benmartens – Page 95 – Studio711.com

Play Table

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve noticed Elijah playing on his own a lot more than he did before. The coffee table is one of his favorite play spots right now. I want to support these activities, but it’s hard to watch him smashing his cars around on the table. I’ve put plenty of my own scratches into the table, but if he keeps at this for a couple months, we’re going to have sawdust on top. I’ve been trying to figure out a good way to build him some sort of bigger play table anyway, and one day it dawned on me that I could solve both problems with one project.

I had a scrap piece of plywood that was big enough to cover the coffee table so I cut it to about the same size and trimmed it with some simple 1×4 pine. Using pine takes a little extra time because it pays to fill all the knots with wood filler, but it’s so cheap that it’s worth it for a project like this.

It only took a night or two to complete the build and then the painting began. Thankfully we had a semi-sunny weekend so I set up the saw horses in the driveway and started painting. I covered everything with a coat of Kilz primer. The rim was painted white and then, after taping, the inside was painted with four or five coats of green. I did all of it with spray paint and kept it smooth with some fine sanding every once in a while. I finished it off with a few coats of spray lacquer.

I had thought about painting a road onto the board and even laser cut some paper to use as a stencil. I didn’t use them though because I wasn’t confident that I could get a clean enough line using the templates.

The end product works perfectly. We already had some soft foam around the edges of the table. This slides over the top of that foam so nothing is touching the actual wood of the table.

Elijah spent a lot of time playing at that table the first day. I spent less than $4 on the project (not including leftover spray paint and lacquer) and used up some scraps. He can beat this up all he wants, and it’s really nice to be able to spread out his Legos without watching them spill off the edge of the table.

benmartens February 26, 2016 Maker, Woodworking

Accountability

Changing a bad habit on your own is tough. Lots of rehab programs use the concept of an “accountability partner.” You are in it together with someone else and you confide in each other about how it’s going. Whether you do it in person or just tweet it every day online, simply knowing that you have to check in with somebody else can be a big motivation.

Tyla and I have both been trying unsuccessfully to shed a few pounds so I geeked it up and used the accountability concept. Our digital scale logs our weight every morning. I grab that data and put it in my own database. Then I made a very quick little website that shows how much combined weight we have lost since the date we agreed to do this. It intentionally does not show how much each person has contributed. We set a shared goal and now we’re both working toward it.

We’ll see how well this works in the long run, but so far it’s adding some fun to the boring task of watching what we eat.

benmartens February 25, 2016 Commentary

Calvary Web Page

If you went to our church’s web page in the past, you probably shook your head and chuckled about the ancient design. It looked like something from the 90s… probably because it was.

I tracked down all our domain, email and web hosting information and got everything migrated to a combination of eNom (domain and email hosting) and SquareSpace (web hosting.) I threw up a quick site and then turned it over BethH who really made some awesome changes. She gets all the credit for the current beautiful site! I don’t get paid for saying this, but if you need a site, make sure you consider SquareSpace. I don’t think Beth has any coding experience but she was able to design an awesome site. And if you are a coder, you can still customize it to your heart’s content. It’s a pretty impressive package for a low price.

Along this journey, we’ve also stepped up our social media presence. I started an Instagram account and we’re also giving our Facebook page some more love. Beth has a good plan for four of us at church to start posting to Facebook and Instagram on a more regular basis.

I used to be embarrassed to point people to our website but now it’s fun! Go check it out at http://www.calvarylutheranbellevue.org. Maybe my next project should be finding a shorter domain name…

benmartens February 24, 2016 Commentary

Pollo A La Crema

Most of my Spanish was learned by reading delicious menus so I’m pretty sure that “pollo a la crema” means “chicken in cream”. I see it on the menus when I go there and think “I should make that at home”, but I’ve never followed through. I can’t say that anymore. Tyla’s verdict was that it was delicious, but the sauce wasn’t the same flavor as what you usually get in a restaurant. I think this will be a regular in our rotation.

