Studio711.com – Ben Martens

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.
1978 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.
1979 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.
1981 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.

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.
1991 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.
1995 Ford Taurus
Dad and Mom liked the first maroon Taurus so well that they bought another one six years later.
1999 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.
Mom, thank you for finding all this information!

I’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!

Before 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.

It’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.

By default, Cortana is disabled in Windows 10 but I recommend that you enable it. If you have a microphone, you can talk to your computer and ask questions, set reminders, search the internet, start apps, etc (and of course you can type to Cortana too.) It will be extra handy once all those reminders and alarms sync with the phone, but for now they just sync across your Windows 10 devices.

It’s really easy to turn it on. Either click the Search icon in your taskbar or press the Start button and type Cortana. Then click the little gear icon on the left side of the menu. The top toggle button asks if you want to turn Cortana on. Yes! After you turn it on the first time, it will walk you through some quick setup steps.

Now that you’re all set up, check out some of the cool things you can do with Cortana. This is one of those features that will keep getting better over time, but it’s already pretty useful. I love having Cortana on my phone, especially for the time and location-based reminders.