Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Commentary

My First Car

cars_mustangLast week’s post about the cars we had when I was growing up got me thinking about the experience of picking up the first car that I ever purchased: a 2002 Ford Mustang GT. It was a beautiful car, and I bought it right after college. The dealer had to transfer it in from another dealership so I couldn’t drive it off the lot after making the deal. Mom took me to pick it up a few days later when it arrived at the dealer. After getting the keys, I sat down in the car to drive it away for the first time. I looked up and noticed about four sales guys watching me from the window. With my foot on the brake, I disengaged the parking brake, put it in reverse, slowly released the clutch and… stalled it. My face turned bright red as I restarted the engine and gave it plenty of gas to make sure I didn’t stall it twice.

It doesn’t sound so bad now that I write it out, but this event sticks out in my head as one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. I’ve stalled cars plenty of times, but never with all those guys laughing at me and my fancy new car that they probably thought my parents purchased for me.

Storing Gasoline

I lived much of my life not realizing that gas has a relatively short shelf life. I figured it out by sending one of church’s mowers to the mechanic because it was running terribly. The result? He replaced the gas and it ran beautifully. The gas had gone bad sitting in the shed over the winter.

Common estimates say that after about 3 months, your ethanol blended gas (which is almost everything you buy these days) should be thrown away and replaced. If you put Sta-Bil or some other fuel stabilizer in it, you might get 6-12 months. The longer you store the gas, the more water that the ethanol attracts. Watered down gas is a mess for your engine to deal with. At best you’ll get decreased fuel mileage and power, but in extreme cases you can really mess up your vehicle.

It’s not a big deal in cars because we generally run through the tanks of gas pretty quickly. It’s a more common problem in lawn equipment. During the winter months, that gas is effectively rotting in your shed and gums up your carburetor.

To help avoid these problems, I do a few things:

  1. Whenever I fill up our gas can, I set a reminder to replace it in two months. The can is pretty small so I usually just pour it into my car’s gas tank when the car is already mostly full. I figure it can deal with a gallon or two of older gas mixed in with 10 gallons of good gas.
  2. The last time I fill up the lawnmower for the season, I use ethanol free gasoline. You can buy it from special gas stations, or you can pick up a can from the home center. It’s not cheap but spending a couple extra bucks to save yourself the headache of cleaning a carburetor is probably worth it.
  3. My weedwacker accepts multiple attachments so I can also use it as a leaf blower and an edger. It gets used pretty often during the spring, summer and fall, but even then, I hardly go through any gas. Rather than keep a small gas can with oil-mixed gas that will go bad before I use it all, I just buy the premixed ethanol free gas. It lasts “forever” and I don’t have to remember where I put the oil to mix in.

It costs a little extra but these simple steps can save you time, headaches and money.

trufuel

P.S. It feels like I just wrote an eHow article. Ew.

Childhood Cars

I’ve been spending a lot of time dreaming and learning about my potential next vehicle purchase (TRUCK!) and it got me to thinking about all the vehicles I’ve owned over the years and the cars that Mom and Dad have owned. I asked Mom to dig up photos of all the cars they owned together (until I left the house) and here’s the list:

