Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Fantasy Football – Week 14

The Jaguars are good? Well this is certainly weird. It was also weird to see our QB throw three interceptions in one game. Honestly it’s amazing he doesn’t throw more with all the crazy scrambling throws that he makes. The most disappointing part of the game was the last 45 seconds when the Seahawks, led by Michael Bennett, showed their lack of anything resembling sportsmanship. Can we please trade away Bennett? I’m done with him. I’m also feeling like it’s time for Blair Walsh to go. He’s 7 of his last 13 attempts. Is this one of those things that’s just stuck in his head? The kicks only get more intense from here on out. Can he handle it?

In our league, Luke beat out Austin in a battle for top seed in the playoffs. Logan also won so he ends up in the second seed as Austin falls to third. Logan lost Carson Wentz to an injury though. With no QB on his bench, who will he pick up for the playoffs? And the final spot in the playoffs goes to… me! The implausible scenario that I mentioned two weeks ago played out. Dad lost both games and I won both games with just enough points to get the tiebreaker. I’m predicting coal in my stocking.

So we’ll kick off the playoffs with Luke vs me and Logan vs Austin. The consolation bracket will be Dad vs Jim and Andy vs Tim.

At the end of the season, I’m going to be sending around an email asking who wants to be in the league next year. I got the impression at the start of this season that a few of you weren’t too keen on playing but kind of went with it since Yahoo auto-added you. I really appreciate everyone sticking with it, but I also don’t want you to feel trapped in this forever. It would be a blast to have everyone back, but if you want out, it’s fine. I’d just like to have the offseason to figure out if we need to find some new players, etc. So there’s nothing to do at this point, but please think about it over the next couple weeks.

Power rankings for week 15:

1. Ben (+4)
2. Luke (+2)
3. Austin (-2)
4. Logan (-2)

On to the weekly awards…

This Week This Season All-Time
Highest Team Score Luke had 152.79 Luke had 161.89 (Week 3) Tim 200.51 (2015)
Lowest Team Score Dad had 74.69 Jim had 60.95 (Week 10) Andy had 41.29 (2015)
Biggest Blowout Luke beat Austin by 63.51 Luke beat Jim by 74.22 (Week 3) Luke beat Andy by 113.02 (2010)
Closest Win Tim beat Andy by 13.01 Andy beat Jim by 2.96 (Week 6) Jim beat Ben by 0.12 (2012)
Highest Scoring Player Caron Wentz had 35.24 for Logan Tom Brady had 45.72 for Luke. (Week 3) Drew Brees had 60.54 on Tim’s bench (2015)
Longest Active Winning Streak Ben and Tim have 2 game winning streaks. Austin has a 6 game winning streak (Week 13) Micah (2011) and Ben (2015) had an 8 game winning streak
Longest Active Losing Streak Dad has a 3 game losing streak. Tim had a 5 game losing streak. (Week 5) Kyle had a 14 game losing streak (2011)
benmartens December 13, 2017 Fantasy Sports

Look Ma, No Server!

Serverless computing is all the rage in cloud computing. When cloud computing first began, people thought about how to move their local servers to servers in the cloud. They would end up with a Windows or Linux machine hosted by Azure, etc. That was much better than operating your own data center, but technology is progressing and even managing your own machine in the cloud isn’t really necessary now. There are so many services available that simply take your code and run it for you. Don’t worry about where it’s running or what machine it’s running on. This lets you focus almost 100% of your time on the core business logic in your application and let someone else handle Windows Updates, disaster recovery, backups, etc.

I like to play around with all this stuff and this website is one way for me to do it. Quite a few years ago, I moved this web application to Azure Websites, but I still had a virtual machine running MySQL on it. Now that Azure offers MySQL, I don’t have to run my own VM anymore.

The only other thing I had running on that VM was a little timer job that records the number of customers of my power company who don’t have power. I like to run that from Azure so that I can track power outages even when they affect me. Running a scheduled task on a dedicated VM is extreme overkill so I migrated the code to an Azure Function. I literally pasted C# code into the Azure portal, told it to run the code every 5 minutes and voila! It costs fractions of a penny every time it runs and I don’t have to even think about what machine it’s actually running on.

