Commentary

Justified Theme

I 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

Seattle’s Big Dig

Seattle 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

Five Whys

When 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

Top Gun 2

Sequels of childhood classics are almost always embarrassing failures. So when I heard that Top Gun 2 might actually happen, I cringed a little. The first movie is so good that I almost want it to stand alone. Could they possibly make anothe one that isn’t terrible?

Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer are signed up again. The screenwriters have movies like The Hunger Games and Jungle Book to their credit. So it’s possible that it could be good if it actually does come to fruition. The plot is supposed to center around the transition from manned jets to drones. I can only guess that Maverick and Ice Man will have to save the day by flying manually when the drones fail spectactularly.

It’s been 30 years since Top Gun took flight. It’s still a great movie after all these years. Let’s hope that the sequel either doesn’t happen or is actually watchable. I wouldn’t bet heavily on either option though.

benmartens March 8, 2016 Commentary

Kirkland Plastic Bag Ban

As of March 1, you won’t be receiving plastic bags at checkout in Kirkland anymore. We live in Woodinville, but we’re right on the border with Kirkland and the Safeway we use most often is in Kirkland. Seattle and Issaquah made this change a while back but I guess I missed the fact that Kirkland was going to do this because it caught me by surprise. Now you either need to bring your own bags or pay $0.05 for a paper bag.

The council passed this last year and at that time, there were some surveys showing that over 60% of people were against this idea. I wasn’t included in that survey, but I agree. I’ve been doing a lot of whining this week about government actions, but this one frustrates me too.

The argument is that plastic bags are bad for landfills. I’m not going to disagree with that, but I disagree that this new law is the logical best course. Why couldn’t we ask/force stores to have a bin for recycling plastic bags? If you want to ban plastic bags, why are you making it a law that stores HAVE to charge $0.05 for a paper bag? Paper bags used to be free but now they cost money? Shouldn’t we be encouraging people to use paper because they are easier to recycle or even reuse without recycling.

I’ll just pay the nickel fee per bag, but I’m tempted to buy a stack of plastic bags and bring them with me. Techncally I think that complies with the law.

The good news is that these local laws are easier to complain about than state or federal laws. It’s probably too late to make any changes to this current situation, but I with such a small voting base, it’s not a stretch to remove these people from office in the next election. Councilmember Councilmember Toby Nixon was lone dissenting vote.

benmartens March 4, 2016 Commentary

Apple vs DOJ

This Apple situation is messy. The FBI chose a good battle ground. They know they probably don’t actually need anything on that specific phone. The shooter destroyed some other phones but left this one alone which indicates that he knew what type of data might be incriminating and this phone didn’t contain any. This phone was his business phone which means it belonged to his employer and he was employed by the local government. So a lot of the typical privacy arguments don’t apply here. He had signed a paper saying that his employer had a right to everything on that phone. So the government should have a right to get into the phone, right? Not quite…

All Apple phones (and lots of other brands too) are fully encrypted. If you don’t have the passcode, then not even Apple can break the encryption. Depending on the strength of your password, you potentially need more computing power than the world possesses right now to break the encryption. That’s a great thing, but there’s a loophole that the FBI is trying to exploit. They want Apple to create a custom version of the operating system that will allow them to guess the password to unlock the phone. Normally the operating system enforces a five second delay between guesses to make brute force guessing impractical. There’s also a limit on how many times you can guess incorrectly before the phone is completely locked forever. Those limits in the operating system can’t be easily removed. The phone is built so that it will only run an operating system that is digitally signed by Apple. This protects you against a lot of malware because there’s no way for an attacker to fake the digital signature. The government is trying to force Apple to create a one-off version of the operating system and sign it with their digital key. This would give the FBI the ability to try to guess the short password to unlock the phone. Once it’s unlocked then all the data is unencrypted and voila!

This sets a very scary precedent which basically says that no matter what great security and encryption measures a company puts in place, the government can force the company to break them. It’s a bad situation to be in because it doesn’t actually stop anyone from taking their security into their own hands and really keeping it safe. Additionally, this hurts American businesses because what other government is going to trust our products if they see a precedent like this get set?

This is a win-win for the FBI. If their request is granted, they have legally set an enormous precedent which gives them a huge amount of power. And if they lose, public outcry from less technical citizens will be for lawmakers to jump in and create some kind of “backdoor” loophole law for the future so that this kind of thing doesn’t happen again. This is probably an even worse situation than the legal precedent I just described in the last paragraph. If you create a back door or magic key to break security and encryption, you have effectively negated the benefits of that security system. The back door WILL be found by the bad guys and even worse, you won’t know when they find it or when they are using it. It’s impossible to create a perfectly secure back door.