1973 Ford Gran Torino Sport
Dad loved this car. He actually kept it until probably the late 80s though it didn’t run at that point. He gave it to a neighbor who restored it.
momdad_torino1978 Ford Mustang II
I don’t remember this car. The only thing I remember about this car is a story Mom and Dad tell about driving through Nevada (?) and it was so hot that it felt like being in an oven.
momdad_mustang1979 Ford LTD
This is the first car that I remember. Dad used to hold me on his lap and let me drive down our quarter-mile long driveway in this car. I didn’t know it until Mom sent over the info for this post, but this is the only car that they purchased from a used car lot. A couple others were used cars as well, but those were purchased from friends and relatives.
momdad_ltd1981 Mercury Grand Marquis
This car belonged to Great Grandpa Hinkle. Mom and Dad bought it from Great Grandma after Great Grandpa passed away. The only thing that I remember about this car was that a bottle of acid for the pool accidentally spilled on the floor behind the drivers seat and ate through the floor mat. Oops.
momdad_marquis
1989 Ford Taurus
I have a ton of memories about this car. For one thing, it’s the first car that I remember them purchasing. I was so excited about how “small” it was. I remember doodling the dashboard layout while sitting in Miss Loescher’s class. And this was the car that I drove to high school. By the time I got it, some of the paint was starting to flake off the gray part on the bottom and there was a little rust on the maroon parts. I tried to grind off the rust and repaint both parts. It wasn’t a great idea.
momdad_taurus1991 Ford Probe
Dad and Mom bought this from Uncle Mark who works for Ford (which explains all the Fords…) and what a cool car it was! It came with a stain on the floor in the backseat from where cousin Ryan had accidentally spilled an orange pop. I spent a ton of time in this car as well. In the photo you can see me driving it to prom. I took this to college for about three of my years at Purdue and drove it during my internships at John Deere. I got over 40mpg from it! It was also the start of my love for manual transmissions. I started driving this around 1999 and drove a manual from the until now.
momdad_probe1995 Ford Taurus
Dad and Mom liked the first maroon Taurus so well that they bought another one six years later.
momdad_taurus951999 Mercury Sable
And last but not least (while I was living there) is the Mercury Sable. This one was extra fancy. It had leather seats and a six disc CD changer in the trunk.
momdad_sableMom, thank you for finding all this information!

Firefly

FireflySay the word “Firefly” around a sci-fi geek and they’ll get all giddy and sad at the same time. The show only ran for one season (14 episodes) back in 2002 but it has a huge following. The show isn’t super high budget, but it’s plenty to be entertaining. It unabashedly mashes the western genre together with sci-fi and the result is great. The premise is that humans have been expanding across the galaxy and the outer planets were settled with basically people and some livestock. The show follows some a crew on a ship that takes whatever transport jobs they can find whether or not they skirt the edge of the law.

It’s all available for free on Amazon Instant Video if you have a Prime subscription. I finally watched the show and loved it, but now, like other fans, I’m disappointed that it’s over and there are no more available!

Job Change

microsoft-azure-logoI’ve been at Microsoft for over 9 years and in that time, I’ve worked on a bunch of different teams. However, I never went out and LOOKED for a new team. I was just moved around in reorgs. That kept me generally happy and I got to peak inside a bunch of different organizations. The key thread through all of those jobs as BI (business intelligence.) I spent a lot of time on Power Query and the language research that led into. Then Power Query joined in with the whole Power BI effort and I moved from the Power Query team into a data engineering/analytics team. Over those years my job title changed from Test Engineer to Test Lead to Software Engineer. All of these changes have been good and have increased my knowledge. This latest team, Power BI, has been really awesome. We went from nothing to a shipping product in about a year and we’re really shaking things up. This is almost certainly Microsoft’s next billion dollar business. (Go sign up. It’s free and easy. http://powerbi.com)

One of the great things about being in a company like this is the opportunity for changing teams without changing companies. There are SO many things that I want to work on in this company that I’ll never scratch the surface. All it takes to change teams is a few emails, some interviews and bam, new job.

So for the first time in 9 years, I took advantage of that opportunity and I’m voluntarily changing to a new team. I’m going to stay in the big data technology space, but I’m swithcing to the Azure Compute team. This is one of the core groups inside of Microsoft Azure. Azure is the cloud computing offering from Microsoft. It started 4 years after the more popular “Amazon Web Services”, but it’s rapidly catching up according to Gartner’s latest report. You can also check out some of the recent financial disclosures to understand how Azure is one of the key bets for the future of the company and it’s going exceedingly well.

My new group handles the vast number of physical and virtual machines that are at the heart of the service. And my specific team is focused on customer analytics. Are you getting what you pay for when you use Azure? What areas are good or painful? What features can we add to make it even better? There is a LOT of telemetry and feedback data available and I’m eager to dip my hands into that pot.

While this feels like a brand new job, it’s awesome that my paycheck, benefits, title and commute are unchanged. Thanks to Microsoft for giving me so many opportunities to pursue my interests!

