Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Toll-Free Times On 405

opentoallhotlanesLast week, WSDOT changed the tolling procedure on 405. The HOT lanes are now open to everyone between 7pm and 5am and on weekends. You don’t need a pass, you don’t need multiple passengers, and you don’t have to pay money. I love this change, but I’m surprised they did it.

If you read the notes from the meeting where they decided this, it’s clear that they have a lot of data available. Some of those charts are incredibly interesting. If you’re a data nerd who travels 405, you’ll love it. But the main problem I have, as I’ve stated before, is that they aren’t optimizing just for maximum throughput on the road. You can see it in their notes. They always talk about how much money each of the options will cost them in lost revenue. The system is in place to generate money and give rich people a fast lane. I’m fundamentally opposed to that. The highway is a shared resource. Let’s maximize throughput. End of story.

So why am I surprised that they created a toll-free time? Because people are going to start realizing that the toll isn’t the part of the system that is important. The important part is having separate lanes with limited entry and exit points, just like a standard express lane setup. There are already calls for WSDOT to experiment with no-toll times during the day instead of just at night, but I can’t imagine them doing that. They’d be giving up a lot of money and that’s a higher priority for them than just improving throughput. Making it free at night and on weekends costs them 3% of their total revenue and removes traffic jams that the HOT system added on the weekends so it’s a nice PR win and actually does improve traffic. Changing the daytime rates would be a much bigger hit to their bottom line.

benmartens March 28, 2016 Commentary

Movies At Home

seanparkerOnline streaming has gotten a lot better and movies are available in just a few months after they are released in theaters. But wouldn’t it be cool to watch movies at home as soon as they show up in the theater? There have been some VERY expensive devices (tens of thousands of dollars) that allow rich people to do this, but Sean Parker (of Napster fame) is trying to change that.

He has a new product and service called “Screening Room.” You pay $150 for a set top device and then you can watch movies for $50 each. Sure, it’s a lot more expensive than waiting until it’s available for rental later (or even later when it’s on Netflix and Amazon), but if you want to watch a current movie, you’re easily going to spend $50 at the theater with two or three people.

This could easily be a cost savings if you see a lot of movies with your friends or family. While I’m interested in that part, I love the idea that I can finally watch current movies without the hassle of trying to find time to go see it with a toddler in the mix.

It seems too good to be true which means that it probably won’t ever happen. I don’t love going to theaters so if this actually happens, it could be something that I would pick up.

benmartens March 25, 2016 Commentary

Holy Week

holy-weekContinuing in the “What do all those church holidays mean?” series, we’re now in Holy Week. It’s a big week for Christians. It started last Sunday with Palm Sunday. This is the day when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and was greeted by lots of people waving palm branches to celebrate his arrival. He knew full well what was going to happen to him later in the week, but he came anyway. The people were celebrating him as their king and Jesus cried because they still didn’t get it. He wasn’t their eathly king. He was there to save them from their sins for eternity! Some of those same people would be in the crowd later in the week shouting for him to be crucified.

Four days later, we celebrate Maundy Thursday. On this day, Jesus ate the “Last Supper” with his disciples. You’ve probably seen the famous painting depicting this scene. At this meal, Jesus gave us the sacrament of communion. We still partake in communion regularly throughout the church year. We receive his body and blood along with the bread and the wine to give us forgiveness and strengthen our faith.

The next day is Good Friday. This church service is usually very somber. This is the day we remember Jesus’s death on the cross. He was abandoned by his disciples and the crowds that he had preached to were now shouting “Crucify him!” He was executed in one of the most gruesome manners that humankind has ever developed, and it all happened because you and I sinned. The Bible says that the wages of sin is death, so God sent his only Son to die in our place to pay for our sins.

Thankfully, that’s not the end of the story. On Easter Sunday, various people went to the tomb and found that he was not there. He had risen! His death marks his victory over death and the devil. Because He died and rose again, we can live with Him forever in heaven.

It’s an incredible roller coaster of emotions for the Christian, but it’s a fantastic annual reminder about how seriously God takes sin. God demands perfection and even one single sin is enough to send someone to hell for eternity. We’re all hopeless, but Jesus took our place, bore the weight of the entire world’s sin and died for us. But because he was not only true God but also true man, he had the power to rise from the dead. God demands perfection but he also showed us mercy by sending Jesus to pay for our sins. Nothing we can do can ever pay that price, but if we believe that Jesus died for us, we will spend eternity with Him in heaven.

benmartens March 24, 2016 Commentary

Justified Theme

justified-artwork-timothy-olyphant-dvdbash-03I finished all six seasons of the Justified TV show.The whole series (except for parts of season 4) are excellent, but wow, the ending is a doozy.

