Studio711.com – Ben Martens

We moved into our neighborhood about three years ago. The neighborhood was built in the 90s, a bunch of families moved in and raised their kids together, and apparently now they are all moving out. Since we moved in, a huge number of our immediate neighbors have sold their houses. Thankfully it wasn’t because of foreclosures or anything like that. I think it’s just a combination of their point in life and the fact that the market in our neighborhood is really hot.

Take a look at this map. The black circle is our house. Red ones have changed hands since we moved in and blue is either up for sale now or will be in the next month.

If you want to be our neighbor, you better be on your game. Almost all of these houses have sold within a few days of being listed and are going for ~10% over the asking price.

I’m thankful that we got in when we did because it looks like a pretty good point in the market history. Our sale price is roughly what it was worth back in the middle of 2005 and now the value is up ~25% back to almost the last peak. It does us very little good since we have no intention of selling, but it’s nice to be on the good end of a real estate investment for once. It gives me hope that down the road when we decide to sell, our good location will continue to make our house an easy sell.

P.S. I’ve been intentionally vague about some of these numbers because it feels a little weird to write about money. But everything here (and more) is public data that you can easily find if you know my address.

I love the idea of solar, but I don’t live in a great part of the country for it. We are one of the sunniest places in the US for 3-4 months of the year and then we switch to one of the most overcast places. A couple years ago, a guy at work did a big solar installation on his house. His monitoring website doesn’t have a password on it, so I check in every once in a while to check out how much money he is saving. Over the two years since he installed it, he has generated 7.51MWh while using 21.9MWh. So he has knocked about a third off his electricity bill saving him roughly $750. I bet he has a LONG way to go to recoup his investment.

I love the idea of solar power, but the technology just isn’t quite there yet if you want to have a quick return on investment. Yes, I know there are other reasons that people do it, and yes I know there are ways you can use it to generate a bigger portion of your usage, but for me, it’s going to be a while before I head that direction. If Tyla and I ever decide to buy some vacation property east of the mountains, I will be revisiting this topic. They get a LOT of sun over there and I could see it being a very useful way to power a vacation home.

After my last post on Friday about the new camcorder I use for recording at church, it dawned on me that I’ve never written up some of my learnings from recording public events. I’m far from an expert, but I’ve made enough mistakes that I have some things to share.

• Get there early. If you’ve never recorded at the venue, go there days ahead of when you’ll actually need to record. Figure out where all the gear will go and where the action will be taking place. But even if you’ve recorded at the same place many times, you can’t arrive too early. There’s always something that needs extra attention.
• Don’t try to do this without a good video editing package that you’re familiar with. I like Adobe Premiere Elements. Whatever you use, you need (at a minimum) to have the ability to sync individual audio and video tracks and then cut between them.
• Unless you are going to have a completely stationary camera, you’ll need at least two cameras. Leave one at a wide angle capturing everything and then do your zooming with the other camera. You can cut to the wide angle while you’re adjusting/zooming the second camera and then switch back to the zoomed view once you’ve got it all set up properly.
• Have at least one backup for everything. So if you’re using the two camera setup described above, make sure you have at least three cameras in the process. For the audio, hopefully you can record straight off the sound mixer, but also set a little portable audio recorder up near the action to use as a last resort. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve been saved by what I thought was just an extra device.
• Plan for people getting in your way. If all of your cameras are clustered in the same spot, one person walking in front of you can ruin all of the angles at the same time. Scatter your cameras around the building.
• Start recording early. Don’t try to hit record right as the action starts. Figure out what time it’s scheduled and then walk around hitting record about 5 minutes early. This gives you time to fix any last minute issues, and then you’ll be comfortable behind your main camera well before anything exciting happens.
• The most time consuming part of this for me is always syncing up the various audio/video tracks. If you can pull it off, walk into the view of all the cameras and clap your hands together. (Or if you’re fancy, use one of the clap boards like they do in the movies.) That’s almost never feasible for me so I have to revert to other tricks. Sometimes I’ll cough really loud after turning on all the equipment. Other times I’ll just do my best to work with some other noise/visual that most of the gear picked up. Inevitably I spend a ton of time moving clips back and forth frame by frame trying to get them all lined up.

The more I do it, the more I learn because I keep finding new ways to screw up! If you want to check out my work, a lot of it ends up on the church’s YouTube page.

Things were a little different last year. Our little man has really grown up. I love you!

