Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Truck Update

boywaitingatwindowIt’s time for another update on my truck order process. The dealer contacted this week and said that I have a VIN! This means that my order is starting to move forward. General estimates from this point are 10-14 weeks which puts me into August so hopefully we’ll have a shiny new truck in the driveway for my birthday. He said that in a few weeks he should have a better estimate, but honestly I’m just happy to know that it’s starting. I was worried that they were going to cancel the orders for these heavy duty F150s like they did last year.

This whole process kind of reminds me of my childhood on days when we had relatives coming over. I’d pull a chair up to the window and stare down our long driveway trying to catch a glimpse of the car. I’m not sure I can spare 14 weeks to sit at the window though…

benmartens May 20, 2016 Commentary

No Complaining Debrief

peacefulTwo weeks ago I said I was going to try not to complain for the next 14 days. That period is up and it was an interesting experience. I definitely failed more than once, but I told many of the people around me that I was doing it and they were happy to call me out when I complained.

I have a couple takeaways from the experience:

  • It’s hard to define complaining. I think you can tell facts with zero emotion and still be complaining. But those same words said at a different time of day might not be complaining. It’s tricky to pin down exactly what the bad behavior is, but just being reflective on your behavior is a net win. And if it causes you to keep your mouth shut because you aren’t sure if it’s complainig, that’s probably not a bad thing either.
  • Once I had a better handle on complaining, I became accutely aware of people complaining around me. It’s easy to get sucked into that mentality. Bad behavior spreads more easily than good behavior.

Now that it’s over, I’m free to complain! Or not. Obviously the point of this was to break a habit and try to get on a better track. I’ll try to make this one permanent and pick up another one going forward.

benmartens May 19, 2016 Commentary

Security Camera

I’ve written a few posts in the past about our security camera setup. It continues to work very well, but as the years have gone on, I’ve been itching to upgrade our 480p cameras to the new 1080p models. When Tyla asked to put a camera in Elijah’s room, I took that as a request for me to upgrade to a new camera.

I moved a camera from our front door into his room and bought a new 1080p Foscam model for the front door. I think I paid about $70/camera when I bought the old ones and this new one was under $100. Prices have really come down for the higher end models. The difference is incredible. Not only is the picture more crisp but the field of view is much wider and perfectly fits the installation spot on the front door. Below you can see a comparison between the old and the new. Click on the pictures to see them in full size and really compare the difference.

The only problem I have now is wanting to get more of them to replace the rest of the old cameras we have around!

oldfrontdoor
newfrontdoor

benmartens May 18, 2016 Home Improvement

Blackout Shades

lightblockElijah’s room gets a lot of sun. It faces the south and has a bay window that extends out past the wall of the house. This is a nice feature except that his room gets extra hot. It can easily be 5 degrees warmer than our room right across the hall. We have the pull-down, solid shades but a lot of light still gets in around the edges.

To try and help with this and also to help make it darker at bedtime, I came up with a quick project to block more light. I purchased painters drop cloths and a grommet kit from Home Depot. I cut the cloth to be about 3″ wider and taller than each window and then inserted some grommets around each piece. I put nails into the wall around the window where each grommet was and voila, we have an easy way to quickly add additional covers over the windows. You can’t see it from the outside because the normal shade hides it and you can’t see it from the inside when the curtains are pulled.

It was a very cheap solution and it’s easy to store. The only problem is that my material isn’t as solid as I thought it would be. Light still shines through. We’ll see how it helps with the heat but I might try this again with some actual light blocking fabric.

benmartens May 17, 2016 Home Improvement

Windermere Cup

For Mother’s Day weekend, Tyla suggested that we go to watch the Windermere Cup which is the finale of the UW crew season. She had previously read and enjoyed The Boys in the Boat which tells the story of a UW team that competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Ever since then, she has been itching to see a race and some of the history on campus.

We have never been to a race there and I’ve only been on campus a few times but it all worked out pretty smoothly. We parked on campus just north of the stadium, walked to the east end of the Montlake Cut and then followed the water all the way down to the end of the race course. There is a race every few minutes so it’s not too hard to keep a toddler entertained.

The race goes under the Montlake Bridge. At one point we were standing almost directly under the enormous bridge and Elijah thought it was really neat that the boats got to go under the bridge. Unprompted, he started clapping and yelling as loud as he could: “YAY! YOU DID IT! YOU MADE IT UNDER THE BRIDGE!”

