Studio711.com – Ben Martens

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.

A couple years ago, TimS and AndyD convinced me that I need to try wool socks. It sounds silly, but it was a life-changing discussion. Since that first purchase, I have worn wool socks almost exclusively. In the winter they keep my feet warm and in the summer they keep my feet from getting sweaty and wet. They’re brilliant! You can get them fairly cheaply in big bundles at Costco. Unfortunately they only sell them during the winter so I like to stock up and have a few bundles in the closet in case I wear some out.

I love that everything around us is becoming a gadget. The buzzword/phrase is the “internet of things.” Add our printer at work to the list. It has always had capabilities like scanning and emailing documents, but it was also a huge paper waster and logging in for advanced features was a pain. People would print stuff and then forget to pick it up. The default setting is that when you print something, it sits in the printer’s queue but doesn’t actually print until you walk up to it. At that point you swipe your badge over the card reader, it brings up all your jobs and ask which ones you want to print. At this point you’re also logged in so scanning and emailing is very simple too. It’s one of those seemingly obvious “why didn’t we do this before” inventions.

Microsoft has a new CEO! I’m sure it’s a bit intimidating to be on a list of three CEOs with the other two being Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, but I’m really happy with the choice of Satya. He’s probably not a household name (yet) outside of the company, but internally he has been doing a fantastic job.

I’ve been in his org for quite a while, and I’m particularly happy that they picked someone who is so familiar with our cloud and enterprise offerings. When you hear analysts talking about Microsoft and they only mention Xbox, Windows Phone, Bing, etc, you can mostly dismiss them because they’re missing the biggest moneymakers for the company. Satya’s org was one of the three main pillars of Microsoft’s revenue (Windows, Office and he ran cloud/enterprise offerings.) It might not be a flashy org, but we crank out around $20 BILLION a year. That’s about 25% of the entire company’s revenue and this org has seen double digit year over year growth for more quarters than I can count.

So while it would be fun to have a flashy, public figure as CEO, I’m happy that we have Satya who intimately understands the core businesses of our company. (And it doesn’t hurt that he loves the product I’m working on too!)

I’m no psychologist, but I’ve found that if I really want to change something in my life, writing it down is a big motivator. I’ve been eating pretty poorly for the past couple months, so I decided to write down everything that I eat for one week.

Wow. It worked even better than I thought. Even though I’m not planning to show the list to anyone else, it’s embarrassing to write down a handful of chips, a candybar or two, or a morning piece of pie.

Writing it down on a piece of paper would probably have been good enough, but I took it one step further and tracked it in the Fitbit website. They have a huge food database so I just enter in what I ate and it adds up the carbs, etc.

I probably won’t keep this up for a long time, but it has been a good exercise and it’s one that I’ll revisit if I find myself snacking a lot again. Let me know how it works for you if you try it too!

Tyla and I have a tradition of buying one new Christmas ornament every year. It’s generally on one of our big vacations together. This past year we took a babymoon to Orcas Island and purchased a purple starfish in a tiny shop on the island. It’s a lot of fun to decorate a tree with memories!

You can find our past ornaments here and here and here.

When Tyla and I moved into our house, we signed a two year contract with Comcast in Exchange for about $30/month off of our bill compared to a month-to-month plan. That worked well since I knew exactly what I wanted. Since Elijah was born this summer, our TV watching has fallen off a cliff. We are trying not to give him much time in front of screens for the first couple years and that means that we also get less screen time (good for all of us!)

Our contract with Comcast ended and our bill went up to ~$120/month. That got us the Digital Starter TV package and 25/2 Internet. I don’t pay for a DVR since I built my own and I own our cable modem too. Those two things might make our bill lower than yours for the same package.

Normally I call Comcast every 6-12 months to tell them I’m cancelling or switching to satellite and they give me a lower bill. I even had one rep TELL me to call back in 6 months to lower my bill again. This time I made multiple calls but couldn’t squeeze and promotional deals out of them. I’m not quite ready to pull the plug on TV and get everything over the internet, but there were still ways I could lower my bill.

I ended up with the “Blast Plus” package. That gives us 50/10 internet (double the download speed and five times the upload speed) but it drops us down to the Digital Economy TV package. There are about 40 fewer channels. The major losses for me are all the ESPN channels and Fox Sports One (the old SpeedTV.) It also drops TNT so that means I’ll only get to watch the first third of the NASCAR season before it moves over to the other networks. I thought I’d never get rid of those channels, but I also can’t remember the last time I actually had time to watch them.

This change saves us $42/month! The package is $79.95 plus local taxes and fees. It also comes without any contract so if we change our mind at any point, it’s easy to bump back up to a bigger plan.