The recipe comes from allrecipes.com but we modified it to include mushrooms and onions.

Ingredients

4 skinless, boneless chicken breast halves – cut into cubes

2 tablespoons butter

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

1 cup chicken broth

1 cup heavy cream

2 tablespoons ketchup

Mushrooms

Onion

6 (6 inch) flour tortillas

Directions

In a large skillet over medium heat, melt butter.

In a separate skillet, cook mushrooms and onions

Add chicken and cook, stirring frequently until juices run clear.

Stir in the flour and ketchup, then whisk in the broth.

When sauce begins to thicken, reduce heat and stir in the cream.

Simmer covered for about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.

benmartens February 23, 2016 Food

Most Dangerous Jobs

If you read through the Bureau of Labor and Satistics list of dangerous jobs, you’ll learn that being a truck driver or working on a farm are two of the most dangerous jobs you can have. They run roughly a 0.01% risk of dying on the job.

These lists all miss the most dangerous job in America. It’s a job that we watch people compete heavily for. People want the job so badly that they’ll spend millions of dollars trying to get it. Some people ruin their lives and their reputations to get the job. Of course I’m talking about the presidency. Eight of our 44 presidents have died in office which means you have an 18% chance of dying in office! Half of those were natural causes but still, a 9% chance of death when taking a job would probably deter me from it.

Thankfully we haven’t had one for 50 years and that’s probably due to a much stronger Secret Service, but there are still plenty of attempts.

benmartens February 22, 2016 Commentary

Vizio Soundbar

Upstairs in the theater room, we have a full receiver and 5.1 speaker setup that provides nice sound. It’s not anywhere near audiophile quality, but it’s more than enough to provide enjoyment. On the downstairs TV, we are just using the built-in TV speakers. I’ve never heard a TV speaker that does a very good job of producing sound and this TV is no exception. However, we don’t need to have a full receiver and surround sound system down there.

Thankfully there is a happy middle and it’s called a soundbar. It’s a long rectangular speaker that fits nicely underneath your TV. Tim and Chelsea just upgraded theirs and sold us their old one. So now we have a Vizio SB3821 installed in our house. It not only has the soundbar but there is a subwoofer that only needs power to operate. It connects wirelessly to the soundbar so that you don’t have to run an audio cable to it. The soundbar connects to the audio output on the TV so whatever plays on the TV gets played through the soundbar.

Is it as good has having 6 discrete speakers spread around your room? Nope. But it’s way better than the standard TV output. As an added bonus, this soundbar supports Bluetooth so I can play music from my phone to it while I’m cooking or playing with Elijah.

It took a little bit of work on our Harmony universal remote to make it all operate seemlessly, but I think we’re there now and the experience is great! Thanks to Tim and Chelsea for selling us their hand-me-downs. Now I’ll probably start drooling of their new setup and want that instead.

benmartens February 19, 2016 Gadgets

You Can’t Screw It Up

The other day at work we were talking about our biggest mistakes in a work environment. It reminded me of an epic failure at my first computer job…

My Dad was a contracter and his boss (the owner) got me a job during high school at a company that processes payroll for thousands of companies across the United States. I worked in the computer room processing the jobs. We had big laser printers that would print 150 checks per minute and it kept you pretty busy just feeding it paper, not to mention pulling 12 sheets out of it whenever it jammed or pouring a gallon of toner into it. it took a while to get the hang of it, but after a while it was fairly mechanical. I enjoyed the job though because the people were fun and sometimes I’d flip through the checks and hold one worth a million dollars. If I had changed my name to “Illinois Department of Revenue”, do you think I could have cashed it?

When I started learning the old mainframe system that ran the whole operation, I specifically remember hearing them say “Don’t worry, you can’t really screw anything up.” Challenge accepted.