The weather was beautiful and we watched almost all the races (with a slight detour to a bouncy house.) After the race, there is a boat parade so we stayed to watch the marching band float by on three boats and then see the fire boat go by with all it’s pumps turned on.

The area was busy but not nearly as crowded as I was expecting. It was a nice even to watch and I can see us doing it again at some point.

windermerecup1 windermerecup2 windermerecup3

benmartens May 16, 2016 Family

Toy Shelf

Many months ago, Tyla shared an idea to have some shelves in the family room to hold Elijah’s toys. It would not only be a place to store things, but also a place to rotate different toys on display to encourage Elijah to play on his own. I kept finding excuses to do other things but finally I decided to give it a go.

I started with a drawing in Sketchup to get an idea of the spacing and also make sure that Tyla was on board with the design. The whole structure ended up being 7 feet long. I’ve learned that big projects are a bit tough to deal with in the garage, but this was an easy one, right?

sketchup shelves

I ran into quite a few problems when building these. I did the initial glueup wrong and had to rip the nails out before the glue dried to start over. The edge banding didn’t stick nicely in all the areas. And I miscalculated and made the drawers 1/2″ too wide. But that’s part of the fun of woodworking. Nothing goes perfectly, at least in my workshop, and I’m presented with lots of opportunities to find interesting solutions. One of my favorite YouTube woodworkers is Steve Ramsey and when he has a major screwup, he makes the fix and says that it’s now “EXTRA FANCY!” These shelves are definitely extra fancy, but you know what? They work. Elijah is just going to beat them up anyway. I’m not building an heirloom. I’m building a toy shelf that we’ll throw in a bonfire after he’s older and we want something else there instead.

The bottom two drawers are only half as deep as the opening. Ever since we moved in, we’ve had a cardboard box covering up a bunch of ugly wires and a battery backup for the TV. I designed a void behind the drawers where I can hide all that stuff and there is also a space for a bunch of cables to run the length of the shelves back to the plugs. The top of the unit still fits snugly against the wall so all that is finally hidden.

Given the size of the project, I wanted to try spraying them. I even borrowed Don’s paint sprayer, but when I finally got around to spraying, the air was full of seeds and pollen. I ended up just taking the time to brush and roll it all, sanding between coats.

Now it’s on to the next project… it will definitely be something smaller!

toyshelf

 

benmartens May 13, 2016 Maker, Woodworking

Seahawks Draft Picks

The 2016 NFL draft is over and the Seahawks have made their picks. Which of these names will hit it big?

Round Pick # Overall Name Position College
1 31 31 Germain Ifedi Offensive Tackle Texas A&M
2 18 49 Jarran Reed Defensive Tackle Alabama
3 27 90 C. J. Prosise Running Back Notre Dame
3 32 94 Nick Vannett Tight End Ohio State
3 35 97 Rees Odhiambo Guard Boise State
5 8 147 Quinton Jefferson Defensive Tackle Maryland
5 34 171 Alex Collins Running Back Arkansas
6 40 215 Joey Hunt Center TCU
7 22 243 Kenny Lawler Wide Receiver California
7 26 247 Zac Brooks Running Back Clemson

Iseahawks_im_in don’t know much about any of these players, but the Seahawks have a history of some pretty excellent performances in the draft. Here are some examples:

2015 Round 3: Tyler Lockett
2014 Round 2: Justin Britt
2014 Round 4: Kevin Norwood
2014 Round 4: Kevin Pierre-Louis
2013 Round 5: Luke Wilson
2012 Round 1: Bruce Irvin
2012 Round 2: Bobby Wagner
2012 Round 3: Russell Wilson
2012 Round 6: Jeremy Lane
2012 Round 7: J.R. Sweezy
2011 Round 5: Richard Sherman
2010 Round 1: Russell Okung
2010 Round 1: Earl Thomas
2010 Round 2: Golden Tate
2010 Round 5: Kam Chancellor

2010 and 2012 were pretty incredible draft years. The Seahawks generally seem to play it smart by avoiding the early first round picks. They regularly trade away their first round picks for multiple later picks. If you’ve read Scorecasting, you know that not only is it not as great as it seems to get one of the first half dozen picks of the draft, you should AVOID having one of those picks. You are forced to pay this random person a ton of money and more often than not, they don’t live up to the hype.

