Studio711.com – Ben Martens

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

Commentary

Berlin Wall

The Microsoft campus has lots of art in all of the buildings. There’s so much of it, that it’s easy to walk right by without paying much attention. But if you walk into the main conference center, take a minute to stop and look at that huge, graffiti-covered cement wall. It’s an original piece of the Berlin Wall! The piece was a gift to Bill Gates and he has it on display in the conference center.

benmartens June 10, 2015 Commentary

Limited Time

On a recent episode of the Making It podcast, Bob Claggett recommended episode 220 of the Back To Work podcast. In that episode, Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin discuss how you manage requests from other people. Their talk covers ways to manage notifications from your phone (turn them off!) to managing the flood of email that you get each day. If you listen to the episode, it takes a few minutes for them to get into the topic and then they wrap it up around the one hour mark.

It’s well-worth a listen if you spend most of your day in front of the computer because there are seemingly infinite distractions. I feel my phone vibrate and need to look to see what it is. I see emails popping up in various email folders and feel the need to get that count back down to zero. People start email or IM conversations and impose their own expectations on my time. If I don’t respond right away, I’m being rude. All of these things mean that it’s easy to spend my entire day context switching between 30 second tasks when in reality, they are not all of equal priority.

There’s no easy answer but the podcast covers a lot of ideas in the area. In the past I’ve had great success with keeping my email closed and only looking at it during defined periods of time. This podcast encouraged me to start that process again and I also disabled a whole bunch of notifications on my phone. We’ll see how it goes.

benmartens June 5, 2015 Commentary

Windows 10 Notification

If you’re running Windows 7 or Windows 8, you may be noticing a new notification down by your system clock. It gives you the option to update to Windows 10, reserve your copy, etc. What is that all about?

Windows 10 is going to be released on July 29. For the first year, it will be a free upgrade for existing Windows users and it sounds like this might be the “last version” of Windows 10. That probably means that they’re just going to keep updating Windows without having major version releases and it probably also means that the future updates will be free. I don’t know how firmly any of that is decided or announced though.

If you’re really interested, you can get it now. I’ve been running it on one of my extra machines at work and it’s just fine. However, even though they say they’re getting finished with the final production code, PLEASE remember that if you upgrade early, you’re potentially putting your sanity at risk. Personally, I won’t put pre-release software on any critical machine and for me that, that means my main home and work computers, my phone or anything that Tyla uses. The cons far outweigh the pros in my book, but you can decide for yourself. The odds are that it will work fine for you.

The Windows 10 update notification also gives you the option to “reserve” your copy of Windows 10. It appears that this just sets a flag to download Windows 10 in the background and then notify you once it’s ready later in July. I’ve done this on most of my machines and it’s probably a good idea unless you’re super paranoid. For example, I’m not doing this on our main file server. I’ll wait a month or two before upgrading that one.

The new features in Windows 10 are pretty nice. You can easily find articles about them on the web, but here are a few:

The start button is back and it brings up a start menu that looks more like Windows 7. I think that on a tablet you might still get the full screen Windows 8 style start menu, but otherwise, it will look more like what you had before. (At least that’s the default, I think you can change it to Windows 8 style all the time if you love it.)
Cortana is in your PC now. You can ask her questions straight from your desktop and get answers from your local computer, the web, etc. You can tell her to do things like “move my appointment from 4pm to 5pm” or “remind me in 20 minutes to check the oven.” It’s pretty convenient on the phone so hopefully it will translate well to the computer.
There’s a new web browser called “Edge”. Internet Explorer will still be there but it won’t be the main browser. Edge is more comparable to Chrome and Firefox (in good ways) so expect a faster browsing experience and better security.
There have been some cool announcements about plugging your phone into your computer and using your keyboard and mouse with the phone that is now displaying on the screen as well as some announcements about interactions with an Xbox. I haven’t dug too deeply but I’m interested.

To sum it up, everyone should update to Windows 10 but you can wait until later this summer to do it. Just make sure you do it before next summer or else you might have to pay for the privilege.

benmartens June 2, 2015 Commentary

Card Catalogs

As a parent, I now spend a lot of time thinking about how differently my son will grow up than I did. For example, instead of a 30 minute car ride planned days in advance, Elijah can see his friends from his back yard. Instead of living in the woods, the woods are a place we visit.

But being a nerd, most of my thoughts center around his experiences with technology. My generation is the last one who ever wrote a school paper using both a card catalog and something online (or from the Encarta CD-ROMs.) It was completely valid to hear someone say they looked up a topic in the book because nobody had written about it on the internet yet. And I vividly remember a world with no internet at all. That’s going to sound like making fire with sticks to my kids, not to mention my grandkids.