There’s so much of this great cloud computing geek stuff to get excited about these days.

benmartens December 12, 2017 Geek, Site News

Mt. Baker Chair

There is a ski lift chair being used as a bench on our back patio, and, in our guest bathroom, there’s a photo of that chair when it was part of Chair #1 at Mt. Baker. It’s a fun piece of history and nostalgia. I wrote about the process of buying the old chair and then receiving a photo of the chair back in 2008.

Fast forward to 2017 and I got contacted on my Instagram woodworking account by an artist who had seen the photo in that post and did a pen and ink drawing of it. She was asking if I could point her to the original photographer so she could give her credit. The photo came from the wife of another guy at work who bought one of the chair. Yada yada yada, we’ve lost touch over the years after I changed groups and he left the company, but I found him on Facebook and sent him a message. We were able to connect all the dots and put the artist in touch with the photographer. Yay for the internet!

You can see the drawing on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/p/Bb-i6iVnt2a/ and now you can also think about this story every time you use the guest bathroom at my house. You’re welcome.

benmartens December 11, 2017 Site News, Skiing

2017 Music

I’ve written before about how I send all of my listening activity to Last.fm. You can see my public profile there and see what music I like. I just got an email from Spotify suggesting that I try out the 2017 Wrapped website which generates some stats based on your Spotify account history. You know how much I love stats so of course I participated. I have multiple Spotify accounts so I ran the stats based on the account that I use at work (so it doesn’t include all of Elijah’s music.) Below is the final summary that was generated from the site. It’s a pretty accurate list of some of my favorite songs and artists.

benmartens December 7, 2017 Music

Fantasy Football – Week 13

I fully admit that I didn’t think the Seahawks would stand a chance against the red hot Eagles. With their decimated defense and lack of an offensive line, I expected a blowout. Boy was I pleasantly surprised? Well I was surprised when it was over… for the entire game I kept trying to figure out how they were going to end up losing. But this was a really solid game. The Seahawks are great in December so who knows. Maybe they’ll hold on to a wild card spot?

Our league was a surprise as well with three of the top four teams losing. Tim beat Luke in a brother v. brother battle and Jim toppled Dad. Jim’s win was actually key for the playoff picture. Austin, Luke and Logan are already locked in, but Dad needed to win to guarantee a playoff spot. Now it gets interesting as Dad faces off against Logan. Here’s how the fourth spot can play out:

  • Dad wins. He’s into the playoffs.
  • Dad loses and I win. If I score 8 more points than Dad, I win the tiebreaker and I’m in the playoffs. Otherwise Dad is in.
    • Technically the same is true if Dad loses and Andy wins by he’d need ~80 more points than Dad and that seems unlikely.

Whether you’re in the playoffs already or have been eliminated, please keep those rosters full so that we can have a fair fight. It’s down to the wire!

Power rankings for week 14:

1. Austin
2. Logan (+1)
3. Dad (+1)
4. Luke (-2)

On to the weekly awards…

This Week This Season All-Time
Highest Team Score Austin had 142.97 Luke had 161.89 (Week 3) Tim 200.51 (2015)
Lowest Team Score Luke had 86.67 Jim had 60.95 (Week 10) Andy had 41.29 (2015)
Biggest Blowout Austin beat Logan by 43.55 Luke beat Jim by 74.22 (Week 3) Luke beat Andy by 113.02 (2010)
Closest Win Jim beat Dad by 10.02 Andy beat Jim by 2.96 (Week 6) Jim beat Ben by 0.12 (2012)
Highest Scoring Player Alex Smith had 45.64 for Tim’s bench. Tom Brady had 45.72 for Luke. (Week 3) Drew Brees had 60.54 on Tim’s bench (2015)
Longest Active Winning Streak Austin has a 6 game winning streak Logan had a 5 game winning streak (Week 5) Micah (2011) and Ben (2015) had an 8 game winning streak
Longest Active Losing Streak Dad has a 2 game losing streak. Tim had a 5 game losing streak. (Week 5) Kyle had a 14 game losing streak (2011)
benmartens December 6, 2017 Fantasy Sports

