Studio711.com – Ben Martens

The other day on Facebook, Ken posted this: “You never regret being kind.” My snarky mind immediately tried to come up with a joking way to refute that. A story from college came to mind and I was surprised to see that I hadn’t blogged about it before…

After coming out of a class, I waited for the bus to get back to the dorm. (It was about a 10-15 minute walk from class to my dorm so sometimes I’d take a bus if the weather was bad.) I wasn’t paying much attention but as the bus rolled up and opened the door, another guy and I arrived at the same time to get on board. I stepped back and motioned him to go first. As soon as his foot touched the bus, a couple guys in suits appeared out of nowhere, grabbed him and asked “Are you getting on this bus?”

I thought, “HA! Sucker. I’m glad I let you go first!”

The bus started moving after we all got on and one of the guys in suits said, “I’m proud to announce that Joe is our one millionth CityBus rider!” He ended up winning a $500 gift card to the mall.

A friend of mine on the bus saw the whole thing and he got a good laugh at my expense.

Our garden is off to a shaky start. I started the plants indoors and I did it WAY too soon. The tomato plants took off but rapidly started crowding each other out. I moved some to solo cups and they are growing and some even have flowers on them. I’m trying to put them outside for a bit each day in hopes of a good transition.

The zucchini plants came up too and i had them in 5 gallon buckets. They grew in really weird shapes along the ground with very little elevation. After a few days moving in and out of the house, I put them in the garden. So far… ehh… I don’t have high hopes that they will succeed.

Lesson learned: forget starter plants. It’s impossible to predict the spring weather around here. I’m about ready to just throw the rest of this stuff outside, let it die, and then buy starter plants when the weather is warm enough. Next year I’m just going to copy our neighbor. She has a great garden!

Say it ain’t so! The Seattle Times reported yesterday that Red Hook is packing up their kegs and leaving Woodinville. Apparently Red Hook is selling less beer than it used to and the Woodinville site has been operating at 30% capacity. They are adding on to a brewery down in Portland so there’s no need to keep this site open anymore.

I’m personally sad to see them go. While their beer is very popular (which means somewhat generic), I really enjoy having them close by. They were a great dinner location and their tour was a great activity with out-of-town guests. The article says that they are opening a brew pub over in Seattle so I feel like this Woodinville location will probably be closing.

The site will be sold to another buyer, and with a hundreds of up-and-coming breweries in the area, I don’t expect it will be difficult to sell. It’s a big facility for those smaller guys but maybe a couple of them will band together or something along those lines.

Goodbye Red Hook! I still love you but I’ll probably never make it across the lake to your new location.

I work on the Azure team. It’s one of the hottest areas in the whole company because it’s growing at an unbelievable rate. That leads to a lot of really interesting problems that keep life interesting. The chart below is a little old but it gives you a good idea at the rate of acceleration.

The future looks bright. There’s enormous room for growth even with heavy competition between Azure and Amazon Web Services. It appears that it’s raining money and the major cloud computing competitors are just trying to build enough buckets to catch it all.

I’m a sleepwalker. I don’t remember when it started, but I haven’t grown out of it yet. Over the years, it has created quite a few interesting stories. Most of the time it just results in my pillow and/or sheets ending in a weird place or me walking around the room mumbling, but there were a couple times that it was quite a bit more involved:

The first one happened freshman year of college. I was at dinner with a bunch of guys from the floor and one of them said, “Hey Ben, thanks for yelling at Sarah last night.” I don’t remember if her name was really Sarah, but we’ll call her that for this story. It was the girlfriend of a guy on the floor and she was a VERY loud talker. My roommate started laughing when I looked confused and said, “Huh?” “You don’t remember?” My roommate filled in the missing details. Apparently the escapade had started with me getting out of bed in the middle of the night. That’s no small feat. We had loft beds. The only way to get up was to do a pull up on the cross bar and hoist yourself up. Getting down was the reverse: grab the cross bar and swing down to the ground. So I swung down in my sleep, unlocked the door, stuck my head out in the hall way and yelled, “BE QUIET! IT’S QUIET HOURS!” Then I walked back in the room, pulled myself up to bed and went back to sleep (except I was sleeping the whole time so I don’t know what you call it.)

The second one that sticks out was also in college. We were on a ski trip in Michigan. It was a big group but I only knew one or two of the guys there. We were all sleeping on the floor of somebody’s house. Apparently in the middle of the night, I got up, took my blanket over to the window, covered it up and yelled about blocking the aliens from coming in the window. You can imagine the ribbing I took from doing that in a room full of a dozen guys. The aliens through the window bit was a popular one for me. I did it in a hotel room with my family one time too.

I still haven’t figured out what triggers it. Being in unfamiliar locations can do it sometimes but not always. Lately it’s usually just talking in my sleep or thinking there is a spider in the bed, but the other morning I did wake up to find my pillow in the bathtub.

It’s kind of fun because I never know what I’ll find when I wake up.

The past couple weekends, I’ve made some pretty big changes to my work shop (a.k.a the third bay of our garage.) The completion of the shop vac cart opened up some new possibilities.

• I moved my table saw over by the garage door. That lets me save a little space because if I have a long board, I can just open up the garage door.
• The shop vac cart is placed by the table saw, the assembly table and the miter saw. Those are the places that it gets used the most so it’s convenient to swap out the hose connection to the right tool. I also have easy access to electric plugs on different circuits so that I can confidently power the tool and the shop vac at the same time.
• The band saw moved up to a previously unused spot by the work bench. I still have space to feed through most boards there but if not, it’s on a rolling base so I can move it.
• One change not in this picture is that I moved my TV onto the same wall as the peg board. That lets me see it a little easier when I’m standing at the assembly table and it also frees up more space for shelves/cabinets that I plan to build at some point.

I’ll probably change it around at some point, but it’s really nice having everything on wheels so I can make these changes quickly.

I signed up to play some preservice music on the piano at church before the service on Sunday. Whenever I play in church, I always remember a story that I just realized isn’t on my blog. Time to share it with the world…

When I lived in Jersey, my church in King of Prussia had a very consistent organist named Eunice. She was there every Sunday and she was good. But then… she went on vacation. For two weeks! Somehow the search for a replacement organist came around to me. They were really scraping the bottom of the barrel because I only played the piano and had barely ever sat at an organ. I did write about this briefly before. Here’s a quote from that post:

I definitely offered my own rendition of a couple hymns. As one guy put it, “I leaned over to my wife and said, ‘Wow Eunice is really having a bad day.’ Then my wife told me that Eunice was on vacation.”

That post must have been after the first week. The second week was even worse. Pastor wanted to use a special settings on the organ for one verse of a hymn. He got it all set up and said “Just press this button to switch to the special setting in between verses.” Easy enough? I bumbled my way through the hymn, pressed the button in between verses, pressed the keys and …. NOTHING. There was no sound coming out of the organ and I had no clue why. The congregation awkwardly started singing a cappella. I rebooted the organ to try and reset it to the default settings. That worked but it made big clunking sounds as it turned off an back on.

Strangely enough, after those two weeks of mistakes, they never asked me again. In retrospect, I either should have declined the request, or I should have just sucked up my pride and played one finger. Playing an organ is a LOT different than a piano even if you ignore the pedals because there is no sustain pedal. That difference is no ingrained in my brain.