Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Tent

cabelastentIt has been 11 years since I bought a tent. That last $35 tent served me well over the years but it was always flimsy, it wasn’t great in the rain, and the last time we used it, Oskar ran through the door destroying the zipper.

With Elijah getting to an age where we are considering camping, I decided it was time to stock up on some new gear. Instead of going for another cheapo tent, I decided to buy one that will probably last us for the rest of our lives. Tim and Chelsea bought the 6-person Cabela’s Alaskan Guide Geodesic Tent a few years ago. They’ve had that tent out in a lot of wild weather and it’s still in fantastic condition. Those experiences coupled with a $100-off sale on tents at Cabelas caused me to pull the trigger before even figuring out if Elijah actually likes camping. In addition to the $100-off sale, I was able to ship it to the store which is in another county that has a lower tax rate so I saved quite a bit of money.

Elijah and I picked up the tent last weekend and set it up in the front room. We didn’t set it up fully, but it was enough to make sure that the tent was in good shape and to get him excited about the idea of camping. We’re going to book a quick camping weekend with just the three of us somewhere close by to see how it goes, but hopefully we’ll be getting out a little more often in the coming summers.

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benmartens May 27, 2016 Outdoors

John Oliver On Scientific Studies

John Oliver has an HBO news show called Last Week Tonight. We don’t have HBO, but a lot of the clips are on YouTube and I find it an entertaining way to get a perspective on the news that I might not get otherwise. The only catch is that since this is on HBO, it’s sometimes R-rated content .This video is no exception, but the content is so exceptional that i have to content on it. In this 20 minute clip, Oliver gives example after example of click-bait “science” stories that are completely wrong. The news media is so eager to get views and clicks that they will deliberately twist (or lazily ignore) the details to produce a story. It’s out of control and it’s sad how many people fall for them. By default, you should probably disbelieve any scientific study that you hear or read about, especially if it’s from a show like Good Morning America, the Today Show or Fox and Friends. If you’re really going to adjust your life because of a study, isn’t it worth a few minutes of your time to maybe READ the study instead of trusting somebody else’s 3 minute over-hyped review of it?

benmartens May 26, 2016 Links

Shed

Our house came with a small Rubbermaid shed in the backyard. It’s a handy place to keep stuff like the lawn mower, but it rapdily gathered so much stuff that it was hard to even pull the lawnmower out.

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Last week I decided it was time to build some organization. Thankfully, that turned out to be a very quick and relatively cheap project. The whole thing was built with about 25 2x4s and a bunch of scrap plywood that I already had.

I started out with Sketchup to figure out how I would get all the big items to fit in there. I measured the interior dimensions of the shed and also the dimensions of the mower, the wheelbarrow, etc. It was very helpful to figure this all out on the computer instead of doing it on the fly.

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The plan was to build an “attic” and two shelves as well as some places to hang tools along the wall. Floor space is really valuable and I can pretty much fill it up with the mower, generator, wheelbarrow, ladder and cornhole boards. Everything else needs to be off the ground.

I moved all of the contents out onto the patio and covered them with a tarp (which Elijah thought was very interesting.) Then it only took about 4 hours of work to build everything inside. After doing a bunch of nicer woodworking projects, it was kind of relaxing to frame the project out with 2x4s. I covered the shelves with scrap pieces of plywood and before I knew it, the project was done.

Everything fits in there very nicely now and I no longer dread opening the doors to get something out. I still have plenty of empty space that I can use now too.

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benmartens May 25, 2016 Home Improvement, Woodworking

Truck VIN

Now that Ford has assigned a VIN to my truck, I can use some interesting tools. For example, did you know that the letters and numbers in the VIN tell all kinds of things like what range the gross vehicle weight is in, the type of engine, the plant it was built in (mine is Kansas City) and how many vehicles were built before yours?

Another nifty tool for Ford buyers is COTUS. It’s a website that lets you check the status of your order. You can get to it either at http://www.cotus.ford.com or http://wwwqa.cotus.ford.com. The sites are notoriously flaky but I finally got the second one to work for my order. As expected, it shows that my truck is “In Order Processing”. That’s the longest phase, but you know I’ll be checking this site pretty regularly!

cotusIt’s amazing what you can find on the Internet if you look around! If you’re in the market for an F150, I highly recommend F150Forum.com. It’s a goldmine of information.

UPDATE: This afternoon when I logged in, COTUS told me the estimated delivery date was July 9! Let’s see if that holds true…

benmartens May 24, 2016 Commentary

CrashPlan Success Story

crashplanlogoAll of our photos, including the ones we take on the phone, end up getting stored on our computer. This week, Tyla was looking back at photos from 2013 and she noticed that all the photos from her phone between January 1 and June 6 were gone. Uh oh.

I said I’d take a look but obviously they were nowhere to be found on the computer. Thankfully, it wasn’t a problem. I fired up CrashPlan, told it to show me all the files including ones that were later deleted from the computer and voila, there they were. A couple clicks and I had all the photos back on my machine again.

We’ve been happily using CrashPlan for five years now and this is the first time I’ve used it for a major recovery operation. But even if we never used it, I’d still pay for it. It’s only $60 and that’s cheap insurance.

benmartens May 23, 2016 Commentary

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!

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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.

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benmartens May 16, 2016 Family