Studio711.com – Ben Martens

It’s hard to believe that our truck is 10 years old! Thankfully it only has about 65k miles on it because since 2020, I haven’t been using it to commute back and forth to work. We’re hoping to have it for many more years so this summer we upgraded it with a canopy.

A canopy seems like one of those things that is useful 95% of the time and then is REALLY annoying the other 5% when you actually need to haul dirt or move something tall. So hopefully I ended up feeling like it was a net win. I’m excited to have it in place for our big road trip later this summer, and once we move, I should have plenty of room to store it for times when it does need to come off. Maybe it’s even an excuse to get a tractor with forks to help lift it off!

Kudos to the friendly people at Truck Builders LLC for walking me through the process of picking it out and then easily working around my schedule to get it installed. I ended up with a Snugtop Rebel with the 24″ led strip and dedicated switch (shown in the bottom picture), sliding side windows, removable front window (for cleaning between the truck and the canopy), and the lock is wired into the same circuit that my key fob controls. It’s a nice setup!

The first thing I did when I got it was remove the vinyl logo from the back and the adhesive badges on the side. (I’ve did that on the first day I had both the Tesla and the truck too.) We’ve already used it for camping, and it worked great!

Whether through some series of life events, personality quirks, or the fact that it has literally been my job for many years, I love efficiency. Or rather, I am deeply troubled by inefficiency. I can’t get rid of inefficiency in others, but I optimize my time to what is probably a bit of an unhealthy level. As I think about how to optimize my optimization efforts, there are two main ways I look at how I spend my time:

• Am I producing or consuming?
• Am I serving others or serving myself?

Both questions help me be intentional about how I spend my time. For example, I feel better about myself at the end of the day if I spent most of my time creating something new versus just ingesting what someone else created. And I feel better about myself if I am serving others versus indulging my own wishes.

As I was chewing on this recently, I realized that these two ways of analyzing my time could be complimentary. Imagine a grid like this:

With this model, each box starts to make sense:

• Producing / Serving Others – This is anything you’re creating where someone else is the primary beneficiary. Examples: Making dinner, planning a family trip, doing yard work, creating a family budget, volunteering on the church council, or practicing piano for playing at church services. This box is where the vast majority of my time goes and I think that’s a good thing.
• Consuming / Serving Others – This quadrant doesn’t always feel productive in the moment but it can make your service more effective in the future. Examples: Reading a book about team leadership, learning a new technology, or studying the Bible to prepare to teach a Bible class. I don’t think I have a lot of regular tasks that fit in this quadrant.
• Producing / Serving Self – In this zone, you’re producing something where you are the primary beneficiary. Examples: Woodworking, personal finance planning, or organizing the garage. If I had no responsibilities, this is where I’d love to spend all my time. In reality, this box usually gets squished out by the producing/serving others box.
• Consuming / Serving Self – While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this quadrant, it’s the “candy”. Left unchecked, this can get out of hand. Examples: Watching TV, playing video games, or taking a nap. I do reserve some time at the end of the day to wind down with TV and reading a book. If I run fast right up until the point I crawl into bed, I don’t get very good sleep.

I think that whether you’re trying to lose weight, break a habit, or optimize your time, writing it all down is a great way to tackle the challenge. Seeing everything listed out at the end of the day or the week can be eye-opening. With something like this that is more subjective, you have to be very honest with yourself because not everything fits nicely into a single quadrant. For example, why am I blogging right now? I’m definitely producing content, but who does it serve? Some of it is recording content for my family to look back on in the future, some of it I think will be useful to others, and a lot of it is just me enjoying writing. Ultimately, if you have to say “well technically” before your answer, you probably already know which quadrant it should fit in.

I don’t think there’s any “right” answer about how your time gets divided among these four quadrants, but I do try to be intentional about it, and I pointedly focus on keeping the bottom right quadrant to the bare minimum. Social media and doom scrolling apps fall squarely in that bottom right quadrant, but that’s a topic for another post.

A little over 20 years ago, I moved out here to start my new job. On the one hand, it’s hard to believe it has been that long, but on the other hand, a LOT has changed in those 20 years.

