Studio711.com – Ben Martens

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.

In the past I’ve always hand-designed our Christmas cards. This year, free time is at a premium and Snapfish has so many great designs that we decided to use their service. I was very pleased with the end product.

The CryptoLocker virus has been making the rounds in the news lately, and well it should. If you get infected, the virus will encrypt everything on your harddrive and on drives that are attached via the network. You then get a message saying that you have a few days to pay them ~$500 to get the data unencrypted or they will wipe it all. It’s quite clever and now that people see how successful this type of attack is, I’m guessing we’ll be seeing a lot more of them.

How do you protect yourself from this? Well obviously you need to be careful when you’re opening attachments in your email, but in the end, it’s pretty much impossible to guarantee that you’ll never get a virus on your computer.

So if you think about this, it’s a lot like the situation where your hard drive fails. All of a sudden, you no longer have access to all of the data on your computer. The only difference is that now the odds of that happening to you have increased (and they were already huge to begin with since all hard drives fail eventually and many of them fail after just a few years.)

The answer to both problems is the same: BACK UP YOUR DATA. If we somehow get CryptoLocker in my house, and even if it encrypts every hard drive we have, I won’t lose any of my data. It’s all backed up in the cloud and the cloud backup has versions so even if it somehow overwrites my backups with encrypted data, I can just sync back to the point before the virus and get my data back.

What would happen if you got the virus right now? The good news is that if you don’t have a plan, you can be quite safe for just $50/year. I’m not getting paid by Crashplan.com, but I love their service and highly recommend it. Set it up on your computer and then forget about it. Your data gets backed up all the time without any intervention from you. Then you can rest easy and know that your data is safe!

It’s not a matter of if your hard drive will stop working or it gets hit by a virus like CryptoLocker, it’s a matter of when. Be prepared.

Every Christmas, we set up a tree and the Christmas village. Turning these on and off as we enter and leave the house can get a bit tedious, so this year I introduced a little technology to the picture. Enter the Belkin remote controlled power strip! Our tree and village are plugged into this power strip and then the remote is left near the door. The ease of use means that we turn it on more and get more enjoyment out of the decorations. I picked this up at Home Depot but it’s also available at Amazon via the link above.

There are a couple stores around here that push their extended warranties ridiculously hard. Sports Authority is probably one of the worst. No matter how I say “No”, I continue to get the guilt trip throughout the entire transaction. It almost makes me want to explain why I never buy it, but I question whether they’d understand the math. Here’s how it works out:

The break even price of a warranty is equal to the cost of replacing the item times the percentage chance that you’ll need to replace the item. So if the product costs $100 and there’s a 20% chance that it will break, then you should buy the warranty if it’s less than $20. The trick is that it’s usually impossible to define the odds that you’ll need a warranty. There’s still a way to prove that it’s a bad deal though.

Think about the company offering the warranty to you. If they charge everyone less than that breakeven point, they’re going to go out of business. They need to make a profit so the warranty is almost ALWAYS going to cost more than that breakeven point. Therefore it’s a bad financial deal for you to buy it.

There are, however, some cases where warranties and insurance are a good thing. Those cases are generally when you do not have enough financial reserve to cover the replacement cost if the item is destroyed. Think about your house or your car. If you have $30K lying around to buy a new car, then you could technically get buy without insurance (though they’ve made insurance a legal requirement since almost no one has this kind of reserve available.)

So when you’re standing at the register and they offer you the extended warranty, know that it’s a bad deal and if you can envision paying that much money again to replace the product, do not buy the warranty. You’ll come out ahead in the long run even if you do have to pay full replacementreplacmenet value every once in a while.

A few weeks back, KenC mentioned Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast and I listened to one (three hour) episode. It’s incredible! He takes a small slice of history and dives really deeply into it. The story he weaves is deep and really helps you understand all of the complicated forces that combined to shape the event.

He only cranks out a handful of episodes a year and I imagine that’s because each one requires so much time and effort. There are 50 total episodes and starting with show 34, they’re available for free on his website.

If you enjoy history, I recommend that you give one episode a shot. That’s all it took to get me hooked.