Upgrading Christmas Lights

I’m planning to slowly improve our Christmas lights from year to year. This year I’m going to put lights around each of the three garage doors. I’m trying to figure out if I should do the red/white pattern there too or if I should go all white. Here’s a reminder of what we had last year. This year there will be lights around the top, left and right of each of the three garage doors.

christmaslights2014

Vote in the poll below and share your opinion!

Fantasy Football – Week 3

2015week3_aaronrodgersThe Seahawks finally put a tally mark in the win column against the hapless, injured Bears. Yay. The first half looked pitiful. I don’t see how they can get very far in the playoffs (if they even make it) given their offensive line situation. It’s a mess. And yes, Kam is back. I would have loved it if Pete benched him for the first half, but whatever. Hopefully they’ll dump him at the end of the season and get a couple offensive linemen.

Our league had some really high scores. Jim got his first win, but the big news is that Tim set an all-time record for single week points. And he could have had another 15 points with a perfect roster! I’m now the only undefeated team but I expect to break that streak next week when I have a really tough bye week situation.

Now on to the weekly awards.

This Week Season All-Time
Highest Team Score Tim 200.51 Was Ben 145.30  (Week 1) Was Tim 195.50 (2013)
Lowest Team Score Luke 102.53 Andy 70.73 (Week 2) Luke 47.01 (2011)
Biggest Blowout Tim beat Austin by 48.50 Ben beat Dad by 60.90 (Week 1) Luke beat Andy by 113.02 (2010)
Closest Win Jim beat Luke by 5.18 Austin beat Jim by 2.49 (Week 2) Jim beat Ben by 0.12 (2012)
Highest Scoring Player Aaron Rodgers had 44.92 for Tim Was Ben Roethlistberger had 36.66 for Dad (Week 2) Peyton Manning had 60.28 for Andy (2013)
Longest Winning Streak Ben has a 3 game winning streak Was Ben, Logan, and Austin have 2 game winning streaks (Week 2) Micah had an 8 game winning streak (2011)
Longest Losing Streak Luke and Andy have 3 game losing streaks Was Jim, Luke, and Andy have 2 game losing streaks. (Week 2) Kyle had a 14 game losing streak (2011)

Don’t forget that there is a very early game in London on Sunday so make sure your rosters are set.

Power Rankings return next week!

Arm And Cross Check

armdoorsBefore you take off on a flight, you’ll hear “Flight attendants, arm and cross check doors for departure” and then when you land you hear a similar message about disarming the doors. Have you ever stopped to wonder what that actually means?

Once the main cabin doors are closed, they need to have the emergency slides made ready to fire in case the doors are opened in an emergency. Cross checking means that they go across the plane to make sure the flight attendant on the other side did theirs correctly.

Music Tastes

goodmusictasteIf I flip on some music, I generally turn to a country station. But over the last few years, I’ve become more and more frustrated with country music to the point where I installed my own FM whole-house transmitter to play the country music that I enjoy. Today’s country music has strayed a long way from it’s roots and every song is about a truck in a field with a bonfire.

I’m a grumpy old man. I get that. But it looks like I’m more normal than I thought.

A study from a few months ago shows that people around my age “discover less-familiar music genres that they didn’t hear on FM radio as early teens, from artists with a lower popularity rank. Second, listeners are returning to the music that was popular when they were coming of age — but which has since phased out of popularity.” I’d say that sums me up pretty well. The study also shows that if you are male and/or a parent, the effect is increased.

So I may be a grumpy old man, but at least I’m not alone. Get off my lawn!

TV Season Premieres

muppets2015It’s that time of year when new TV shows start up again. Tyla and I have been cutting down the number of shows that we watch, but there are still a few that we enjoy (marked in bold below.) I’m going to give the new Muppets show a try too since I liked the old one so much. The others I’ve included because I know some of you watch them.

9/14 – Dancing With The Stars (ABC)
9/21 – The Big Bang Theory (CBS)
9/22 – The Muppets (ABC)
9/23 – The Middle (ABC)
9/23 – Modern Family (ABC)
9/23 – Survivor (CBS)
9/25 – The Amazing Race (CBS)

If you want the full list, check out Metacritic.