Let’s take a quick trip back to 2006:

• Sites like Twitter, OneDrive, and Spotify did not exist.
• Not many people had heard of Facebook yet. It was only 2 years old and you had to have a college email address to join it.
• Sites like Digg and Reddit were brand new. Most nerds were getting their news via slashdot.
• The Blu-Ray and HD-DVD battle hadn’t even started yet.
• Microsoft stock was hovering around $20 and people wondered if it would ever move again.

I started out at the most junior level of software engineer and I started in the test org. After a few years of that, I become a first level manager and eventually helped ship much of what you now see as the Data tab in Excel and the Power BI editor experience. I then moved to Azure as a dev back when it was clear Azure was becoming a thing but “cloud computer” was still very new. Satya had just made his “mobile-first, cloud-first” quote. Fast forward to today and Azure is one of a very tiny number of hyper-scalers on the planet.

It has been wild to have a front row seat for this transformation that impacts not just the tech industry but pretty much everyone on the planet. It’s exciting to play a tiny role in a product that runs 911 call centers, operates rides at your favorite amusement park, handles huge portions of global banking transactions, serves you endless information from the web, and on and on. As if the cloud computing explosion wasn’t enough, now the demand for AI growth dwarfs anything civilization has seen before.

I’m extremely thankful for this job and the opportunities it has provided!

A couple quotes that I heard recently have been floating around in my head.

“I think if you don’t have dreams about what might happen in your life, then how do you know what you want to do next? How do you choose whether I should do this or do that if you don’t really care where you end up? … I think it’s a wonderful gift to reflect within yourself and ask what do I actually hope will happen in my life if my life goes perfectly from now on? What do I dream will happen and what am I doing today and this weekend in order to change who I am deliberately?”

– Astronaut Chris Hadfield on the Mythfits podcast, April 27, 2026

I like this one because it encourages us to have a vision and work towards it. If you just float along letting life happen to you, it’s unlikely that your situation is going to improve.

The next one comes from the creator of a popular open-source project that recently decided not to allow AI generated code submissions. While this is about code, I think it applies to AI generated text even more.

It’s a common misconception that we can’t tell who is using LLM and who is not. I’m sure we didn’t catch 100% of LLM-assisted PRs over the past few months, but the kind of mistakes humans make are fundamentally different than LLM hallucinations, making them easy to spot. Furthermore, people who come from the world of agentic coding have a certain digital smell that is not obvious to them but is obvious to those who abstain. It’s like when a smoker walks into the room, everybody who doesn’t smoke instantly knows it.

I’m not telling you not to smoke, but I am telling you not to smoke in my house.

— Andrew Kelley

You can read more about their rationale for this move here. I’m not sure I totally agree with it because I think source code is becoming a generated artifact and specs are more important, I do think about this comparison to smoking every time I’m writing text and using AI to help me clean it up.

For the last ~6 years, I’ve watched gas prices mostly as a curiosity since my truck stayed parked in the driveway most days, but now that I’m driving back and forth to work, I feel the pain of those $100 fill-ups. But how bad is it compared to the past few years?

Since March of 2022, I have been running an app to record a half dozen gas stations close to me every day. I use this to carefully calculate how much money we are saving with the Tesla compared to a gas car. Here’s the chart:

So they are high but not quite as bad as when Russia invaded Ukraine. We live in a nice little pocket of reasonably priced gas, but there are currently some stations at $5.99 for gas and over $7.29 for diesel. Ouch.

I wonder what we’ll think when we look back at this post in 10 years.

Parenting is an interesting opportunity to think about important personality traits and life skills. Sometimes it feels like it’s hard to communicate anything so if I’m going to pick a few things to focus on, what should they be?

Lately, I’ve been thinking that one near the top of the list is the ability to be good at things you dislike. Too many people see a task they don’t like doing and they do the bare minimum required to get it off their list. But successful people are able to be excellent at things even if they dislike doing them. It doesn’t mean that they ever end up liking the task, but you’d never know it by the quality of their work. This advice shows up in the Bible too: “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” (1 Corinthians 10:31)

Often those things we don’t like doing are the hard things. We’d rather spend our time doing the fun things. Elijah gets tired of hearing me say “Work first, then play” but there are better versions of that quote:

• “Do what you have to do until you can do what you want to do.” – Oprah Winfrey
• “Do the hard jobs first. The easy jobs will take care of themselves.” – Dale Carnegie

It’s a straightforward lesson, but it’s one I need to remind myself of too.