The computer system had a bunch of “partitions” and each one could run an individual payroll job. One of our main tasks was to look at all the incoming requests and figure out how to organize them to get maximum throughput through the system. If I remember correctly, there was a background partition and then eight job partitions. The background partition was how you interacted with the system and submitted jobs to the either other partitions. When things went wrong with a job, you’d pause a partition by typing “P F3” where 3 is the number of the partition running the job.

On some very busy days, we’d squeeze a little more juice out of the system by running jobs in the background partition. It was a little risky because it would block user interactions while it was running, but if you had a really quick, high priority job to get through, it wasn’t a huge deal.

It was one of those busy days and I had submitted a job to the background partition. There was a mistake so to stop it from getting worse, I quickly typed “P BG”. Those characters will always be burned into my brain because basically it felt like when I hit Enter, the entire building ground to a halt. I had just paused the partition that the computer was using to listen to input from the users. So effectively the computer was happily chugging along with it’s ears plugged and there was no way to tell it to start listening again because it wasn’t listening to us.

Oops.

We all just kind of stared at each other with this “uh oh” look on our faces. People around the building started coming to the window of the computer room with quizzical looks on their faces. The president and the mainframe guru came storming in. I made myself tiny in the corner. It was a doozy of a problem. They were on the phone with IBM for THREE HOURS trying to figure out how to fix it. I still don’t know what they did but eventually it came back online and somehow I got a pass because I was the stupid intern.

So please, don’t tell me that I can’t do anything bad that you haven’t done before. I have a knack for it. Maybe that’s why I ended up geting a job as a tester for 8 years.

benmartens February 18, 2016 Commentary

What Is Lent?

This is the next installment of my “What does that religious celebration mean?” series. The first was Advent. We made it through Christmas. I forgot to write about Epiphany and now we’re onto Lent. So what is Lent?

Lent covers the six weeks before Easter and kicks off with Ash Wednesday. Many churches will have extra Wednesday night services so you end up going to church twice each week. The extra services are there to giive you even more time to reflect on the meaning of Lent. The whole point is to show us our need for a Savior and what’s about to happen at the end of Lent (Jesus’s death and His resurrection at Easter.) Lent reminds us WHY Jesus had to come to suffer, die and rise again. He did all that because we are sinners. The law that God sets forth in the Bible is very clear. He demands 100% aboslute perfection. If you can pull that off, you get into heaven. But as you probably guessed, that’s impossible .From the moment we are conceived, we’re sinful. If that’s all we covered in Lent services, it would be extremely depressing because we’d leave knowing that we’re heading straight to hell when we die. But the story doesn’t end there. After each reminder of our failures, we are presented with the reminder that Jesus came to pay the penalty for sin in our place. Through him, we are guaranteed spots in heaven and all that’s required is faith.

You may have heard people talk about Lent in terms of giving something up for the season. The idea has lost a lot of its good intentions. Many people now do it because they think they’re going to gain points with God if they choose to not eat Skittles or drink coffee during Lent. Nope. But giving up something for Lent can be a good thing if you use it as a constant daily reminder of the meaning behind the season for Lent.

So if you step into a Lent service, it might seem like a somber occasion. There’s black on the altar and there’s a lot of talk about all the suffering that Jesus had to endure because we are screwups. But stay for the end and you’ll hear the wonderful message of what that Jesus’s death and resurrection mean for us if we believe. We get eternal life in heaven. It’s the ultimate gift.

benmartens February 17, 2016 Commentary

Great Wolf Lodge Trip

Great Wolf Lodge is an indoor water park a little less than two hours south of our house. It’s a national chain so if this post sounds interesting to you, check their site to see where the closest one is to you. Tyla and I have always thought it looked interesting as we drove by, but a quick check of the website proves that you’ll be a creeper if you show up without kids. So we basically had Elijah as an excuse to go to the water park.

