Studio711.com – Ben Martens

I’ve been getting a few Visa/AmEx/Mastercard gift cards for various things like rebates. They’re nice in that you can use them anywhere, but it’s a struggle for me to remember how much money is left and it’s not always easy to pay use the remainder of the gift card and then put the rest on another card. That’s when I realized that I could just take these gift cards, buy Amazon gift cards for the exact same amount, and then I don’t have to worry about it. At future checkouts, Amazon automatically pulls from my gift card balance first. Since we spend a ton of money there anyway, it works out really well.

A while back we checked out some of the knockoff jerseys that are widely available. They were close but disappointing. Thanks to Tyla’s parents, I now have an officially licensed jersey and it’s awesome! So what are the big differences? Well this photo shows the major problem I had:

The real jersey on the left has greens that match throughout the jersey. On the right, the green on the shoulders doesn’t match the green around the lettering. It seems small but it looks a bit silly in person and it’s obvious you’’ have a fake. Looking closer at it, you can also see that the stitching is fraying after a single wash.

Save your money and get the real thing.

It’s no secret that I love Amazon Prime. For relatively urgent items, the free 2-day shipping is good enough to save me a trip to the store. But for some items, I’m really not in a rush at all and I can wait a week. Amazon used to offer a $1 credit for Amazon movies, but since I never buy Amazon digital movies, I didn’t care. They have switched and are now offering a $1 credit towards books or ebooks. Now THAT’s a deal I’ll use! The downside is that these credits expire after about three months. Still, I expect to opt for the slower shipping quite a bit more often now.

Mike Rowe has a new show coming out and it’s called Somebody’s Gotta Do It. There is an article posted about how this landed on CNN and why it’s different from Dirty Jobs. I’m excited to see this new show because it sounds like it really aligns with Mike’s focus on the hardworking people of America. If you want a primer on his viewpoints, check out his TED talk from 2008.

I have almost everything turned off in my Facebook feed, but I do follow Mike Rowe. He writes some excellent articles that I wish more of our government leaders would read and take to heart.

“Somebody’s Gotta Do it” debuts Wednesday at 9pmET on CNN.

We live off of I-405 so we have been watching the huge construction project for the last couple years. The project page has all the details, but basically they are adding an HOT lane (carpoolers use it for free, single occupancy cars can pay to use it) and fixing the interchange where we live. Cars going from 405 to 522 had a hard time merging with cars going from 160th to 405.

I had thought that after the change, we wouldn’t be able to get onto 522 from 160th St anymore but it looks like they have accounted for that in the design. That’s great for us because it means we’ll be able to head out that way without driving through the traffic mess in Woodinville.

The people who bought those townhomes right along the new braided exit ramps are going to be treated to an enormous sound blocking wall right outside their balconies. They’re going from having a view that had about 3 or 4 rows of trees between them and 405 to seeing a concrete wall 10-20 feet away. Ouch. At least the real estate market is starting to recover around here so some of the decrease will be masked.

And since I mentioned real estate, here’s a semi-related factoid: the guy who bought our condo from us sold it a few months ago. He sold it for about 20% more than he bought it so he made a little money after all the fees and taxes. Our house has gone up about 3-4 times as much as that condo did though so I still think it was a good financial move. (And it was a great move for many other reasons.)

I’m continually amazed by people merging in front of big trucks and semis, especially as traffic is coming to a stop. I see it every day. Why do you think the truck is leaving that space? It’s so they don’t kill the people in front of them. I wonder if it would help to add a “big rig ride along” day as part of driver’s ed. Students would go ride with a professional driver for an hour or so. Drivers would learn a lot about how long it takes to stop a truck and what cars do that is dangerous around trucks. There are likely a lot of legal and liability issues with that idea, but if implemented correctly, it might improve our overall safety.

I thought a lot about this last weekend while driving around a 5300lb truck pulling 10,000 pounds of trailer and dirt. It’s the truck driver’s responsibility to be safe, but just in the short time I was driving that rig, there were at least a couple people who were saved from a messy death only because I guessed ahead of time that they were going to do something stupid.

When Tyla asked what I wanted to eat for my birthday dinner, I said “BACON LOG!” It’s been a long time since we’ve made one and sitting outside in the sunshine by a smoker for a few hours seemed like a good way to spend the day. Don got in on the action too and decided to smoke a brisket. He really went all out marinating it for two days and then starting the smoker at midnight. He got up every couple hours to check on it. He also chopped up two grill baskets full of veggies. Thanks Don! While we had all that going, we also cooked up a new batch of hot sauce. This time we did it with all mango instead of including some papaya. Logan dubbed this one “Yellow Fever.” It came out delicious though Logan claims the Agent Orange recipe is better.

There was so much delicious food that day. Thank you to everyone for helping to put it together and for letting me fulfill my dream of making another bacon long!

Happy Birthday to me! More and more things make me feel old. The latest one was this video that went around showing teenagers playing the original Nintendo. It’s hilarious, sad and face-palm at the same time.

Having just switched into a new role at work, I’m keenly aware of the various stages of learning that I’m progressing through. I think it can be broken down into three stages:

1. What? I look at this list of things you want me to do and I have no idea what any of them even mean.
2. How? Ok, now I understand what you’re talking about but I don’t know how to make progress on these tasks.
3. Why? I’m a productive member of the team, but I don’t really understand the history and philosophy of why we’re doing these tasks.

I’d say with my job right now I’m generally in stage 3 (though there are some areas where I’m still borderline 1/2.) Jumping into a brand new group is disconcerting, but it sure feels good to learn new stuff!

There is a site for everything on the internet. It’s nearly impossible to come up with an idea that doesn’t exist already. But I’ve got one and I’m giving it away for free. As best I can tell, there is no good website that has downloadable (either free or for purchase) woodworking plans along with user reviews of the quality of each plan. Think about having a shopping experience like Amazon.com except it’s all woodworking plans. You could have customer submitted images of each project, reviews saying how good or bad each plan is and a catalog that is both browsable and searchable. Creators could upload their plans and get money from people who buy the plans.

There are actually some sites out there that attempt to collect plans but they are ancient at best and generally they’re indistinguishable from spam sites. They’re flooded with dead links.

Why doesn’t this exist? Somebody please take the idea and run with it! All I want in return is a link to the finished site so I can use it.