I’m done with airline miles and points. I want money back from my credit card. In 2008 I switched to mainly using the American Express Blue Cash card which has really good returns for no annual fee. We average just around 1.7% back every year on our purchases with that card. But since not everyone takes American Express, we also carry a Visa. In 2004 I signed up for a card which gave me points for Sony products. Since then I’ve gotten two digital cameras, a camcorder, noise canceling headphones, and two under-cabinet radios. We’re still accruing points but I’ve come to realize that I don’t really want anything that Sony makes anymore. Or at least I don’t want to be forced to chose from only their products. So it’s time to switch!

We ended up choose the Amazon Visa card. We get 3% back on Amazon purchases and credits for all other purchases as well. The rewards come in the form of Amazon points which, for as much as we shop there, is effectively like cash. There’s no minimum required number of points to redeem them.

Part of me thinks it’s fun to get these rewards, but a bigger part of me wishes that credit card companies would just charge lower transaction fees and we could skip all these silly rewards. Just charge me less for the original product and I’ll be happy.

About a year or so ago, the pastor of our church (Pastor Weiser), announced that he would be going into semi-retirement this summer. Instead of just retiring like most people his age, he’s taking a half-time job as our missionary in Nigeria. He’ll spend quite a few months out of each year over there helping to train new Nigerian pastors. It’s always been one of his passions and he’s spent a lot of time there over the decades. I’m excited for him, but that leaves us without a Pastor.

I’ve heard a few comments/questions that can generally be summarized to “What happens if you don’t agree with what your new Pastor teaches?” I’m very thankful and happy to say that there is almost no chance that this will happen and I’ll explain why in this post.

Our local church, Calvary Lutheran Church, is part of a bigger group called the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod or WELS for short. The WELS is the central body that oversees all the churches to make sure we all teach exactly the same thing. While the types of church buildings and the styles of the church services might change from one WELS church to another, I can walk into any one of them and know that they are teaching exactly what the Bible says.

So when our Pastor left, we went put out a “call” for a new pastor. I won’t dive into the details of what a call is and why we do it because the WELS website already has a good description of that. I’ll just briefly say that the process is based on the Bible’s teachings and it’s not like a normal job interview. We ended up getting a Pastor who was just graduating from the WELS seminary. This will be his very first congregation.

Getting back to the original question, even though he’s never led a congregation before, I’m confident that he’ll stay true to God’s Word. His schooling included four years at our teacher/pastor training school (Martin Luther College) and then an additional four years at our seminary (Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary.) He’s well-versed in all of the Bible’s theology and he knows the original languages that it was written in (Greek and Hebrew) so that he can always go back to the most original manuscripts when needed.

But hey, everyone is human and we all sin. All of this training and process doesn’t mean that every single pastor is always right on target. Thankfully there are lots of checks and balances in place. First of all, every single person in the church should be actively listening and testing the words that the Pastor preaches. The book of 1 John teaches us to “test the spirits.” We should be comparing everything the Pastor teaches to what the Bible teaches. If they don’t align, we should investigate and question until the issue is resolved. In the worst case, this could be escalated all the way to the synod body which could take action to remove a Pastor from the synod entirely.

This is quite a bit more rigid and strict than many other church bodies, but that is what has kept our group of churches so rock solid on the teachings of the Bible. I’m very thankful that when I move to a new area or go on vacation, I don’t have to search around for a church. I just pull up the WELS directory, find a convenient location and start attending.

I’ve never worked on a team that really used an agile process. Some claimed they did but they only went so far as to use it as an excuse to not plan. This new team follows a variation on Kanban that is being developed by another manager in our org, Brent. It’s spreading pretty quickly and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a book written about it in the future.

I first heard about Kanban when I was an intern at John Deere in 2001. They used it on their factory flow to reduce the amount of money tied up in logistics. Applying it to software is similar: keep your total work in progress as low as possible. I won’t go into all the details here. If you really want to learn more, you can read Brent’s blog. (One of his most popular posts is how he implemented this with his kids for chores.) He has also started a podcast called AB Testing. But anyway, here are a few keys to how the system works:

• Every piece of work done by the team is represented by a ticket on the board.
• No ticket should take longer than two weeks to finish. All tasks should be trimmed down until they fit into this time window.
• All tasks move through these phases: Backlog > Ready > Analyze > Engineer > Code Review > Release > Customer Validation > Done. Backlog is the list of work that the team could do, Ready is a small number of tickets that the manager says should come next and the rest of the phases are a little more self-explanatory. There are specific criteria for exiting each stage and every ticket goes through every stage.
• Lightweight documentation is created in the Analyze phase to give background on the issue, clearly define scope and agree upon what “Done” looks like.
• Each phase has a limit on the number of tickets that can be in the phase at one time. There’s also an overall limit to how many tickets can be in flight in total for the whole team.
• Morning team standup meetings focus around what you need to do to get your ticket into the next phase and who can help you, NOT a status report of what you’ve been doing.
• When you finish a ticket, you don’t pick up a new one until you go through every other ticket and ask if you can help move the ticket along.
• There are special ways to track high priority issues and requests from outside the system.

