Studio711.com – Ben Martens

No Complaining

nocomplainingStarting yesterday and lasting for two weeks, I’m not going to complain. I’ve noticed that I do a lot of complaining and it coincided with hearing a couple different people talking about doing this challenge. It’s kind of like Whole 30 but I can still eat tater tots and it’s 14 days instead of 30 days.

“They” say it takes two weeks to form a new habit so hopefully I’ll form a new habit of changing my gut reaction to various situations. It’s good to see opportunities for improvement and think of ways that you can change your environment for the better, but whining and complaining has no positive impact and just slows down the improvement process.

This has already been very difficult! If you notice me complaining, especially in the next two weeks, feel free to kick me in the shin.

benmartens May 6, 2016 Commentary

Kite

kiteflyingWe had a classic sitcom moment in the park this week. A couple months ago, Elijah was given a cheap kite while he was out shopping with Tyla. The weather, the wind, our schedules, and our moods all finally aligned and we headed down to the school football field to try to fly it.

There was about a 1″ square picture showing how the strings were supposed to be tied on and 2/3 of that picture was covered by a UPC sticker. How hard can it be right? I got the strings attached and tried to launch it. For some reason it kept flipping around so the string was coming out the “back” of the kite and wrapping around. It obviously didn’t fly very well and I realized that duh, I tied the strings on wrong.

By then I had already knotted the incredibly tiny string so much that it was impossible to undo so I had to cut it. Thankfully Tyla suggested that I use some of the string that was wound around the handle to get the kite strung up and that worked great.

Fifteen to twenty minutes later, I finally had the kite in the air. Elijah tried it for about 30 seconds and then took his shoes off and went to play in the “sand box” (the long jump pit.)

 

benmartens May 5, 2016 Family

Family Photos

Tyla is always on the lookout for good gift ideas, especially for her parents. This year she came up with the idea to get a family photo session so we’d all have some nice photos. Our photographer was Kelly from TwoSwallows Studio and she did a great job! We met her down at Tolt MacDonald Park in Carnation on a Saturday morning and took a bunch of pictures. Just a week later she had them processed and in our hands. Thanks Kelly! And thanks to Tyla for doing all the research and planning!

familyphotos_kelly1

familyphotos_kelly2

familyphotos_kelly3

familyphotos_kelly4

familyphotos_kelly5

familyphotos_kelly6

benmartens May 4, 2016 Family

Northwest Trek

There is a wildlife park about 1.5 hours south of us called Northwest Trek. We headed there last Saturday to celebrate Megan’s 30th birthday. None of us had ever been there before, but I left pretty impressed. Your ticket includes a spot on a 1 hour tram ride through their ~500 acre preserve. The ride includes lots of sightings of animals like elk, deer, big horned sheep, mountain goats, and bison. Some of them were right beside the road and you had to stick your head out the window just to see them because they were so close! Elijah LOVED the trip and spent most of it with his head hanging out the window. Later in the day I asked him what he liked best about the tram and he said it was watching the wheels go around when he stuck his head out the window.

After the tram ride we walked a bit through the other area of the park which has predators like bears, cougars, etc. We ended our visit at the brand new giant playground.

On the way back we stopped at the Ram for some delicious burgers and beer. Aside from spending 1.5 hours in the car with a screaming toddler on the way down, it was a very nice trip. Happy birthday Megan!

nwtrek2 nwtrek3 nwtrek4 nwtrek5 nwtrek6nwtrek1

benmartens May 3, 2016 Family, Travel

Beer Stats

craftbeerDad, Luke and I all use the Untappd app pretty regularly. Think of it like Facebook for beer. You “checkin” when you have a beer and you give it a rating. You can see what your friends are drinking, get recommendations, etc. I love it because it’s an easy way to keep track of all the different beers that I’ve tried and how much I like each one. It’s a great encouragement to keep trying new things.

I recently tied into their API and wrote a quick app that lets me download the data locally for analysis. There are lots of questions that I want to answer, but here are a couple fun charts to get started.