This is a bit of a weird post (which is saying something on this site) but as I go through the grocery store each week, I’m always looking at the prices for the store brand versus the name brands. I will almost always default to the store brand unless the name brand happens to be on sale for cheaper, but there are some items that I will always buy the name brand regardless of price. That usually gets me wondering if others feel the same way about these specific items or if there are others I should be considering. Reflecting on this is harder than doing it in store, but here are some that immediately come to mind:

• Kleenex – Raw nose. Ouch. Enough said.
• Paper towels – I want the smaller sheets and I don’t want them to fall apart!
• Toilet paper – Raw… you get it. Ouch. The exception to this is Costco. Their generic brand of toilet paper works well and we had a plumber tell us that it’s one of the best ones for not clogging your pipes too.
• Trash bags – The cheapo ones fall apart too easily. This is another Costco exception. Their generic brand of bags is great.
• Bacon – Pay for the good bacon. It’s worth it. Locally I like to get Hempler’s center cut peppered bacon.
• Cream cheese – This is the newest addition. I have always bought the store brand and just assumed that when a recipe says “softened cream cheese” that was just impossible to do well. Then I bought the good stuff and learned that the consistency of good cream cheese is so much easier to work with!

What did I miss on this list?

I rarely mention “drinking beer” as one of my hobbies, but I thoroughly enjoy trying new beers. My Untappd app tells me I’ve had well over 1500 unique beers. The Pacific Northwest is one of the best places in the world for craft beer, but lately, I’ve felt like maybe the fervor is dying down a bit.

I thought maybe some of it was just that my favorite brewery, Good Brewing Co, has effectively closed. The Sultan location still exists, but as far as I know, it was sold to new owners and no longer brews any of its own beer. Bummer!

But it’s more than just Good Brewing. When I visit Total Wine, the enormous selection of craft beer packs and singles has been reduced to a glimmer of its former glory. At Safeway, the craft beer section has been mostly replaced by cider and even more beer from the big/national breweries.

Expanding the scope, the picture doesn’t get better. Craft beer declined in 5% after a 4% decline in 2024. More breweries closed (434) than opened (268).

Craft beer isn’t dead, but it’s not expanding like it was before. Get out there and support your local brewery!

More info: 2025 craft beer year in review

Every app seems to send some kind of stats page for your year. I picked out some of them to share here. If I spent this much time on these things, they probably get my default recommendation. After reading this, let me know what you think I missed out on.

Pocket Casts (podcasts)

• 18,051 minutes listened
• Top 5 podcasts by time listened
  • Stuff You Should Know
  • Making It
  • Cordkillers
  • No Dumb Questions
  • Wood Talk

Spotify

• 47,106 minutes listened
• Top artists: George Strait, Andrew Peterson, The Piano Guys, Third Day, Johnny Cash
• Top Albums:
  • George Strait: 50 Number Ones
  • Downhere: Downhere
  • FFH: I Want To Be Like You
  • Caedmon’s Call: 40 Acres
  • The Arcadian Wild: The Arcadian Wild

Duolingo

• 1995 Spanish lessons
• 3684 minutes of studying
• Current streak: 1911 days

Trakt (TV/movie tracking)

• Most watched:
  • Star Wars (including Clone Wars, Rebels, and all the movies)
  • Bob’s Burgers
  • Superstore
  • Chuck

Untappd

• 139 unique new beers
• All time total distinct beers: 1573
• Top 5 rated beers
  • Fort George – Pizza Pals
  • Icicle Brewing – Enhchantments Hazy IPA Series – Windy
  • Stemma Brewing – It’s Another Double IPA
  • WarPigs USA Brewing – Foggy Geezer
  • Icicle Brewing – Alpenhaze Hazy IPA

Goodreads

• 8670 pages read
• 22 books read
• Most popular book read: The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

I didn’t include YouTube because the channels with the most watch time aren’t necessarily the ones I’d recommend for most people. I watch some homesteading and construction channels in the background when I’m doing other things. I’ll save a refreshed edition of my YouTube channel recommendations for another day.