It sounds like the Seahawks are focusing a lot on their offensive line which is a no-brainer. We’ll see what next season brings!

benmartens May 12, 2016 Sports

Safeway Monopoly

safewaymonopolyFor the last couple months, I’ve been playing the Monopoly game at our local grocery store. When you buy items, you get game pieces and if you collect all the pieces in a specific set then you get the associated prize. I know it’s ridiculous to play but it was something to do during the times that I was watching Elijah but he was content to play by himself.

The most I ever won was a free DVD rental from Red Box (not even a BluRay) and a free jar of pickles. Yay. Totally worth my time.

I’d love to know exactly how much they actually pay out. They say they are giving away a hundred of million dollars, but there are so many sneaky ways that they don’t actually end up paying.

  • Many of the game pieces include $0.25 coupons for specific products. I imagine that most people, like me, immediately toss those.
  • It’s a lot of work to keep track of everything. You have to stay on top of it to have any hope of winning so that weeds out a huge number of people. I bet a lot of gamepieces get lost or just thrown away when they are taken home.
  • If you do keep up with it, you pretty quickly figure out that there are some game pieces that are common and one from every set that is impossible to get.
  • If you assume that a decent percentage of people who get the tickets don’t actually end up following through with analyzing them all, then it follows that the rare pieces that you need to win are ending up in the trash somewhere.
  • The game is spread across the country and across many grocery chains.

I knew all this going in, but I still played.

When it finally ended, I looked up the odds. I should have done it from the beginning. Here are some of the interesting stats:

  • Each set does indeed have a rare piece, but there is also a semi-rare piece. The odds of getting the semi-rare piece are 1 in 5000. So if you get to the point where you only need one more, you’re doing pretty good.
  • Free Redbox rentals are the easiest to get. The odds of finding the rare piece for that prize are 1 in 1620.
  • If you take out the little instant winner prizes (like Redbox) and the prizes that just gives you two more game tickets, then your odds of finding ANY rare game pieces are 1 in 4157.
  • Lots of the game tickets include a code that you can enter online for another chance to win. All I ever won there was more of the free ticket coupons. If you take out those, the odds of winning anything online are 1 in 80,598.

It’s relatively easy to collect all the non-rare pieces. The whole game really boils down to just finding those rare pieces. I’m guessing that I probably acquired around 400-500 game pieces over the course of the game. So even with all that work, my odds of winning anything were tiny. Put all those numbers together and I had about a 10% chance of winning anything worth more than $10. Bump it up to a prize worth more than $100 and my odds fell to less than a percent. That’s not a very good return on my time investment.

benmartens May 11, 2016 Commentary

100 Years

stpaulsodus100My parents attend St. Paul Lutheran Church in Sodus, MI. That church just celebrated it’s 100th anniversary! It’s an impressive milestone for any organization. She said that 293 people showed up for the service! They had extra chairs all over the place and people were in overflow rooms too. The image in this post is one that she snapped from the balcony during the service. The area paper also has a writeup that includes older pictures of the church.

It got me thinking about my current church. That church started in 1959 so if I’m still around for the 100th anniversary, I’ll be 79 years old!

benmartens May 10, 2016 Commentary

Cashing Gift Cards

gift-cardI recently won a $15 gift card to a place that I’d probably never go. Sure I could have given it away, but I keep hearing about these places that will buy gift cards from you so I decided to try that out.

Coinstar is an easy one and they are in the Safeway right down the street. That seems to be the fastest way to go, but they take a big cut for the convenience factor. You can hope to get about 50% of the remaining value of the card. There are some slower options online that will give up a little higher percentage. I ended up getting about 65% from cardcash.com. There are multiple ways to get them the card (either type in the info or send it to them) and lots of ways to get paid (check in the mail, PayPal, another gift card, etc). Obviously your best bet is to use the card but if you are stuck with a card that you won’t use, this is better than nothing.

Cardcash also sells gift cards at a reduced rate. You might save 5-15% off the value of the card. The cards I looked at were all pretty big ($100-200) but if you know you have a big purchase coming up, it might be an easy way to save some money.

benmartens May 9, 2016 Links