The first is a chart showing how many checkins we’ve each had by IBUs (International Bitterness Unit). It doesn’t show how much we LIKE them, but it does show which ones we generally try.I’d love to expand this to show how this has changed over time.

ibus

Here is one showing the cumulative number of checkins we’ve had over time. This chart is a little sloppy because each user series should have it’s own color, but there are only three of us so it’s not too hard to follow. If you look at the end of the chart, Luke is the top line, I’m the middle and Dad is the bottom. You might think that after a while, you run out of new beers, but if that’s true, we haven’t hit that point yet. We’re all on a pretty steady upward trajectory.

uniquebeers
I took a look at which beers have the highest combined score from the three of us. The beers with wider distribution are more likely to win because to get to the top it helps if we’ve all tried it. Since I’m out on the west cost and they are in the midwest, most of the time our beers don’t overlap unless they are bigger breweries. Here are the top six in order.

Deschutes Brewery Red Chair NWPA
Bell’s Brewery Two Hearted Ale
New Belgium Fat Tire
Great Lakes Elliot Ness
Great Lakes Burning River Pale Ale
Deschutes Brewery Mirror Pond Pale Ale

Looking at the bottom of that list is a little silly because there are only 40 beers that all three of us have tried. I expanded it out to beers that at least two of us have had. There are 129 in that list and here are the bottom three. I bet you won’t be surprised.

Coors Light
Miller High Life
Bud Light

I’m looking forward to playing around a lot more with this data. If you want access too, just let me know.

 

benmartens May 2, 2016 Geek

Coding At Home

sourcecodeshirtWhen people ask me how to get a job where I work, I tell them to be curious and experiment at home. I’ve learned so many valuable things from tinkering with code at home and it has made a big, positive impact in my career.

In the past it has been a lot of website stuff, but since my move to WordPress, that has pretty much disappeared. Lately it has been stuff that a computer science geek would call “ETL” (Extract Transform Load) programs. I enjoy taking my data out of one system and storing it in a common place that I control. For example, my Ecobee thermostat logs a ton of data every day but it lives in the EcoBee server. I use their programming interface to download the data and store it in my own database. I do the same thing with my irrigation controller, fantasy football and a few other gadgets and services. There’s not a lot you can do with the initial data right at the beginning, but as time goes on, you build up a pretty large data set and you can start to see some interesting trends. As I move into more of a data science position it’s great to have a big dataset of data that’s interesting to me personally.

Learning is a lot more fun when you’re doing it to achieve a goal that interests you. So why not find interesting things to learn that can benefit you in your job?

benmartens April 29, 2016 Geek

Drawer Slides

drawerslidesIn some past woodworking projects, I avoided using real drawer slides because they add so much cost to the project. Amazon to the rescue! There’s a line of slides from Gliderite Hardware that is very affordable. Depending on the size of your drawer and the quantity that you order, you can get a pair of drawer slides for $3-7. They are full extension slides which mean that you can pull the drawer all the way out of the cabinet and you can also upgrade to soft close drawers to make sure tiny fingers don’t get pinched.

benmartens April 28, 2016 Woodworking

Cord Cutting

streamingtvA couple of you have written me recently to say that you have already dropped cable TV or that you’re thinking about it. It’s something I think about regularly. For now I’m satisfied with our current plan. We have a very simple TV package (no ESPN) with a very nice Internet package (120/10Mbps.) If we dropped the TV part, we’d pay almost the same amount since we’d have un-bundled Internet. I know it’s a scam to keep their TV subscription numbers high but I’ll take it. But if you’ve decided that dropping TV might save you some money, here are some things to help you plan the transition:

  1. Educate yourself! There’s a great (short) guide to cord cutting from Tom Merritt available on Amazon. If you’re a Prime subscriber, it’s currently free. Otherwise it’s a whopping $0.99. In fact, that’s probably all you need. Go read that book and ignore the rest of this post.
  2. If you like podcasts, check out http://www.cordkillers.com. Tom Merritt and Brian Brushwood host a weekly show about how to watch the TV you want, whenever you want, on whatever device you want. This is great no matter how you consume your content.
  3. How do you like to watch TV? Do you have to keep up with the latest episodes as soon as they come out? If so, make a list of all the shows that fall into this bucket and start adding up $2/episode which is about what it will cost to buy them. I’ve found that my viewing habits have changed dramatically and I’m not keeping up with current TV very much. I greatly prefer to wait until the season (or even the series) is over, wait for it to show up on Netflix or Amazon and then watch it all at once. Shows are a lot more enjoyable for me this way.
  4. Do you need any live events? Sports is probably the most common example. If yes, then you’ll need to figure out how to watch them. Maybe it means getting a basic cable package for the months when your sport is on. Or maybe your sport offers a package to stream games online. DirectTV has an online-only package like this for the NFL.
  5. If you still want to have the experience of fliipping on random live TV, two great options are SlingTV and Playstation Vue. Think of these services as old school cable except it’s delivered over the Internet. The caveats are that you’ll need to make sure they work with your devices and sometimes DVR-style features are limited to certain shows/channels. I expect to see a LOT more players in this market space in the next year or two.
  6. Pure streaming is a great solution, but if you’re willing to mess with some hardware and if you can get a good broadcast TV signal at your house, then you can pick up an antenna and some kind of little DVR box like a Tivo Roamio. Check out antennaweb.org for help picking an antenna and pointing it in the right direction.

If all that looks like too much work, here is my short recommendation:

  • If you already have Amazon Prime, start with their video service. You might also want to add Netflix. Want ESPN? Get SlingTV. And if there are specific TV shows that still aren’t covered, then you’ll either need to buy the seasons individually or maybe Hulu will meet your needs. Remember that cutting the cord isn’t necessarily cheaper. The nice thing is that you can have more control over your spending. For example, you can turn these services on and off every month depending on what you’re watching.
  • On the device front, I recommend a Roku. They have multiple versions for under $100 and they support almost every video service on the planet (Playstation Vue is the only notable exception I’m aware of.) If you already have an Xbox One or a Playstation 4, those make pretty good streaming devices but they don’t support as many apps as Roku. The Amazon Fire TV is also a great device.

Cutting your cable cord gets easier every month so even if you investigate this now and decide it’s not for you, check back again periodically to see how the world has changed.

benmartens April 27, 2016 Gadgets

Caspar Babypants Framed Photo

Last fall we all went to see Caspar Babypants at the Neptune Theater in Seattle. Elijah has been to a lot of kiddie concerts but this was his first “real” concert where there was a ticket purchase and a theater, etc.

At the concert, we bought some artwork and had it signed by Chris Ballew (Caspar Babypants.) The artwork was done by his wife, Kate Endle.

It was pretty cool to get an autograph but I stupidly got it on the plastic covering for the photo. It’s kind of hard to display that. So the next time Tyla and Elijah went to see Caspar, they took Elijah’s concert ticket from the Neptune and asked him to sign that.

This simple project took me FOREVER but I finally got it framed and hung on the wall. I want to have a smaller frame for the ticket hanging separately from the artwork, but given how long this simple task took, I figured I should just get part way there.

Thanks to Chris and Kate for making great music and artwork!

casparphoto

benmartens April 26, 2016 Family, Music

Amazon Prime Video Monthly

amazonprimeAmazon has always offered Prime as a one year plan. It’s $99 and you get free two day shipping along with access to a selection of free Kindle books, streaming videos, music, unlimited photo storage and a bunch of other smaller benefits. It’s a fantastic deal and they’ve had me hooked for many years. They will still continue to offer this but they’re adding two new plans:

  1. Amazon Prime Video is now available for $8.99/month. This is obviously in direct competition with Netflix. It’s a good move because it allows them to expand globally even when the rest of the more complicated offerings like 2 day shipping are not available. I don’t think the Amazon Prime catalog is as good as the Netflix one, but since I would pay for Prime just to have the shipping option, the video stuff is just gravy on top and there’s plenty there to keep me occupied.
  2. The full Amazon Prime is available for $10.99/month. If you aren’t sure that the service is right for you or maybe you only want to use it in December for ordering gifts, then you have the option of paying monthly.

If you keep either one for a full year, you’re going to end up paying more than if you had prepaid for a year, but it’s nice that these options exist to expand their customer base.

benmartens April 25, 2016 Commentary