Studio711.com – Ben Martens

On the baseball field, we used to say that “he’s so bad he couldn’t catch a cold.” Oh so funny, I know, but what about when the weather turns cold? Do you remember hearing that you should dress warm so you don’t catch a cold?

It’s amazing how long this saying has survived. Back before Louis Pasteur figured out germs in the 1860s, this was a pretty valid saying. But now that we know that germs make you sick, why would you say that the temperature of the air can have an effect on your health?

This probably started because winter is cold and flu season. You’re more likely to stay inside which means you probably have more contact with other people which means diseases spread more easily.

Of course, cold weather can hurt you physically. If it gets cold enough, you’ll get hypothermia, frostbite, etc. But just walking outside without a hat when it’s 20 degrees is not going to make you more likely to get sick.

I spent the first eight years at this company with the title of “Software Development Engineer in Test.” A few months back, there was a company-wide change and now there’s no such thing as someone who specializes in testing. We’re all “Software Engineers” and we’re all expected to both develop and test the product in our normal daily work. There are pros and cons to each method, but I think the switch is going to be a good move and aligns us with the current industry trends. The idea is that you’re responsible for your feature from the time it’s planned, while it’s being written, as it’s being readied for shipping, and while the customer is using it (telemetry, etc.) You own it and you don’t get to hand it off to anyone to be your safety net.

So now I’m not only out of the manager track and back in the individual contributor pool, but I’m also a “software engineer” instead of a “software development engineer in test.” They’re both pretty big changes to my day-to-day activities but I’m still loving my job!

Back in October, I finally decided on some Christmas lights and bought them. I decided to go with really nice stuff and add a little bit each year since it’s a little pricey. Tim came over to lend a hand and we got them up in under an hour. I’m really happy with the end result, but I’m eager to add more next year.

On a side note, I find it interesting that the house lights show up as different shades of white. It’s not very obvious to the naked eye. The three on the left are LED and the one up by the house is still CFL. Looking at it without a camera, it appears that all the colors of white (including the Christmas lights) match which was the intended goal.

Around this time of year, it literally pays to watch the gift card section of Safeway. They regularly have deals for 2-3x gas reward points when you buy gift cards. That’s a reasonably good deal, but until 12/9 they have an even better one: $10 off your next visit when you buy $100 in gift cards.

Amazon is included in the list and since we normally spend a lot of money there anyway, I threw a $100 Amazon gift card into my cart. Including the extra gas rewards, that means I just got ~$12 in free money. Sure it’s not a lot, but for almost zero effort, it’s worth it. All I had to do was come home and type the code into my Amazon account. Easy!

I didn’t see any limit to the number of times you can do this.

We were carrying a box through the garage and accidentally dropped one on the Subaru. Bummer! It’s not a huge deal on an 8 year old car with lots of other dents and scratches, but since I’m hoping to trade it in some day, I thought it would be nice to try and fix it, but I wasn’t willing to pay a shop to do it.

Some quick searching around online revealed that most of the “as seen on TV” dent remover kits are really just hot glue and some pressure. So I headed to the garage, chopped a spare 3/4” dowel rod into a few short pieces, and ran a screw through them to give me something to grip.

I started with an old dent on the passenger side door made someone’s by an errant golf shot. I cleaned the area, hot glued the dowel to the car and then waited about 5 minutes. When I pulled on it, it came off very quickly leaving most of the glue on the car. So I heated up the glue on the car with a heat gun and added a little fresh hot glue too. I waited five more minutes and this second attempt stuck MUCH better. The dowel eventually popped off under my pulling but not before removing most of the dent. It was enough success to try it on the front fender.

The same process repeated itself with the first attempt pulling off too easily. The second attempt stuck so well that I decided I’d gotten it as good as I could get it and the dowel never popped off. I was concerned about pulling any harder on the sheet metal because it was starting to pull up from the headlight area and I didn’t want to break anything. After using the heat gun to melt the glue and get the dowel off, I used the heat gun and Goo Gone to remove the rest of the hot glue.

The pictures might not show it perfectly, but it greatly reduced the size of the dent. It’s FAR from perfect. There’s still a dent though it’s probably 70-80% smaller and there are still scratches in the paint, but it’s good enough now that I’m going to leave it alone.

If I had a nicer vehicle, I wouldn’t try this, but for an older beater, why not?