If you’re interested in something similar, here is a list of the channels that we keep and the one we lose. It might be different depending on your area.

Thinking back on the year, it’s hard to remember anything before Elijah’s birth, but since he wasn’t born until June, there was obviously quite a bit that happened.

As the year began, we embarked on a month long master bathroom remodeling project. It seemed quite stressful at the time as I hemmed and hawed about doing it myself or hiring a contractor and as we tried to figure out what tile to buy. Then once we did find the tile, the wrong stuff was delivered and the replacement never arrived. Thankfully we had hired a contractor who was able to roll with the punches and he helped us find new tile that was in stock and ready for immediate use. There was so much drama around that whole event, but looking back it’s easy to see that God was smacking me upside the head telling me I had picked the wrong tile. I’m so incredibly thankful that it happened as the new design is much nicer than the slightly edgy/modern design that we were originally planning to go with.

Tyla graciously allowed me to get a season pass to Crystal Mountain and spend most of my Saturdays there while she sat at home and grew our baby. It was a tremendous season with huge snow dumps and some runs that will be forever burned into my memory. New skis and a visit from Jay topped off a great season. I imagine the next few years will see dramatically fewer days on the slopes.

We spent a lot of time getting the nursery ready: painting, buying furniture, replacing the blinds, adding curtains, and installing shelving in the closet. By the time we were done, it looked perfect, except that it was missing our son!

Before Tyla got pregnant, we had big visions of what we could do for a babymoon (our last vacation as DINKs.) We stayed a few nights at a resort on Orcas Island, enjoyed some down time and sampled a lot of the restaurants on the island. We look back on those quiet times now and wonder how long it will be until they happen again!

As the due date approached, our excursions got smaller and smaller until we were basically sitting around the house waiting for Elijah to arrive. As I mentioned in his birth story, the delivery process was nothing like we expected but at the end of it, we had a healthy mom and baby so we were happy and thankful.

I took the month of September off for my paternity leave (what an awesome benefit!) Mom and Dad came to visit during that time and it was really nice to have their help. We were able to take some small trips with them too including the Puyallup Fair and Orcas Island. They were also here to partake in the Duck Dynasty themed birthday party that Tyla organized!

During the month of September I also installed cabinets and built a desk to go in the theater room. It feels wonderful to have an actual place to work and lots of storage space.

I usually create these posts by looking through the folder names for all the photos we took during the year. Aside from the trips we took when Mom and Dad were here, they are pretty much all photos of Elijah around the house or within a few miles of it. Our calendar has never been more empty or felt so full. We don’t have much planned but sometimes it seems like it takes all our effort just to get through the day. We love our little man more than we ever could have imagined. I treasure every phase that he’s going through… but I’ll be very happy when we can all sleep through the night!

This is easily the most dramatic change to my lifestyle that I’ve ever experienced, but it’s wonderful. I’ve been very thankful for all of the time off I’ve had since he was born. It’s tough when I’m working because I see him for about an hour in the morning, and hour in the evening, and then throughout the night when he wakes up. I miss so much of his life! Tyla has been an incredible mother, staying home to take care of him and making sure he gets exactly what he needs.

It doesn’t take a genius to predict that next year will probably revolve around Elijah, and I’m so excited for that. There are some big milestones coming up as he learns to crawl and then walk. I try not to wish too much for the future and enjoy each day as it comes!

Previous Year In Review Posts: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012

Amazon made news a few weeks ago when they announced that they were working on drones that would deliver your packages. Anything called a “drone” now gets instant media blitz. I do believe it was largely a PR move. Paul Thurrott had a great tweet: “The sheer amount of free PR that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos got for his BS ‘drone delivery system’ is awe-inspiring. Media, you just got played.”

It’s easy to poke holes in the proposal. How are you going to keep it from murdering a dog when it lands? Why won’t people just shoot them down? The batteries won’t last long enough. The FAA will never allow it. Some of these have more merit than others, and sure, we’re a long way from making this possible, but there is very little question in my mind that something like this is coming.

There are two great interviews on TheAtlantic.com that are worth reading. The first is with Andreas Raptopoulos, the founder of a company who is creating a network of drones to deliver packages. The second one is with an emerging technologies ethics and policy implications expert from UW named Ryan Calo. The interviews say that there are already quadcopters which can go 50km on a single charge, and that’s with today’s battery technology. Imagine what they could do in five years.

Even if the regulations in the US are very strict, the implications for third world countries is huge. Those countries have little or no regulatory oversight. Drones make a lot of financial sense when there isn’t an existing infrastructure like UPS or FedEx (or even well-maintained roads.)

When you hear “drones” in the mass media, it’s usually equated with science fiction or something evil. In the next decade I think we’re going to learn that neither is true.