The show is set in Harlan, Kentucky. It’s a little blip on Highway 421 which, coincidentally, is the same highway I used up in Indiana to get between college and home. They play a lot of the song “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive”. It got me to wondering if the song written for the show or if the song came first.

It turns out the song was released in 2001 by Darrell Scott. The show, which came in 2010, featured three covers of the song from Brad Paisley, Dave Alvin, and Ruby Friedman.

Harlan shows up in a few other songs from big name singers including the Steve Earle song “Harlan Man” and the Anna McGarrigle song “Goin’ Back to Harlan” (covered by Emmylou Harris).

I’ve never been to Harlan (you can tell because I’m not there now and I’m still alive), but I don’t think it looks much like the scenery in the TV show. That bugged me. The show is filmed in California and it’s pretty obvious from the terrain and the foliage.

But aside from that minor stumble, this is still a great show. Thank you to Ken and Logan for reocmmending it to me over and over until I finally watched it. All six seasons are free on Amazon Prime so it’s easy/free to get into it.

benmartens March 23, 2016 Commentary

Keyboard Scrolling

microsoftkeyboard4000Aside from those good old mechanical spring keyboards, my favorite keyboard is the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. There’s also a wireless version which is the 7000. The two halves of the keyboard are split and rotated in toward each other just the way that your hands normally face. Each set of keys is concave to help keep a similar distance to your fingers no matter where the key is.

I don’t love all the shortcut buttons across the top but I mostly ignore those. I do, however, like the Back and Forward buttons below the spacebar. I map those to my music player so I can quickly skip songs.

One more shortcut button just became useful: the zoom button between the two halves of the keyboard. The software doesn’t support this in the UI, but you can remap this to be a scroll button.

  1. Go to “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard Center”
  2. Open commands.xml in a text editor.
  3. Search for <all> and you’ll see this under that section:
    <C319 Type=”6″ Activator=”ZoomIn” >
    <C320 Type=”6″ Activator=”ZoomOut” >
  4. Change it to look like this:
    <C319 Type=”6″ Activator=”ScrollUp” >
    <C320 Type=”6″ Activator=”ScrollDown” >
  5. Open task manager and terminate itype.exe
  6.  Restart itype.exe or reboot and voila!

[source]

benmartens March 22, 2016 Gadgets

Power Outage Debrief 2

WP_20160313_17_18_50_ProAfter our previous multi-day power outage, I wrote a post talking about what I learned from my first real test with the generator and gave myself a B-. Unfortunately, I had another test recently when the third windstorm of March knocked out power for 175,000 people. Thankfully, this outage only lasted 11 hours so it was easier to deal with, but I’d still bump us up to a B+. Here’s a breakdown of what I learned this time around:

  • We need to have a plan of what to do when there is nasty weather coming. This time around, I remembered to set the fridge to Max Cool (dropping the fridge and freezer temps to 33 and -6), I moved ice from the freezer to the fridge and had it refill the ice in the freezer, and bumped the furnace thermostat up a couple degrees. That was all great but I forgot that I should also have been keeping our phones charged up.
  • After the power went out, I remembered that I never got around to building a better shelter for the generator. Fail. The last time I tried to use the pop up tent but it was difficult to deal with in the wind and it took a lot of time to set up. So I headed off to Home Depot, but because I only had my little Subaru, I had to plan something that was quick to build and could fit into my car. I had them cut a sheet of 3/4″ OSB into two 40×48 pieces and I bought a couple of metal 90 degree straps. I made a quick “tent” out of those two pieces and it worked really well. It was heavy enough that it wasn’t going to blow away and it provided shelter for the generator while giving the exhaust an easy way to exit. It will also be easy to unscrew and along the wall in the shed.
  • Last time I was nervous about the dirty power from the generator ruining the fridge so I would only run the fridge every ~2.5 hours and then unplug everything. That was a lot of work and I was exhausted after a couple nights of that. This time I just let it run and everything was fine. Much easier.
  • We used VERY little gas. The generator ran for a total of 7 hours and we used well under two gallons. The supply I had on was sufficient for a full day so that was a win.

