idea for me?

Sauron’s Helmet

Yesterday, Aubry, his friend and I rode up to New Hope. It was a nice little ride to the motorcycle mecca. We stopped for lunch and some Rita's and walked in a few shops up there. One of the shops we stopped in was a medieval shop with armor and clothing from that time period. They had a case full of Lord of the Rings props. One that caught my eye was Sauron's helmet. Can you imagine buying this thing and wearing it down the road as your motorcycle helmet? It's probably not a good way to pick up women, but I don't think anyone would try to headbutt you.

http://www.hotmovieprops.com/product_info.php?cPath=2_84_163&products_id=556