Studio711.com – Ben Martens

I first saw Zane Lamprey on a show that began in 2006 called Three Sheets. He traveled around the world learning about local alcohol and drinking customers. It was educational, intoxicating and funny all at the same time. The MOJO HD network got canceled and the show ended with it. The reruns fluttered around on various networks like FLN, Travel Channel and Spike but never got picked up for new episodes. You can still watch most of the episodes on Hulu for free.

His next show was called Drinking Made Easy. It was a similar idea except that this one featured a lot more of his friend Steve McKenna and it seemed more about drinking and less about education. I watched all the episodes but it never had quite the same appeal to me that Three Sheets did.

There were 50-60 episodes of each series before they died. Zane did some podcasting for a while but was always trying to find a way to get something like Three Sheets back on the air. It’s apparently very difficult to get TV studios and networks to pony up money for this type of show. So instead, he turned to his rabid and slightly inebriated fanbase in the form of a Kickstarter. The goal was to fund about 6 episodes of a new show he called “Chug.” The name is a reference to both drinking and the trains he’d use to travel from city to city. The funding campaign was an enormous success allowing them to produce more episodes and longer episodes than initially planned. The first episodes are coming out now, but you had to back his Kickstarter to view them. (Lucky me!)

In addition to the crowd funding, Zane put a bunch of his own money into the project too. In the end he had a show that was exactly what he wanted and he started shopping that around to the networks. But this time, instead of asking for money to produce the show, he was selling them the rights to air his program! What a different conversation! National Geographic liked it and will be airing the show. If it does well, they’ll fund another season out of their own pocket.

I’m not only happy for Zane and happy to see the new episodes of Chug, but I love this new model of funding your dreams. You no longer have to convince somebody behind a desk that your passion is worth their time. If your dream really does have a chance, you can prove it all on your own with crowd-funding from a site like Kickstarter. You cut out the middle man and go directly to the people.

I would have been even happier if Zane didn’t try to shop this around to the networks and instead did a completely web-based show, letting the people fund future seasons, but I guess there’s still enough money and distribution left in the networks to make that a worthwhile path. I’d be polishing my resume if I worked at a network though. Their days are numbered.

I’ve said this enough that you probably know it by now, but even though people think about rain when they think of Seattle, we actually get less rain than most other major cities in the country. That being said, 2014 has ben WET. At this point, we’ve already received the amount of rain that we normally get by Halloween! Last Saturday was the second rainiest day in May ever. Even if we got no more rain for the rest of the year, it still wouldn’t be the driest year on record.

The long range forecast says we’re heading toward an El Nino weather swing which generally means drier weather for the Pacific Northwest so we’ll see if this keeps up. But for now, our umbrellas are getting a lot more use than normal. [source]

I let my NRA membership lapse. I had it for a year because it was a requirement for joining the gun range. It was a tough call because overall, I generally agree with the things that the NRA supports. I started off in their corner but they turned me off.

1. As soon as you join, you’re automatically signed up for more junk mail (both electronic and physical) than you can imagine. You have to unsubscribe one by one and it takes forever.
2. There’s a non-stop call for more money. The world is going to end and Obama is going to personally come to your house and take your guns if you don’t give them money NOW.
3. They don’t come off as a level-headed organization. Just because the anti-gun lobby is whacko and illogical, that doesn’t mean that the NRA should go to the other extreme and scream just as loud. Why can’t they provide calm, logical arguments? It seems like that would go over a lot better with the public. Just being louder doesn’t mean you’re right.

If you thought that you got a lot of mail when you were a member, wait until you try to quit. It keeps coming and so do the phone calls. Finally one of the callers started the conversation with, “Is this a good number to call you at?” I replied, “No, this is a bad number. Please don’t ever call it again.” So far that seems to have been the end of it.

So while I still agree with most of their stances, I’m out. I know some of you are lifetime members and that’s great. I’m probably going overboard, but I have better things to spend my money on right now. If it was free I guess I might still have my name attached.

The Internet has enabled anyone to become a content creator. Quality content isn’t common, but there are more than a few people producing incredible content. The trick has been for these Internet shows to get enough money to support their high production values. Enter a website called Patreon.com. Patreon provides an easy way for viewers to give money to the people producing the content. Some content producers balk at this and view it as begging for money. I think the opposite is true: if Internet content gives me value, I want to give them money so they can keep doing what they are doing. We both benefit from the relationship.

