Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Fantasy Football – Week 10

2016_week10_elliottEach week I usually check the Bing NFL predictions to see what they think about the Seahawks game. It has been a long time since the Seahawks were not favored to win but that was the case against the Patriots. It was a great game and it was very refreshing to see the offensive line giving Wilson pretty good protection and a good run game. And the ending was very sweet: the Patriots had first and goal from the 1 and they failed with four chances. It was good payback for the Super Bowl (but obviously not at the same scale.)

Every week there are a few stat corrections and Yahoo takes those and updates all of our scores. They generally don’t matter too much, but last week there was a stat correction in the game between Luke and Logan. It was already incredibly close and the stat correction made it even closer. Luke’s score dropped just a little bit and almost changed the winner of the game. (Seems appropriate during election time, right? Maybe there were some hanging chads.) The net result is that last week’s game between Luke and Logan broke our all-time record for closest win ever.

In our league, Andy held on to his first place position, but it’s a firmly packed mess behind him. There are 5 teams separated by a single game. Nobody has clinched a playoff spot yet and there are only 4 games left in our regular season. It almost always comes down to a tie breaker somewhere in the league so every point counts!

No big change in our power rankings this week except that our top place team, Andy, reappears on the list.

1. Ben
2. Austin
3. Logan
4. Andy (+3)

  This Week Season All-Time
Highest Team Score Ben had 146.87 Logan had 170.69 (Week 5) Tim 200.51 (2015)
Lowest Team Score Jim had 74.78 Tim had 67.79 (Week 8) Andy had 41.29 (2015)
Biggest Blowout Ben beat Dad by 40.00 Logan beat Tim by 79.46 (Week 5) Luke beat Andy by 113.02 (2010)
Closest Win Austin beat Tim by 10.47 Luke beat Logan by 0.11 (Week 9) Was: Jim beat Ben by 0.12 (2012)
Highest Scoring Player Ezekiel Elliott had 39.90 for Ben Ben Roethlisberger had 43.90 for Andy (Week 4) Drew Brees had 60.54 on Tim’s bench (2015)
Longest Active Winning Streak Ben has 4 wins in a row. Was: Tim and Logan had 4 game winning streaks Micah (2011) and Ben (2015) had an 8 game winning streak
Longest Active Losing Streak Logan has a 4 game losing streak Was: Jim and Dad had 4 game losing streaks Kyle had a 14 game losing streak (2011)
benmartens November 16, 2016 Fantasy Sports

The Grand Tour

the-grand-tour-33I don’t watch a lot of British television, but Top Gear is one of my favorite TV shows of all time. If you’ve never seen it before, pick out any of the reboot episodes (2002-2015) which corresponds to series 1 through 22. Some of my favorites are the Top Gear Polar Special, or Season 8 Episode 6 where they go camping in RV trailers. But basically anything that includes James May, Richard Hammond and Jeremy Clarkson is great.

Last year there was a big hubub and the BBC dropped them and replaced them with other hosts starting with series 23. I haven’t seen those new hosts and frankly I don’t really care to. The show was about the 3 people, not the cars or the channel it was on.

Amazon was smart enough to realize that and picked up those same three hosts for a “new” show on Amazon Prime called The Grand Tour. It promises to be everything we loved about Top Gear but without the constraints of the BBC execs. I have very high hopes for this and I won’t have to wait much longer because it comes out on Friday!

benmartens November 15, 2016 Commentary

Bass Pro Swallows Cabela’s

bassprocabelasI’ve only lived in areas that have Cabela’s stores, but Bass Pro Shops has slightly more stores in the US. There are only a couple states in the midwest where they both have stores. Now they’re all the same thing. Bass Pro Shops has bought out Cabela’s. It sounds like they plan to continue the Cabela’s brand. This deal doubles the reach of Bass Pro Shops. It will be quite a while before the deal gets approved but it will be interesting to see how the joint ownership affects the stores in the coming years.

benmartens November 14, 2016 Commentary

Parental Visit

Mom was surfing the internet a few weeks back and found some incredibly cheap plane tickets so she and Dad came out here for Halloween weekend. It was a trip that was too short, but you can’t argue with the price. We spent a lot of the time just hanging out at the house so they could get maximum Elijah-time. It was good to see them again, especially since we aren’t going back to Indiana for Christmas this year.

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benmartens November 11, 2016 Family

Halloween 2016

Elijah chose to be a bumblebee this year. I don’t know where it came from but he made a pretty cute bumblebee (and it was thankfully an easy costume to put together!) He got a lot of use out of his costume. He used it at our church’s Trunk or Treat program, a Microsoft family day, a nursing home program, and of course in the neighborhood on Halloween night. He didn’t care much about the candy he receives but he loved being on both ends of trick-or-treating.

Below are a couple photos of him in his costume. My favorite is one from church: he’s wearing a bee costume, wearing some silly glasses that he “won” playing a game and riding a tricycle.

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benmartens November 10, 2016 Family

Fantasy Football – Week 9

2016_week9_mattryanThe Seahawks played a doozy of a game on Monday night. Jimmy Graham had two one handed touchdown catches and he hurdled someone. The man is incredible and it’s nice to see him getting used. I loved the shock of everyone in the stadium when Russell Wilson ran in for that first touchdown. It felt like a collective, “What?! He can do that again?” Thankfully he’s good enough that her was able to keep the passing game alive despite the horrible offensive line and complete lack of a running game. It was a nail biter to the end. And oh yeah, that mess at the end of the first half was beyond ridiculous. (Also ridiculous: people who spell ridiculous with an “re” as if they are “diculous” again.)