The bottom line is what we should already know: if you have data that you need to protect, you need to be responsible for protecting your data. It is possible for you to encrypt and protect your data so that nobody else on the planet can break into it today. You’ll have to do your homework and keep up with the changes to keep improving and strengthening your process. Every year, computing power increases and we’re able to crack older security schemes.

Any issue like this is bound to get flamed into flames by the presidential election, but it’s good that people are talking about these topics. We need the courts to decide if it is our right to have data that is private or not. This case will go a long way toward deciding that. Hopefully, along the way, we’ll educate the general public about the pros and cons of the various outcomes instead of just inhaling the rhetoric from their side of the aisle. There’s no perfect answer but there are a lot of really bad ones that we need to avoid.

benmartens March 2, 2016 Commentary

405 HOT Lanes

The construction is over on the stretch of 405 by our house. There are now two HOT (High Occupancy Toll) lanes in each direction for the busiest stretch of road. This leaves three regular lanes for each direction. During rush hour periods, you can use the HOT lanes for free if you have 3 or more people in your vehicle. If you don’t have enough people, you can still use the lanes but you pay whatever fee is posted on the sign. It varies from $0.75 up to $10. They adjust the toll in real time to keep traffic in those lanes flowing above 45mph. Generally I see a $1-3 toll between the exits I use (roughly 8 miles.)

I have really mixed emotions about this project. On the one hand, it’s an awesome mix of data and social behavior. They know exactly how traffic is flowing and they can make mathematical adjustments, but those changes will have different effects on different people. So the same change might not work in two similar traffic situations because of other social or physical factors. I’d love to get access to that data feed. In fact, that’s one big way they could improve it. At least give me a data feed showing when my car used the lanes, which entry and exit points I used, etc. You can get your last 10 transactions from their poor website but it’s basically unusable as a data feed. Give me JSON with OAuth please. Even better, consider opening up all the data after removing the personally identifiable information.

On the other hand, this whole thing bothers me a lot. In this extremely liberal part of the country, I don’t understand how the general population approved a system that lets rich people get to work on time while poor people have to sit in traffic and be late. Doesn’t that seem unjust especially when lower paying jobs are more likely to be sticklers for showing up on time? I guess they justify it as “taxing the rich” which is heroic. Personally, I almost always refuse to use those lanes unless I’m qualified to use them for free. I want to be that data point that just mooches from the system. It’s my nerdy, tiny protest.

It’s hard to know if this has improved traffic flow or not. WSDOT has been very vocal in saying that it takes six months or so for the system to settle down. Some days there isn’t anyone on 405 and other days it’s a complete standstill. Eventually, people will settle into new traffic patterns, and then we can decide if it has improved traffic. My gut feeling is that yes, it has. I use Waze to help me figure out if I should take 405 or two different backroad routes home. Before this project, 90% of the time the answer would be backroads. Now I’m frequently using 405. Traffic still slows down around the entry/exit points into the HOT lanes, but otherwise it flows pretty well.

And there-in lies my biggest beef: it seems pretty obvious that this system was not optimized purely for better traffic flow. That drives me nuts. We have a very limited resource and instead of using it as efficiently as possible, the politicians have their money grubbing hands in it. The traffic engineers have all the data, and I bet if you told them to dream up the best solution, this would not have been it.

I have no data to back this up, but I think the two biggest improvements are:

There are a consistent 3 (non-paying) lanes of traffic. It used to expand and contract between 3 and 4 lanes. This created a lot of merge points and generally slowed things down. The consistent set of lanes has removed a lot of lane changing.
There are defined entry/exit points for the HOT lanes. Those lanes used to slow down because of “friction” with the main stopped lanes. It was a little scary being in the HOV lanes because you knew that somebody could decide to jump into those lanes at any point. Technically, that could still happen but now you’re crossing a double white line (actually in most places it’s 4 white lines), and there is a hefty fine for getting caught. This really improves the average speed the express lanes.

A lot of my opinions on this could potentially be changed if they’d release real data and models showing that this is the most efficient way to move people along the road. Instead we get tiny little stats and soundbites that they think “prove” their approach.

I’d love to see what would happen if we had the current layout but removed the carpool and monetary restrictions on the express lanes. Sure, the rich people would lose their speedy route, but on average, it seems like everyone would have a faster trip because we’d be closer to 100% utilization of 5 lanes instead of 3 booked lanes and 2 sparse ones. And since those two express lanes have limited entry/exit points, they would be more immune from lane changing. This isn’t a ground breaking idea. This is how express lanes are implemented in a lot of other cities.

The HOV/money part feels like politicians tacking on rules to make themselves feel like they are saving the environment and taxing the rich. Is that worth reducing the efficiency of the highway? Not in my book. With election season approaching, I have another chance to spit into the hurricane and vote for a different makeup of our state government.

benmartens March 1, 2016 Commentary

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

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

Studio711.com – Ben Martens

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