The general format is that users say they will give $X for each episode but they can also set a monthly limit. So I might say that I’ll give you $1 per episode but I’ll limit it to $2/month. If you make three episodes in one month, you won’t get any money from me for that third one. So when you see total donation amounts per episode, remember that’s only guaranteed for the first episode of the month. It will probably drop down a bit for any episodes after that.

It has been quite successful for a couple of my favorite shows.

• Cordkillers has 1761 patrons giving them roughly $2300 per episode.
• Smarter Every Day has 1022 patrons giving him roughly $3600 per episode.

I’m hoping that some of the other web content I enjoy moves to this model so I can help support them and keep them “on the air.” The whole idea is a throwback to the middle ages when the wealthy would pay musicians and artists. The difference is that now we can crowdfund these and make it all happen with a tiny amount of money from a large number of people. I’d much rather give money directly to these independent creators than the huge chunk of money that goes to the cable company every month.

We’ve had our Escape for over a year now and we have just over 11,000 miles on it. I thought it was time for an update on our experiences.

The more I drive the car, the more I like it. Maybe it’s because I drive an economy car but I’m regularly impressed by the smooth and quiet ride of the Escape. The car had a bunch of features on it that I never would have thought I’d really want but some of them have grown on me. The biggest one is probably the memory seats and mirrors. I’m so much taller than Tyla that switching drivers takes quite a while. For a family vehicle that we both drive regularly, this feature is awesome. The power lift gate has been very handy too. With one arm full of baby and the other carrying bags, we just swipe our foot under the back bumper and the rear hatch opens automatically. That hands free goodness also lets us unlock the doors and start the car, all without digging out a key.

I put our Ford My Touch/Sync/Navigation in the “meh” category. It’s nice to have it all integrated and the big touch screen is good for displaying lots of info. The audio system has a bunch of inputs (radio, Sirius, USB, SD, etc) which is nice, but the actual user interface of the whole thing feels sluggish. Why can’t we just have a head unit that is basically an Android/Apple/Windows tablet? This interface already feels a big sluggish and out-of-date. What’s it going to feel like in 10 years? While I love having a nav system built-in to the car, I don’t know if I’d shell out the extra wad of cash to get this whole system again, especially when I think how it could be done better with a tablet at a fraction of the cost.

It has been in the shop for one issue which was covered under warranty. The coolant bypass valve failed which made the check engine light come on. They diagnosed that quickly and while it was in the shop, the parts came in for a recall. We had them keep the car and do it all at once. Our car was the first time they had run through the fairly involved recall repair and they ended up a part short which added more time. Once it was all done, they had kept our car for a week but they gave us a loaner so it wasn’t a huge issue.

I’m biased because my uncle works for Ford and pretty much everyone in my family drives a Ford. I was one of the oddballs who stepped out of the Ford family and went for a Subaru. But after driving this car, and after reading about what Alan Mulally has done at Ford in the past years, I’m pretty confident that our next purchase will be a Ford. The Subaru has just over 100K on it and is still going strong so if all goes well it will be a few years before we have to buy something new. But if I was buying a new car today, I’d probably go for a Focus as my commuter car for work. I’d love to get a big F150 but it’s hard to justify the cost at this point.

Last September, I didn’t step foot in the office. I was on paternity leave the whole month. It was a wonderful time to spend at home with my family and connect with Tyla and Elijah. When I got back to work, I took stock of the changes. There was a long list of work that I had been doing on a regular basis that hadn’t happened for a month… and for many of those things, nobody cared! It was a big revelation for me. As I spend time in the same job, my list of tasks is always finding new additions. I rarely cull the list so it just grows. But does it all really need to be done? Obviously not if nobody cared that it hadn’t happened in a long tie. Some things, of course, need to happen whether people care or not but that’s an exception to the rule.

As my free time at home gets squeezed more and more (parenting takes a lot of time!), I’ve been trying hard to apply this at home too. I regularly ask myself “What if I don’t do X?” What if I don’t mow the lawn or clean the furnace filter? Well that’s clearly not good. But what if I don’t watch that television series or watch that movie or spend a day doing a hobby? It takes some practice to answer that question honestly because there are many activities that I think make me who I am. But once I forced myself to find a good answer, I’ve been able to remove a ton of old habits from my life. And you know what? I don’t miss them! In fact, it feels liberating to have all this time handed back to me.

Having a child was a forcing function to make this happen since it put such a huge constraint on my available free time, but it feels like a very healthy experience. Instead of trying to schedule in a bunch of habits, I now schedule in time to just “veg” and do some random activity that used to be a time-sucking habit. It’s a good balance for me right now and lets me focus on things that I really do consider important and high priority.

