Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Our garden is off to a shaky start. I started the plants indoors and I did it WAY too soon. The tomato plants took off but rapidly started crowding each other out. I moved some to solo cups and they are growing and some even have flowers on them. I’m trying to put them outside for a bit each day in hopes of a good transition.

The zucchini plants came up too and i had them in 5 gallon buckets. They grew in really weird shapes along the ground with very little elevation. After a few days moving in and out of the house, I put them in the garden. So far… ehh… I don’t have high hopes that they will succeed.

Lesson learned: forget starter plants. It’s impossible to predict the spring weather around here. I’m about ready to just throw the rest of this stuff outside, let it die, and then buy starter plants when the weather is warm enough. Next year I’m just going to copy our neighbor. She has a great garden!

Say it ain’t so! The Seattle Times reported yesterday that Red Hook is packing up their kegs and leaving Woodinville. Apparently Red Hook is selling less beer than it used to and the Woodinville site has been operating at 30% capacity. They are adding on to a brewery down in Portland so there’s no need to keep this site open anymore.

I’m personally sad to see them go. While their beer is very popular (which means somewhat generic), I really enjoy having them close by. They were a great dinner location and their tour was a great activity with out-of-town guests. The article says that they are opening a brew pub over in Seattle so I feel like this Woodinville location will probably be closing.

The site will be sold to another buyer, and with a hundreds of up-and-coming breweries in the area, I don’t expect it will be difficult to sell. It’s a big facility for those smaller guys but maybe a couple of them will band together or something along those lines.

Goodbye Red Hook! I still love you but I’ll probably never make it across the lake to your new location.

I work on the Azure team. It’s one of the hottest areas in the whole company because it’s growing at an unbelievable rate. That leads to a lot of really interesting problems that keep life interesting. The chart below is a little old but it gives you a good idea at the rate of acceleration.

The future looks bright. There’s enormous room for growth even with heavy competition between Azure and Amazon Web Services. It appears that it’s raining money and the major cloud computing competitors are just trying to build enough buckets to catch it all.

I’m a sleepwalker. I don’t remember when it started, but I haven’t grown out of it yet. Over the years, it has created quite a few interesting stories. Most of the time it just results in my pillow and/or sheets ending in a weird place or me walking around the room mumbling, but there were a couple times that it was quite a bit more involved:

The first one happened freshman year of college. I was at dinner with a bunch of guys from the floor and one of them said, “Hey Ben, thanks for yelling at Sarah last night.” I don’t remember if her name was really Sarah, but we’ll call her that for this story. It was the girlfriend of a guy on the floor and she was a VERY loud talker. My roommate started laughing when I looked confused and said, “Huh?” “You don’t remember?” My roommate filled in the missing details. Apparently the escapade had started with me getting out of bed in the middle of the night. That’s no small feat. We had loft beds. The only way to get up was to do a pull up on the cross bar and hoist yourself up. Getting down was the reverse: grab the cross bar and swing down to the ground. So I swung down in my sleep, unlocked the door, stuck my head out in the hall way and yelled, “BE QUIET! IT’S QUIET HOURS!” Then I walked back in the room, pulled myself up to bed and went back to sleep (except I was sleeping the whole time so I don’t know what you call it.)

The second one that sticks out was also in college. We were on a ski trip in Michigan. It was a big group but I only knew one or two of the guys there. We were all sleeping on the floor of somebody’s house. Apparently in the middle of the night, I got up, took my blanket over to the window, covered it up and yelled about blocking the aliens from coming in the window. You can imagine the ribbing I took from doing that in a room full of a dozen guys. The aliens through the window bit was a popular one for me. I did it in a hotel room with my family one time too.

I still haven’t figured out what triggers it. Being in unfamiliar locations can do it sometimes but not always. Lately it’s usually just talking in my sleep or thinking there is a spider in the bed, but the other morning I did wake up to find my pillow in the bathtub.

It’s kind of fun because I never know what I’ll find when I wake up.