Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Azure Growth

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.

benmartens May 2, 2017 Commentary

Best Of YouTube

This first video is actually two videos. Sneaky. The one embedded below is a series of physics riddles. Watch it first and think about your answers. Once you feel good about your answers, what this video to see the actual answers. I only got two right (and one was little more than a lucky guess.)

Mark Rober is the world’s most awesome uncle and he’s done it again with an awesome Hot Wheels video. Elijah loves his Hot Wheels track and I want to show this to him, but I don’t think he’ll understand that it’s not totally real. He’ll spend the next month asking me for enough track to fill up our whole house.

And finally, I’ve never thought about how ravioli noodles are made, but now that I’ve seen it done, it seems like it could be a fun project. I’ll add this to the list of things to build if I ever get a lathe.

benmartens May 1, 2017 Links, Video

Picture Frame Jig

Picture frames are four pieces of wood stuck together. How hard can that be?

Very.

Getting those corners to match up perfectly, have all four corners be exactly 90 degrees and have those joints be strong is not easy to achieve without some help. My next project involves making a picture frame so I decided to take some time and make a couple jigs.

The first step is to make the main picture frame jig. Thankfully the interwebz are full of ideas, and I chose David Picciuto’s jig. He has a nice video describing how to make it, but my quick summary is: “It works!” I did a quick test with some scrap wood and the glue up went perfectly.

Next I’ll work on making his spline jig to reinforce the corners.

benmartens April 28, 2017 Woodworking

Sleepwalking Stories

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.

benmartens April 27, 2017 Commentary

500 Unique Beers

I’m two months behind Luke, but I just had my 500th different kind of beer. Oddly enough, it was a bottled beer from Red Hook. Living just a couple miles from the brewery, I regularly have bottles of their beers and I’ve been through most of the stuff they have on tap too. But I was at Tim’s house and had their American Pale Ale for the first time. It was launched last summer.

I still enjoy trying new beers, but I think the next 500 will take longer, not because of a shortage of new beers, but because I want to enjoy some of the best ones that I’ve found along the way to 500.

And if you like trying new beers too, feel free to send me a friend request on untappd.

benmartens April 26, 2017 Food

Elijah’s Favorite Shows

I wrote about Elijah’s favorite songs back in December and that list is still pretty accurate. I thought it might also be interesting to record the shows that he likes to watch the most:

  • Winnie the Pooh
  • Fox and the Hound 2
  • Cars – He’ll specifically tell you “Cars 1, not Cars 2”. I agree.
  • Thomas the Tank Engine
  • Curious George
  • Bob the Builder
  • Clifford the Big Red Dog

The top two are the only ones he’s asked to watch for the last month or so, but the others have had their time in the spotlight of obsession too.

It’s pretty cute how much he loves Winnie the Pooh right now. One of my favorite games is when he pretends that he’s Roo and I’m a Heffalump. He leads me around the house and explains things too me. Usually when I ask him to tell me about his day, he says, “I didn’t do anything. I just laid on the floor. All day.” But when he’s Roo, he goes into great detail. I love it!

benmartens April 25, 2017 Family

Dad and Mom Visit

My parents came to stay with us over Easter. They are so good with Elijah, and Tyla and I were happy to have a break. In fact, we even went out for a date night while they were here.

We didn’t have anything huge planned while they were here but our days were nicely filled. The biggest trip was probably a leisurely ferry ride for lunch. I put Dad to work and we knocked a bunch of things off my todo list both at our house and the church property.

We’ve had a record shattering wet winter and spring, but somehow the weather was pretty nice while they were here.

We all look forward to their visits and it’s hard to say goodbye, but we’re looking forward to seeing them again this summer.

benmartens April 24, 2017 Family

Easter Videos

This year I forgot to do my traditional Easter blog post, so instead I’ll share the videos that I recorded during the Easter service. In order, the videos are: preservice music, the sermon, a choir song and postservice music. I also included the first verse of I Know That My Redeemer Lives at the end of the sermon video.

benmartens April 21, 2017 Video

Classic Mac Games

One of my earliest experiences with a computer was the Macintosh Classic (or Classic II?) that Dad would bring home from work. I spent a lot of hours on that machine and one of our favorite games was Airborne. Gameplay was pretty simple. You had two different times of guns to shoot from the lower left of the screen. Planes and helicopters flew in from the right and sometimes they would drop parachuting infantry. Once there were enough troops on the ground, you would lose.

It turns out that archive.org not only has some of the old Mac games, but there’s a built-in emulator so you can easily play them from your browser! Airborne is on the list and you can play it right now.

Now if only I could find a few other favorites from that computer. I remember an air traffic control game, a “3D” maze game with monsters, and an elevator/frogger game. I wasn’t able to find any of those on the archive.org list but maybe they’ll show up eventually.

 

benmartens April 20, 2017 Geek

Piano Book Shelves

We’ve lived in this house for 6.5 years. For that entire time, our piano books have sat on the floor in the box that they were packed in (or scattered messily around the box.)

I decided this would be a good wood working project to tackle so I flipped through a bunch of plans and settled on the tower bookshelves from Wood Magazine, partially because I previously purchased the digital back catalog of the magazine so the plans were “free.” The plans recommend oak or maple but I thought I’d go for cherry.

The project began with a trip to Crosscut Hardwoods to buy the most expensive piece of plywood that I’ve ever purchased (though it can get much more expensive than this!) I got a 3/4″ piece of cherry plywood that was nice on both sides, a 1/4″ piece that was nice on only one side, and a 1″ thick board.

I was pretty nervous about cutting into the plywood, but I was also excited to use my new table saw with a big sheet of plywood. My old saw was too wimpy and too unsafe to do big pieces. I cut about 25″ off one end and then ran the rest through the saw. The saw ran like a champ, and combined with the assembly/outfeed table, it never felt unsafe.

After cutting some strips of hardwood and using it as edge banding on the plywood, the main joinery is done using biscuits. I’ve done a little bit of work with the biscuit joiner before but never this much. It really is simple and makes quick work of some of these bigger glue ups.

Next up was the base and the top trim pieces. Those were a little tricky as the plans recommended biscuit joints on the mitered angles to hold the joints together. That worked but I think I’d probably choose a different method next time because it took forever to get my cheapo biscuit joiner dialed in for that fancy cut. In the photo below you see a scrap piece filling in the empty back so that the band clamp can squeeze evenly all the way around.

The final construction step was to build the drawer, install the drawer slides, and then cut/attach the drawer front.

For a finish, I chose to keep it simple and went with a wipe on polyurethane. It does give a bit of a plasticy finish but that build-up is also extra protection for the books that will be sliding in and out fairly regularly. After the coats of finish were done, I put on the 1/4″ back and reinstalled the drawer.

Once we figured out where to place it in the room, I took the time to attach the top to a stud with a strap. It’s very easy to tip over and with a three year old running around, it wouldn’t take long for it to topple over.

This project was a nice way to dabble in some nicer furniture. This was about the biggest thing I can comfortably handle in my shop so I won’t be tackling a dining table anytime soon, but I’m happy I did this one.

It’s pretty easy to see the different colors of cherry woods, but I’m hopeful that as time goes on, the cherry will all darken up to the same color. But even as it is now, I’m very happy with it and admit to walking into that room just to check out the bookshelves. It’s a nice step up from the cardboard box mess on the floor.

 

benmartens April 19, 2017 Woodworking