Our league was really low scoring in most of the games. Austin and I scored a lot of points but five other teams didn’t break 100. There were some very close games with Dad and Logan coming out on the bad end of those. Dad gets the deadbeat award for missing two roster spots, but he already apologized for that one. Please keep an eye on those rosters because our league is so tight that it doesn’t take much to change the list of teams that make the playoffs… we only have 5 games left! This week’s big game in our league is Luke vs. Logan (1st vs 3rd.)

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

  This Week Season All-Time
Highest Team Score Ben had 149.19 Logan had 170.69 (Week 5) Tim 200.51 (2015)
Lowest Team Score Dad had 94.06 Tim had 67.79 (Week 8) Andy had 41.29 (2015)
Biggest Blowout Ben beat Austin by 18.31 Logan beat Tim by 79.46 (Week 5) Luke beat Andy by 113.02 (2010)
Closest Win Luke beat Logan by 0.21 Was: Tim beat Dad by 0.45 (Week 4) Jim beat Ben by 0.12 (2012)
Highest Scoring Player Matt Ryan had 35.76 for Ben Ben Roethlisberger had 43.90 for Andy (Week 4) Drew Brees had 60.54 on Tim’s bench (2015)
Longest Active Winning Streak Ben has a 3 game winning streak Tim and Logan had 4 game winning streaks Micah (2011) and Ben (2015) had an 8 game winning streak
Longest Active Losing Streak Logan has a 3 game winning streak Jim and Dad had 4 game losing streaks Kyle had a 14 game losing streak (2011)
benmartens November 9, 2016 Fantasy Sports

Keep Android Unlocked

androidsmartlockPhones contain more and more high value, personal information. If you don’t have some kind of a password lock on your phone, you probably should consider it. Tyla and I both use a password and with our new phones, we also do a thumbprint. That being said, there are some times when you know that you’re the only one who will be touching your phone and the unlocking step is annoying. Thankfully, Android has a feature for that. It’s called “Smart Lock“. You can tell Android to unlock your phone based on location, connected Bluetooth devices, and a couple others. (I’m surprised that WiFi network isn’t on there, but maybe there’s no good way to identify a specific WiFi network since someone else could set one up with the same SSID and MAC address.)

Obviously this feature should be used with care, but it’s nice to not have to unlock my phone sometimes.

benmartens November 8, 2016 Gadgets

Windows 10 And Android SMS

windows-10-cortanaDid you know that Windows 10 has as built-in feature that will allow you to receive SMS messages from your Android phone and reply to them right from your desktop? This feature is fantastic when I’m at work because I don’t have to stop what I’m doing to pull my phone out of my pocket and reply. (I’ll just have to remember to disable it when I’m in projecting on the big screen in meetings!)

To get this going, you need to have Cortana set up on your phone and on your desktop. There are plenty of websites that cover this, but here are a couple tips:

  1. On your desktop, make sure that Cortana is enabled. In the settings, turn on “Send notifications from devices.”
  2. On your Android device, install Cortana. From the settings, go to “Sync notifications”. Enable App notifications sync and make sure she has access to your notifications. Then go to Choose which apps to sync and make sure you enable only the ones that you really care about (I chose my SMS app and Facebook messenger.)

Now when you get a text, you should get a toast notification with the contents of the message and you can reply right from that box. You can also open up Cortana on your computer and type (or say) “Text Joe Blow Will you bring beer to the game tonight?” Note that after I set this up, it took 5 or 10 minutes before it started working but now the messages show up on my desktop within a couple seconds of my phone buzzing.

benmartens November 7, 2016 Gadgets

Android Thoughts

cortana-androidThis isn’t my first post about my new Galaxy S7 and it probably won’t be the last, but I have some more thoughts about the phone and about Android in general:

  • Using Android has made me appreciate how much thought and effort went into Windows Phone. People scoff at it, but it really was a great OS. Windows Phone may be failing in the American market for a lot of reasons, but the OS isn’t one of them. Android isn’t terrible, but it’s not nearly as polished or consistent. The plus side of that is that you can customize everything.
  • I love the processor and graphics power in this phone. I can easily do live 1080p streams from my security cameras. I don’t know why but my old phone would choke on those streams.
  • The cameras are terrific. The regular camera on our old phones was ok but the front-facing one was horrendous. Now we can using the front-facing camera without fear. I can also get RAW images from the cameras which make post-processing in Lightroom very nice.
  • I didn’t even know this existed but we have “HD calling“. When we call each other, the call quality is way better than a standard telephone. I’ve also gotten the HD calling when calling to an iPhone.
  • The microSD storage is a very nice feature. We put in some very fast 64 GB cards but it goes all the way up to 256GB.
  • Android has gobs of nice features like Do Not Disturb hours so that we don’t get woken up when east coasters are texting us. We can either let specific people through at any time or set it so that our phones will ring if you call twice in quick succession. (Note: we have the latter so in an emergency, just call us back right away.)
  • I was disappointed in the reminder functionality baked into Android. It’s there, but it’s sub-par. Thankfully, Microsoft has made Cortana available for Android and she has excellent reminder technology. The UI is great and the reminders sync to my Windows 10 computers too. By the way, if you do use the Google Now reminders, did you know you can access them from your desktop Chrome browser? Just search for “my reminders” and see what pops up.

I’m still finding more cool features so stay tuned!

benmartens November 4, 2016 Gadgets

Cubs Win!

What an incredible game 7! That game had everything. They put on a good show and in the end, the Cubs won the World Series for the first time in 108 years. Watching these Cubs games brings back a flood of great memories. Go Cubs go! Fly the W!

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benmartens November 3, 2016 Sports