Wooden Semi Lowboy and Dump Trailers

The last two Christmases, I’ve built Elijah toys from the Wood Magazine construction series. 2015 was the front end loader and 2016 was the dump truck. He plays with them a lot so I decided to go for it again. A few months ago, I showed him all the toys and asked which ones he liked. Of course his favorite was probably the biggest build: a tractor with a dump trailer and a lowboy trailer. I supposed I could have just done a single trailer, but eh, why not go for it all?

If you’ve been following my woodworking Instagram account (@martenswoodworks), then you know this project has taken me quite a while. It kicked off on November 1 and I finished it almost exactly one month later. The instructions were pretty good although there are two fairly big flaws with the plans:

  1. There are multiple locations where they tell you to cut pieces to size and then glue them up. It’s impossible to glue two pieces that are perfectly aligned. Instead, leave them cut a little bigger and then cut the whole block to size after you get it glued up.
  2. There are little fender pieces that get glued on the front and back of the truck. They are supposed to have head and tail lights drilled into them but they tell you to do it after you get it on the truck. That’s a recipe for frustration. Instead, do the drilling before you glue them on.

Luckily for me, those flaws (at least in my book) are part of the entire series so I knew to keep my eye open for them going into the project. The whole thing went pretty smoothly without any major disasters. I felt like it went a little faster than previous projects because this time I got a whole bunch of boards milled to all the various thicknesses that I needed before I started building.

The dump trailer added a new twist since it incorporated PVC. It was a little tricky getting the wood glued to the PVC without too much glue squeeze out, but hopefully it worked well and will stay together.

These toys feel more fragile than the previous ones I’ve built, but I guess it anything breaks, it’s not like I can’t repair it. I figure I’ll do a pass on all of the toys after he gets older and is ready to put them on a shelf or in a box (in which case I’d probably put them on MY shelf.)

Obviously, please don’t say anything about this to Elijah. He’ll be unwrapping these for Christmas, but I’m so excited to have them done that I had to show you!

benmartens December 4, 2017 Woodworking

2017 Christmas Ornament

We pick up one or two ornaments every year as a family and this year, we decided to get one from our Montana trip. Not surprisingly, we didn’t find a lot of Montana ornaments as we drove across the state so I decided to make one myself. This ornament is cherry plywood cut on a laser cutter. It’s a map of Washington, Idaho and Montana with our route highlighted and “Fort Peck 2017” written across the bottom.

You can see our past ornaments in these posts: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2008-2010

benmartens December 1, 2017 Family

Childhood Christmas Gifts

As we think about what to get Elijah for Christmas, it’s interesting to think back to my own childhood and remember various gifts that I received. I thought it might be fun to list out a few of the more memorable ones:

  • Around 1992, we got a family Christmas gift which was a CD-ROM drive for the computer. *mind blown* I spent hours being amazed at how much data could fit on a single disc and watching every tiny little 160×120 resolution video that was on the encyclopedia disc that came along with it. I’m pretty sure it was The New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia.
  • I had an enormous Lego set on my Christmas list. In retrospect, it was probably twice as expensive as our normal Christmas gifts. But low and behold, a wrapped package ended up under the tree that was about the size I expected the Lego set would be, and when I shook it, it sounded a LOT let Legos. I proceeded to comment endlessly about how I knew what that present was and I was very excited to open it. On Christmas morning I ripped open the paper and… not Legos. It ended up being Domino Rally (here’s a great 80s ad for it) which was actually pretty fun, but wow, did I feel horrible for incessantly guessing the wrong present. That gift changed my life. I will never ever again guess what is in a present before I open it. That declaration was quickly put to the test when there was a BB gun under the tree for me the next year, but I stuck to my guns and refused to guess what it was. Pun intended.
  • When I was 4, Rachel and I each got Big Wheels. We got a lot of use out of those things but that gift really sticks out because we were permitted to ride through the house! This was the first Christmas in our new house and we rode all the way down the hallway, through the living room and into the dining room. It was quite a thrill mostly because we were clearly doing an outdoor activity inside.