I also wonder how much every parent feels this way. I feel like my generation was pretty lucky to have experienced the world with no internet, but still be young enough to quickly adopt it as it grew. What other generations have had experiences like this? Our grandparents rode horses and buggies when they were young but transitioned to cars. That’s probably comparable but it was stretched out over a much bigger chunk of their lives.

And as I wrote about a couple weeks ago, what really blows my mind is to think about what tech is going to be like in 30 more years. Remember, technology advances exponentially, not linearly. Think about tech 30 years ago and compare it to today. Now double or maybe event quadruple that difference and that’s what 30 years more will look like.

I wonder if I’ll still be blogging.

benmartens June 1, 2015 Commentary

Safeway Flowers

Buying flowers for your spouse at the grocery store might not the most romantic way to give flowers (where romantic equals expensive), but Tyla gets really excited when I get them there instead of somewhere else. Why? Safeway flowers are magical. They seem to last FOREVER! Case in point: I bought flowers for Tyla on Friday, May 8. The photo below is what the flowers looked like when we came back from vacation on eight days later. You can hardly tell that they aren’t fresh! We’ll easily get two weeks, sometimes three out of the flowers. Try that with a fancy bouquet from the florist!

I suspect that it has something to do with the type of flowers that Safeway generally uses in their arrangements, but the end result is that we get pretty flowers for a very long time for a good price. Seems like a good deal to me.

benmartens May 22, 2015 Commentary

Slow Netflix

While I’m excited about all the streaming options available for TV and movies, I’m still a fan of the Netflix disc service. I get full quality movies and a much bigger selection. Netflix disc service used to be a great option. I would ship out a disc on Monday and have the next one in my mailbox on Wednesday. It has slowed way down though and I think it’s because the discs appear to be going all the way to California whereas previously there was a distribution center in Seattle. This means that if I ship a disc out on Monday, I don’t get the next one until about Friday. Those extra days really cut down on the value I get from the service and has made me drop it. I’m going to try to use Red Box more since it’s cheaper anyway.

benmartens May 21, 2015 Commentary

Sport Brella Review

After having three hunks of flesh cut out of me because they were suspiciously heading towards skin cancer, it should be no surprise that I don’t mess around with sunburn anymore. Having a kid has amplified that since they can burn so easily. Tyla and I saw a “Sport Brella” at a concert in the park one time and decided to pick one up.

It’s basically a big umbrella that isn’t quite round on the top and it lays down on the ground to provide shade. You can stake it into the ground if it’s windy and the pole of the umbrella drives into the ground too. It sets up in a matter of seconds and does a great job providing shade anywhere you need it.

We don’t use it a ton, but we’re always thankful when we do get it out.

benmartens May 15, 2015 Commentary

Grill Care

I’ve seen a lot of people crank up their gas grill after they take the meat off to burn off the remainder of whatever was cooking. I did the same thing for many years too. But after I got my Weber Genesis, I found out straight from Weber that this is a bad idea. Very high temps are fine if you really need to cook something that way, but doing it every single time you cook puts a lot of extra wear and tear on the grill. There shouldn’t be any need to burn anything off if you have good grill grates.

So give your grill a rest. Maybe you want to brush it while it’s hot but otherwise, just let it cool down while you eat and then scrape it off.

benmartens May 14, 2015 Commentary

Tom and Jerry

One of my favorite cartoons growing up was Tom and Jerry. Listening to the latest Hardcore History episode, I learned that Germans called British solders “Tommy” and British called the Germans “Jerry.”. That really put a new spin on the cartoon series! … Until I learned that it wasn’t actually were the name came from. In fact, in the original episode of Tom and Jerry, Tom’s name was “Jasper.”

Or at least this is what the Internet tells me. If you can find otherwise and prove that Tom and Jerry were really named after those nicknames then I think I’ll like the cartoon even more!

benmartens May 13, 2015 Commentary

The Fridge

I had a random thought while putting away the groceries: why do we call that cold box in the kitchen a “refrigerator” instead of just a “frigerator”? What is frigeration and why does this box redo it?

The answer is pretty boring (so I thought it would fit in perfectly with the other blog posts here). The word “refrigerate” comes from the Latin refrigeratus, past participle of refrigerare “make cool or cold.” So the “re” part of the word isn’t the prefix that means to do again.

benmartens May 12, 2015 Commentary