I have some very generous friends. For the front yard project, Tim and Brent loaned me their tractor, Don loaned me his Chevy 2500 diesel truck, and my neighbor Randy loaned me his dual axle dump trailer. We ran all that equipment very hard on the first Saturday of the front yard project. We moved 50-60 yards of sod and dirt in 14 loads. Each load was at least an hour round trip to a spot where Tim’s friend let us dump it for free (saving us $1500-2000!) The only catch was that getting up to the dump spot required powering straight up an extremely straight driveway towing 5-6 tons. We had to put the truck in 4 low just to make it up the hill, and man, you should have heard that diesel screaming up the hill! It was nothing that the truck couldn’t handle, but it was pretty impressive.

On the final run, Tim stuck his phone out the window to record it. Of course the video doesn’t even come close to doing it justice. The hill looks way steeper in person. Before you watch it, picture that you’re driving $50-60K worth of somebody else’s equipment on somebody else’s property and if you slide back down the hill you’re going straight through somebody else’s house into the river. No pressure.

I’m proud to say that I was part of the first fan-funded television show in history! Many of you know Zane Lamprey from previous shows like Three Sheets and Drinking Made Easy. He travels around the world, learns local drinking customs and has a good time doing it. I previously wrote about his Kickstarter to fund a new TV show. His plan was to put in a bunch of his own money, raise money from fans, and then produce a TV show that he would market to networks. It was an easier sales pitch because their cost to produce the content was $0.

Zane has inked a deal with the National Geographic Channel and Chug premieres on Monday, November 24th at 10:30pm (ET/PT). I’ve watched the whole season and love it! Please check it out if you get a chance and then go talk about it on Twitter, etc so that it will get picked up for a second season.

This is a very cool way to make content. The only thing better would be if he had skipped old media and just sold it directly on the web or done a deal with Netflix or Amazon Prime.

The trailer for the new series is on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/104074272

Some very disturbing news has come to light about what cell phone companies are doing with your browsing habits. As data from your phone goes through their servers and out into the internet, they add a uniquely identifiable tag to all of your data. Whoever is on the other end of your request (web pages, ads on those pages, etc) all get that tag. Companies can then pay the cell phone company to convert that tag to information about YOU. This is a goldmine for advertisers because Verizon has an extremely accurate picture about everything you do from your phone and they also have tons of personal data about you. Lovely.

Here are a few places where you can read more:

• http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/10/29/the-privacy-lowdown-on-verizon-and-atts-permacookies/
• http://www.wired.com/2014/10/verizons-perma-cookie/

This is pretty disgusting. Although they say you can opt out, it doesn’t do much good because they still add that tag to all your traffic. They just don’t have your permission to sell the data about you. But even a unique identifier across all of your traffic is pretty ugly.

The only way to really avoid this is to only browse to secure websites (https) because that traffic is encrypted. Or of course you can only use wifi instead of your cellular data, but the point of a smartphone is that you can connect everywhere. The best solution is to let your carrier hear what you think of this policy.

To test whether your carrier is doing this to you, open the following link on your cell phone. Make sure that wifi is turned off so that you’re using your cellular data plan: http://lessonslearned.org/sniff

The cost of a gallon of gas has been plummeting in the last few weeks. The following chart shows prices for the last 10 years.

I posted something about this on Facebook and Mom commented that gas prices always go down in election years. Well is that true?

Thanks to the wonderful interwebz, there are already a few studies that have done all the heavy lifting. It turns out that on average, prices fall around this time of year, but they fall more during election years. I recommend reading the full article from BusinessWeek, but here’s a key paragraph:

From 1991 to 2012, national gasoline prices fell by an average of 3.27 percent each year between the July 4th weekend (when demand tends to peak) and the first week of November. During presidential election years, prices fell by more than twice as much, 7.6 percent. Factoring in congressional election years (every even-numbered year), the average price decline is 5.35 percent. The smallest effect happens during odd-numbered years, when no candidates are running for the House of Representatives or Senate, though five states do hold gubernatorial elections. In those years, prices declined by only 0.6 percent.

Whatever the reason, I’m happily filling my tank for $2.89/gallon!

After a spectacular summer, October has been WET. You might scoff and say that Seattle is always we this time of year. That’s sort of true. It’s usually wet but it’s rare that we get much total precipitation. Coupled with a very rainy February, we are already at our normal average rainfall for the full year.

Related to that heavy rainfall this fall, we’ve also had a very warm month with the average temps in October being 6-10 degrees above normal. That’s why we still have so many trees with leaves on them. There’s no change in sight for this warm, wet weather.

(All of the info for this post came from Cliff Mass’s excellent area weather blog.)