it seems a little complicated at first, but once you get into it, it’s liberating! Here are some of the things I love about it:

• Coming on to a new team, this really helps you ramp up. Everyone is encouraged to work with someone else on every ticket. Solo tickets are not the norm. That means you can hop in with someone else and start learning about their area.
• You’re encouraged to pick up tickets from all areas that the team owns, not just your comfort zone. It’s a bit inefficient at first, but after a couple months, you have a team full of people that really can fill in for each other.
• At most, you have two tickets on the board at one time. Imagine only having TWO things to work on! You can focus and pound them out instead of constantly task switching.
• There is ALWAYS help available. The whole system focuses on really working as a team and moving the tickets through the system.
• It’s very clear how much work is getting done and how long it’s taking. Inefficiencies or choke points quickly bubble to the top to be addressed.
• This seems to avoid the slow buildup of responsibilities over time that you get as you stay in a group longer and longer. If you’re doing work, it’s on the board. And if it’s visible, it’s less likely to be stuff that builds up. The team will see it and find reduce the cost of those taxes.

This system has made it very enjoyable to ramp up with the new team, see the contributions I’m making, and focus on one or two very specific and well-defined tasks.

I don’t remember the first time that Dad and I found the Red Green Show, but we spent a lot of time together watching it. One episode that really cracked us up was when Harold read a letter from a reader with a broken keyboard. The O and the E were reversed. This all happened before everything was on the internet so I didn’t know what episode number it was or anything like that.

Thankfully now every episode of the Red Green Show is available (legally!) on YouTube. That still didn’t help me much though because there are hundreds of episodes to sift through. Then I found this page that lists out the subject of the “Male Call” segment of the show! Sure enough, it says that in the episode “Homemade Cheese” a reader writes a letter with a broken keyboard!

I found the episode on YouTube. Here it is for your enjoyment. The segment starts at the 19:06 mark.

Happy Fourth! Here are some fun trivia facts to annoy your friends and family:

• John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe all died on the Fourth of July.
• Calvin Coolidge was born on the Fourth of July.
• Most people didn’t sign the Declaration of Independence until August 2, 1776.
• The final signature on the Declaration of Independence didn’t come until January of 1777 when Thomas McKean put his name on it.
• 31 places in the US have “Liberty” in their name. Iowa has the most with 4.
• 1 in 6 backyard BBQs contains meat from Texas.
• Though we fought them for independence, Britain is now our 6th leading trade partner.

Yes, I know the plural of Lego is Lego, but in my world, the plural is Legos. Deal with it. The other way sounds too pretentious. It’s like calling that fancy sports car a “Porsch-uhhhhh.”

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about the price of Lego pieces (see what I did there?) There are entire websites devoted to the economics of Lego sets. One good example is brickpicker.com. There are also some great breakdowns of the average price per piece by year and also by Lego genre. My parents will notice that when they were buying me lots of Legos, prices were coming down from their peak of $0.40/piece. Note that these numbers DO account for inflation. Today, a good rule of thumb is $0.10/piece is a good deal. Some sets can still be quite a bit more than this.

When you’re buying used Legos at a garage sale or thrift store, it’s probably easier to think in terms of weight. Advice varies a bit here, but in general if you shoot for $5-7/pound, you’re getting a pretty good deal.

Tyla shops at our local thrift stores pretty regularly to find clothes and toys for Elijah. I went with her once and was excited to see a small bag of Legos for sale. Ever since then, she’s been on the lookout and has had some small scores. Last week she sent me a photo of an entire wall of bags of Legos! We had a hard time deciding how much was “too much”, but it was such a good deal, we didn’t want to miss out. She ended up grabbing twenty bags for about $75.

The total haul weighed in at 14.5 pounds which puts us at $5.17/pound. I counted out a sample of the bricks, weighed the sample and then estimated that she bought about 5500 pieces for a price of 1.4 cents/piece.

The only way this wasn’t a good deal was if Elijah doesn’t like to play with Legos. But even if that happens, we could sell this for a profit. Combined with my Legos that are still in Indiana, he’s going to have an incredible amount of building options at his fingertips!