It seems like a short chunk of time
Since I married my partner in crime
But now there’s a son
Who can nearly run
And my thoughts are all metered and rhymed

I can’t end a line with your name
No rhyme exists I claim
Four years ago
You married your beau
And my heart is still aflame

Did you know that you can download a report of your Amazon orders? I pulled all that data into Excel and started playing with our Power BI toolset even though it was a pretty simple scenario. Here are some of the facts I discovered:

• First order: Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution, January 11, 2001. This would have been my Junior year at Purdue. I discovered that some books were cheaper on Amazon than our bookstore. Strangely they didn’t have many of my textbooks and even then, they weren’t always cheaper. Times have changed!
• Most popular item category: Health & Beauty
• In our current home, we order 3.3 times more items per year than we did in our last home.
• There is an average of 1.7 days between ordering and shipping. The median is 1. There are some outliers when I made orders that weren’t fulfilled by Amazon and they can take forever to ship.
• Item purchased most often: Purina Pro Plan Dry Adult Dog Food, Large Breed Formula, 34-Pound Bag
• 804 total items ordered

Here are some graphs over the data. It will be pretty obvious that I signed up for Amazon Prime in June of 2008. On a side note, the recent Amazon Prime price increase doesn’t bother me at all. It’s still one of the best deals in online shopping, not to mention that I also get some free Kindle books, and a pretty good collection of streaming video for free. They could charge a lot more and I’d still pay for it.

I’ve written many times about how I believe it’s a lot more useful to be involved in local politics than national politics. Here’s a good example about how much more responsive your local government can be.

Safeway is a little less than a mile down the road from our house so we frequently take walks down there. Tyla also runs along that sidewalk sometimes. There was one stretch that was getting destroyed by tree roots. It was so bad you almost couldn’t push a stroller over it anymore. It’s right on the boundary between cities so it took a while to figure out who owned the sidewalk, but after I found the right government, it was fixed in less than a month!

The end result looks a lot nicer and is much safer! You can see the before and after photos below. Thanks to the Woodinville maintenance crew for such a prompt response! I’ve had a similarly positive response with them for some traffic light maintenance. In that case they were out the SAME DAY to fix it.

Tyla has a Christmas village from the Thomas Kinkade collection. She feels like she has enough big pieces but was interested in a couple accessories so back I decided to order her something for the Christmas of 2012. There’s only one website where you can get this stuff (other than used on eBay.) I placed my order and was told it would be 6-8 weeks. Oops. Well that’s ok, I’ll wait. After 3-4 months and a couple postcards with status updates, I was told that they would never ship my order. Ugh. For the Christmas of 2013, my mom decided to order Tyla some little accessories. The exact same thing happened to her!

I was really frustrated at this point so I emailed customer service. I tried to be very nice in explaining my situation and asking what we’re doing wrong. Is there a better time of year to order? The reply was “We regret to inform you that the item has been retired.” Huh? I didn’t mention any item in my email. It was a general question. I replied “Did you even read my email?” The second email was a bit longer but it was still a canned response that didn’t answer my email. In the vain hope that a human who cared was actually reading, I replied once more and ended it with “You don’t need to reply to this. You’ve lost me as a customer.”

I’ve been reading the Ford book about Alan Mulally so I guess I have CEO on the brain. I believed that there must be somebody in the company who cared about treating customers properly and would want to know about an experience like mine so it could be corrected. A little searching revealed the CEO’s name. I guessed what his email address probably was and forwarded my customer service chat to him along with a note. I said that if I was in his shoes, I’d want to know about something like this. I wasn’t looking for any retribution. It was simply for his information. I figured that would be the end of it (whether he actually received the email or not.)

The next morning, my phone rang and it was someone from the company! I guess they looked up my number from my previous order. She said the CEO had forwarded my note on to her and she apologized for my situation. She then stated a couple things she had done to get some fixes started (removing retired items from the website, scheduling a meeting with the manager of the email customer service group, etc.) She thanked me multiple times for emailing and I apologized for ruining her day by getting the CEO involved. She insisted on giving us something for our trouble so if it all works out, Tyla should have a small gift arriving in the mail.

It was a wild story but I’m happy to know that the senior management does seem to care. This isn’t how I normally recommend lodging complaints against a company, but in this modern world, there are some extremely affective tools available if you choose to use them. They did regain my business and I’ll give them another shot.