Studio711.com – Ben Martens

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.)

I see them everywhere: red vending machines that shoot out movies and put a bullet in the head of Blockbuster stores. It’s a great way to distribute discs, but I had never tried it. We always used Netflix. But since Elijah was born, we’ve canceled our Netflix subscriptions (both the disc and the streaming) because we don’t have much time to watch movies anymore. My team at work is going to see the new Hunger Games movie when it comes out and I wanted to see the second movie.

My first thought was that I’d just stream it from somewhere. I checked CanIStream.It and was surprised to see that the cheapest option was around $12. Really? $12 to watch a movie in my own home? No thanks. That’s when I decided to give Red Box a try. They rent BluRays for only $1.50/day.

Their website makes it easy to search for a specific movie and find the closest machine that has it in stock. You can even pay for it online and reserve the disc. I did that, drove to Fred Meyer, walked up to machine B, swiped my card and out popped the disc. Brilliant!

If we go back to watching lots of movies, I think I prefer the Netflix model but this is great for those instances when you want a specific disc RIGHT NOW.

Hobby time is precious when you have a young one in the house. Given that, I continue to evaluate my various hobbies to understand what I get out of them. Lately I’ve been thinking about what I learn from each hobby beyond the physical skills.

• Trap Shooting: Performance under pressure.
  Once you get the hang of it, trap shooting is a hugely mental activity. Sure there are lots of physical aspects to keep in mind and to analyze when you get on a bad streak, but when you’re in the zone, the hardest part is focusing on one shot at a time. It’s easy at the start of the round, but once I start getting close to a perfect round, it’s incredible how my body reacts. My hands get clammy, my mind is racing with what kind of victory dance I’m going to do, and my arms literally start shaking. With experience, I’ve gotten better at controlling it, but the last time we were out and I hit 24 straight, my last shot was almost comically bad. This feels a lot like my (very) old days of high school baseball. Standing alone on the pitchers mound in high pressure situations is another mind game. I’ve thrown tens of thousands of pitches, but I had to overcome the mental pressure to throw one more.
• Woodworking: Sometimes perfection is required.
  Over the past 5-10 years, I’ve become a big proponent of “done is better than perfect.” There are so many cases where you simply being done is a lot more beneficial than taking it from 95% correct to 100% correct. Woodworking isn’t usually one of those cases. Small errors along the way pile up into bigger and bigger problems until I just wish I could go back to the beginning and start over. A well-done project is a wonderful reward and a constant reminder that sometimes it pays to spend extra time and get closer to perfection.
• Remote Control Flying: Failure is ok as long as you learn from it.
  You can’t fly RC planes without experiencing crashes. Lots of them. If you’re lucky, your crash results in a quick repair, but sometimes you end up with bits of plane scattered across the field. If you can’t pick up the pieces (literally and emotionally) and still want to keep going, this isn’t the hobby for you. It takes a different mindset to watch tens of hours of work explode in a couple seconds. But if you stop there, you probably WILL get fed up because you’ll keep repeating the mistakes. Each crash has something to teach me. Loose connection? Incorrectly configured transmitter? Lapse of focus? Misjudged the conditions? It’s fine to fail once, but repeating the same mistake over and over again is not only painful and costly, it means you’re not taking the opportunity to learn from your mistakes.
• Skiing: Be humble and keep pushing.
  As people get into skiing (including me), they seem to progress from someone who knows they are a newbie, to someone who thinks they are awesome because they can ski circles around everyone they see, to someone who finally realizes that there is more to life than the groomed runs and there are a LOT of people who are infinitely better than you. Going to that last phase is humbling but it’s awesome. You realize that you can never master it all so you pick one area and try to improve until you decide to move on to another area. Once you’re in that phase, the challenge is continuing to push yourself. It’s so easy for me to stick with what I know and enjoy instead of doing something that makes me a little nervous or is just a little beyond my abilities. There’s a popular saying, “If you’re not falling, you’re not learning.”

I think you could take any one of these and easily see how the lessons from the hobby are easily extrapolated into general life. These lessons are an added benefit to the physical enjoyment of the hobby and hopefully help us improve ourselves beyond the skillset that we’ve learned.

We grew up in the middle of the woods and pretty much no one ever saw our house except us and our guests. We put up a few lights to enjoy ourselves, but as far as a public display goes, there was no point. Ever since I moved into more populated areas, I’ve wanted to get into Christmas lights, but I’ve been hemming and hawing over exactly what I want to do. This past weekend, I finally took the plunge.

Tim and Chelsea have alternating red and white bulbs on their house and I really like that look. Unfortunately it’s hard/impossible to find this in a strand of lights off the shelf. It’s also quite difficult to find interchangeable LED bulbs to make my own alternating strand.

I gave up looking for the cheaper consumer grade products to fill my needs and splurged on the professional grade stuff. You buy the cord with empty sockets and then buy individual bulbs to screw into them. Theoretically, these should stand up to the elements better and if/when they do need maintenance, I can replace just the piece that is broken. It also lets me do whatever light pattern I want.

We’re starting small with the theory that we can build more each year. The lights will follow our garage peak and then follow the gutter line around to the cedar tree on the corner of the house. I wonder how long I need to wait before I’m that weird guy who puts up his lights too early?

This summer, I spotted the Bing street view vehicle a couple of times in our area. One of the times, I was out on a walk with Elijah.

The car also drove past our house in the middle of our yard project so the side yard looks oh so beautiful.

But Tim wins for the picture they took driving past his house.

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.