Our trip was Monday through Wednesday because we found a deal for 40% off. Your waterpark pass starts at 1pm on the day of arrival and ends at 9pm on the day of your departure. You could get a LOT of waterpark time for just a one night stay. Checkout time is 11am but they have lockers and restrooms where you can easily shower and change even if you don’t have a room anymore.

We arrived pretty late on Monday night so we skipped the water park and took Elijah down to story time. They have a big animatronic setup where they tell some story about blah blah blah Mother Nature blah blah. Elijah’s favorite part of every story time was at the end when one of the Great Wolf Lodge wolf characters would come out to read a story.

The rooms are HUGE. I don’t know if they are all like this, but ours was near the conference center on the second floor just down from the water park entrance. The ceilings were probably 11-12 feet high and there was more square footage than most other hotel rooms that I’ve been in. It’s nothing super fancy but it’s nice and there’s a pretty big mini fridge there to keep your food cool.

If you’re looking to save money, the fridge is a key part of it. Everything there costs money except the room and waterpark. We had to walk past four money spending opportunities in the ~100 steps from our room to the water park entrance. If your kids don’t know the meaning of the word “no”, prepare for a big bill. Thankfully, ours was happy playing in the arcade without realizing that he wasn’t acutally playing anything.

The waterpark is impressive. There’s a large wave pool, a swimming area with basketball hoops, a big “fort” with a 1000 gallon bucket that dumps every few minutes and two waterslides, a large toddler play area with two tiny slides and then four “big kid” slides. It’s a big place, but I was actually surprised that it wasn’t bigger. The Lynnwood Aquatic Center is somewhat similar and isn’t that much smaller than Great Wolf Lodge. That being said, it was plenty big for a toddler. Tyla and I had fun on the various slides while we took turns watching Elijah.

There are tons of activities for kids (all of which you pay for.) The coolest one is probably MagiQuest. Participants get a magic wand and then walk around the lodge pointing at stuff on the walls and on pedestals. The art/animals/pedestals react to the wand helping guide the player along a quest for points and prizes. I’m excited to give that a try when Elijah is old enough to understand it. Other activities include a spa for adults, a spa for kids, arcade, and mini golf. There’s a breakfast buffet ($15/adult, $7/child) and burger/steak/chicken dinner place that looked to be about $20/person unless you ordered the steak. Our general practice on vacations is to pack our own breakfast and lunch for the room and then eat out for dinner. We chose a Mexican place in nearby Centralia, but unfortunately it was closed so we just chose a random place that was close by.

Will we go back? Yep! It was fun and I could see it being a great vacation once Elijah is old enough to run around on his own. Everyone gets their own waterproof bracelet that acts as your door key and credit card during your stay. It’s super convenient because you never have to worry about taking anything with you to the waterpark. Elijah could just run around and do whatever he wanted while we relaxed. It would be especially great if he brought a friend or two with him. We’d definitely look for another deal though. Full price is about $200/night plus about $35/night in taxes and fees. I’m glad we gave it a shot! Thanks to Tyla for doing most of the planning on this one!

benmartens February 16, 2016 Family, Travel

Conflicting Opinions

In a recent post, I mentioned the Smarter Every Day interview with the President. Destin, the guy behind Smarter Every Day, has posted another video talking about the whole experience. Why was he picked? How did disagreeing on some political issues effect the conversation?

Around the 3:42 mark, Destin goes into some really interesting thoughts about how polarized our political environment is. He compares it to feedback loops. There are positive feedback loops and negative feedback loops. If a system has both inputs, it will trend toward the norm. But if you remove one, you are going to wildly diverge. This is what happens with politics if we only listen to news/media/journalists who agree with us. You’re not getting both sides so you end up very polarized one way or the other. Destin points out that it’s our responsibility to really be informed about the issues and understand the other side of the argument.

If you were at all intrigued by my previous post, watch this video. He says it better than I did with some cool graphics and stats to back it up.

benmartens February 15, 2016 Links

Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Just trying to get through life without looking stupid, so far it's not going very well.