At this point in writing the post, I looked back through our old Christmas photos (thanks for doing all that scanning Mom!) and remembered a bunch of other great gifts like laser tag, various Lego sets, a safe, a skateboard and various models. Hopefully Elijah ends up with lots of happy Christmas memories too.

benmartens November 30, 2017 Family

Fantasy Football – Week 12

Thankfully the Seahawks won in San Francisco. I was pretty nervous going into the game and even after the first quarter, but by the end it was a comfortable win. I didn’t realize this, but the 49ers secondary is even more beat up than the Seahawks. If you haven’t seen the Bobby Wagner interception, it’s worth a look. The video is in this article and the interception happens around the 1:15 mark. The 49ers receiver caught the ball and then Bobby Wagner took possession of it on the way to the ground.

In our league, Luke, Logan and Austin all won easily and Luke secured a place in the playoffs. I assume that Logan and Austin are pretty much in barring a crazy scenario. The fourth place is the one that is up for grabs. Dad has it now but Andy has a good shot at it. I would have to win out and have Dad lose twice for me to make it in. We’ll know how it shakes out in two weeks.

Power rankings for week 13:

1. Austin (+1)
2. Luke (+2)
3. Logan
4. Dad (-3)

On to the weekly awards…

This Week This Season All-Time
Highest Team Score Austin had 149.89 Luke had 161.89 (Week 3) Tim 200.51 (2015)
Lowest Team Score Tim had 90.47 Jim had 60.95 (Week 10) Andy had 41.29 (2015)
Biggest Blowout Austin beat Dad by 50.77 Luke beat Jim by 74.22 (Week 3) Luke beat Andy by 113.02 (2010)
Closest Win Andy beat Jim by 5.19 Andy beat Jim by 2.96 (Week 6) Jim beat Ben by 0.12 (2012)
Highest Scoring Player Julio Jones had 44.80 for Andy Tom Brady had 45.72 for Luke. (Week 3) Drew Brees had 60.54 on Tim’s bench (2015)
Longest Active Winning Streak Luke has a 3 game winning streak Logan had a 5 game winning streak (Week 5) Micah (2011) and Ben (2015) had an 8 game winning streak
Longest Active Losing Streak Jim has a 4 game losing streak Tim had a 5 game losing streak. (Week 5) Kyle had a 14 game losing streak (2011)
benmartens November 29, 2017 Fantasy Sports

Washington Ski Areas Average Opening Dates

We had an early start to the ski season around here this year. Snoqualmie is the lowest elevation and is still waiting for enough snow, but everyone else is open. Years ago I made a chart of the opening dates on the Seattle PI blog. I’ve updated it this year with the help from some fellow skiers at work.

 dfdWhistlerBaker  StevensSummitCrystal
200617-Nov13-Nov17-Nov2-Dec15-Nov
200717-Nov29-Nov18-Dec15-Dec1-Dec
200826-Nov14-Dec18-Dec11-Dec27-Nov
200914-Nov12-Nov19-Nov14-Nov11-Nov
201019-Nov20-Nov1-Dec25-Nov19-Nov
201118-Nov18-Nov19-Nov19-Nov18-Nov
201217-Nov21-Nov20-Nov8-Dec21-Nov
201316-Nov21-Nov16-Nov10-Jan20-Nov
201422-Nov20-Dec20-Dec28-Dec21-Nov
201519-Nov19-Nov4-Dec11-Dec21-Nov
201623-Nov25-Nov29-Nov6-Dec25-Nov
201717-Nov16-Nov16-Nov2-Dec15-Nov
Average18-Nov24-Nov28-Nov8-Dec20-Nov
benmartens November 24, 2017 Skiing