Given that we’ve had three outages in the last nine months, we are ready to look into a manual transfer switch so that the generator could run right into our electrical panel. Depending on the, cost we might go ahead with that. A neighbor put one in and within 10 minutes of the power going out, he had his generator and started and plugged into his house.

benmartens March 21, 2016 Home Improvement

Seattle’s Big Dig

sr99viaductprojectSeattle is in the middle of an enormous construction project. I haven’t kept up with the details, but my general impression was that it was a financial disaster. I spent a little time doing some research into the current state of the project and how far it has come:

  • The double decker highway, SR 99, going right along the waterfront is in severe need of replacement. The 2001 earthquake damaged it and it is a disaster waiting to happen. It’s also a terrible spot for an elevated highway. It runs like a big scar right along the beautiful waterfront creating a dark, gloomy, wet area that you have to walk through to get to the waterfront. The plan was to bore underneath it. You know, right next to the ocean. What could go wrong?
  • It is the widest bored tunnel ever attempted.
  • The initial budet was $3.1 billion and started in 2011. It was scheduled to be done in 2015. The tunnel boring part was expected to take 14 months.
  • At the point when the tunnel was 10% complete, the state had spent 70% of it’s money.
  • The drilling machine, Big Bertha, has moved 1437 feet. That’s about 15% of the total distance.
  • Problems so far have included the machine getting stuck, the machine breaking and needing major repairs, and the ground caving in.
  • When the machine broke, it was down for two years. There’s no way to back it out so they had to dig a huge hole to get down and repair it in place.
  • Even parts of the project that don’t involve tunneling are over-budget. Replacing the seawall along Alaskan Way was a $331 million dollar project which is already about $100 million over budget.
  • The most recent estimate I could find for completion was March 2018. Complete rebuilding of the waterfront will stretch into 2019.
  • I couldn’t find anything that gives a recent estimate of the actual cost of the project. It seems like most people just shrug, laugh and cry.

I get why people thought this was a good idea. It would be beautiful to hide all that traffic and really beautify the area, but the discussions now are not around what would be beautiful, but rather, when should they cut bait and run. And of course, if they do decide to stop, they still have the original problem of the decrepit double decker SR 99 to deal with. It’s anybody’s guess how (and when) this one will turn out.

benmartens March 18, 2016 Commentary

Get Your Seahawks Tickets

seahawksticketsI’ve been in the Seattle area for almost 10 years now and I still haven’t been to a Seahawks game. It’s a combination of me being cheap and the tickets being nearly impossible to aquire firsthand. I don’t love buying tickets secondhand, but if I’m ever going to see a game, that’s probably what I’ll have to do.

How hard is it to get a ticket straight from the Seahawks? An article in the Seattle Times mentioned that there will be a total of 5800 single game tickets available for sale in the coming months. I’ve tried to snag those before and it’s nearly impossible. They sell out in minutes. Do you want season tickets? I hope you’re ready to wait. There are 70,000 people in line for the 61,500 season tickets and 99.6% of last year’s season ticket holders renewed.

benmartens March 17, 2016 Sports

Simone’s Robots

simonesrobotsHow often have you been doing a repetitive task and thought, “A robot could do this”? Now imagine what would actually happen if you tried to build that robot. It probably wouldn’t work very well and it might be hilarious. That pretty accurately describe’s Simone’s Robots on YouTube. Go check out her channel and watch her build a robot to apply lipstick, chop vegetables, or slap her as an alarm clock. She’s got a good sense of humor and the videos are reasonable crisp and short. They’re good for a couple chuckles.

benmartens March 16, 2016 Links

Five Whys

whyWhen we’re trying to get to the root of a problem at work, we like to employ the “Five Whys“. Somebody just keeps asking why about five times and it’s amazing what you can discover. You get past the obvious problem and blow through the excuse to find something that might actually be addressable to prevent it in the future.

If you have a two year old, you probably wish it stopped at five. Elijah is a master of the five (or 500) whys. I know I did the same thing when I was young and I try really hard to answer him legitimately. I want to cultivate his curious mind, but wow, it can be a trying ordeal to hear why over and over and over again. On the flip side, it leads to some intersting, albeit one-sided, discussions.

benmartens March 15, 2016 Commentary