Studio711.com – Ben Martens

I’m saying this too late to have an impact this year, but the next time a voting opportunity rolls around, make sure you spend some time on the local races. They have enormous impact on your day to day life, much more so than the national races. Tired of congestion downtown? Nervous about some potential new zoning decisions? Tired of that street that needs to be repaved? Want to improve the quality and safety of the parks where your kids play? Concerned about your water quality? All of these things are done right in your hometown, not at the federal level.

Woodinville had a very hot race for city council with lots of mud-slinging and hype. The incumbent is apparently a psycho stalker making physical threats during meetings and the incumbent is accused of violating campaign finance laws. With all this hype, there were a grand total of 1380 votes cast in the race. Your vote really could swing an election. Our water district commissioner race was won by 17 votes!

You’re not going to find tons of commentary in the big media about your local election. They’re going for ratings so they’re going to cover what is common to everyone: the state and federal elections. It’s pretty challenging for me to think of any way that any of my federal votes last time around have had any effect on my life. But the local ones? Those are big. Pay attention, do your research, formulate an educated opinion, and vote!

So the NSA has all our data. All our web traffic, all our email, and even our encrypted traffic that they can unencrypt. That’s scary enough, but here’s something for you to chew on: what happens when this massive NSA storage facility gets hacked? You know that every hacker in the world is now trying to hit this place now that they know it exists. Sure the NSA has probably done a very good job sealing it up, but nothing is perfect. It’s only a matter of time before all that data on everyone gets leaked all over the internet. Then what!?

Do babies have big heads or short arms? Elijah can barely touch his hands together over his head. So does that mean that his arms are too short and will grow longer as he ages or that his head will shrink relative to his body?

The answer is that babies have proportionally bigger heads than adults. A child’s head makes up 20% of their overall height while an adult’s head is only 11% of their height. That means that if our proportions didn’t change as we moved through our lives, my head would be roughly twice as big as it is now!

This is as close as I’m going to get to being political, but I got to wondering if our 18th government shutdown meant that we were spending less money than we brought in (assuming the IRS would still operate to collect our taxes.)

So the first question is how much is the government spending during the shutdown? The estimated answer is that we have stopped about 17% of our spending. 83% of it is still trucking along unaffected. And secondly, how much of a deficit did we write into the 2013 budget? For that budget, we planned to bring in enough money to cover 76.3% of our spending.

Put those two facts together and you can see that even during this government shutdown, we are STILL spending more money than we collect.

And one final, somewhat-related thing before I return you to normal blog posts, KenC pointed me to a video that does a good job of putting all of these enormous numbers into perspective.

I’m sure people can take these numbers and use them to argue on either side of the aisle. That’s the beauty (and confusion) of our political system. But it’s helpful if we all start with the facts and go from there instead of starting with other people’s opinions that are screamed at us from the televisions.

I love a good burger. Up until now if you asked me for the absolute best burger I’ve ever had in an area restaurant, I would have to say it was the burger at Tavern Law in Seattle. That is no loner the case. Enter Lunchbox Laboratory!

Their first site was in Seattle, but even the draw of a delicious burger couldn’t convince me to venture across the lake to the city. Now they have a new location in Bellevue which is just a few exits down 405. Perfect! On the last Friday of my paternity leave, Logan, Tyla, Elijah and I headed there to see what the buzz was all about.

It’s a casual restaurant with a very fun menu. Pretty much every burger looked incredible. It was hard to pick one but I was sure that no matter what I picked, it would be delicious. More experimentation is needed to prove that hypothesis, but so far so good because I picked an AMAZING BURGER. It was the Sante Fe Slammer: "Super-beef, colby jack cheese, bacon, lunchbox onions, diced green chilies, and papa’s house-made bbq sauce. I got that with tots smothered in cheese and bacon. Tyla ordered the “Tribute to Dick’s Deluxe” (Dick’s is a famous burger place in the area) and Logan got a dork burger which is duck + pork.

The food was fantastic and I think we’re all eager to eat there again. The downside is that the location is kind of in the newer snooty area of Bellevue so parking is a pain. It’s also not cheap. Tyla drank water and I had a pop. Our total with tip was $48! This won’t be an every day spot for us, but if you’re in the mood for a wonderfully delicious burger, give us a call because we want to go back!

Birthdays around here usually involve dinner with Tyla’s parents, so when she said we’d go over there for my birthday, I didn’t think twice. Boy was I in for a surprise!

My first clue that was something was different was when we pulled up to the house and the front door had a sign that said “It’s a party Jack!” Walking in I discovered Don and Logan in camo, beards and bandanas. Then I spotted the food table and it was filled with all kinds of recipes from the show! Wow! Tyla put in a ton of work planning it all out and Don and Nancy spent all weekend cooking. It was quite a party! Thank you!

All of the food was great including some specialties like frog legs, but my favorite was Miss Kay’s Banana Pudding. I need to get the recipe for that from Tyla and try it to make it myself. It was so good!

A couple weekends ago, we headed across the border to Vancouver, BC for Andy and Stephanie’s wedding. It was Elijah’s first time crossing the border, but he kept his mouth shut and didn’t say anything awkward to the border agents. It turns out that we only needed a birth certificate to get him across the border which was nice.

The wedding was beautiful! It was an outdoor wedding at the Hart House, and though it’s normally pretty wet this time of year, they had beautiful sunny weather. After the ceremony, Andy and Stephanie got in a row boat and headed out onto the lake for some quiet time before coming back and getting the reception started.

Approximately 15% of the guests did NOT have a big camera with them. I’m joking, but there were an incredible number of cameras clicking all night long. So I don’t have many of the standard photos you’d take as a wedding guest. I was trying to stay out of the way and not add to the photo madness. A few of the photos are included below or you can check the photo gallery.

Elijah was a champ the whole night. He was either content to watch the party or was sleeping soundly in his car seat. We had sunglasses for him in the bright sun and then ear protection inside the tent. (Tyla’s time working at the hearing clinic is going to help this boy keep his ears safe!) In the end it was Tyla and I who tuckered out and had to leave the party.

Thanks to Andy and Stephanie for inviting us and congratulations!

Tyla and I seem to have started a tradition of getting one of those ridiculous giant photo buttons at the fair every year, so there’s no option of skipping the fair when it comes to town. This year was a bit of a challenge with Elijah in tow, but when my parents came to visit, we all piled in the car and headed to Puyallup.

Elijah did great with us lugging him around all over the fairgrounds. He’s a real trooper! We ate fair food, saw plenty of animals, and of course posed for a photo button.

Earlier this summer, I was surprised to see a “20th anniversary” parade for the city of Woodinville. After some research (translation: reading Wikipedia), I learned that the city was incorporated in 1993 after Bothell started discussions of annexing the area. Take that Bothell!

The area was settled in 1871 by a logger/farmer named Ira Woodin. The cabin he built ended up serving as the first school and the post office. 93% of the buildings built since then have been wineries.*

The city held 10,938 people in the 2010 census which is a 19% increase from the 2000 census. Every one of those people apparently drives through downtown Woodinville at rush hour. There are some old train tracks that run through the middle of the city and make for awkward intersections under the bridge. At some point I think all 11K residents are going to be willing to pay a bit extra in our taxes to rip that thing out. Luckily my route to work avoids that whole mess.

Tyla and I continue to be thrilled with the location of our home and I’m happy to call Woodinville home. It’s nice being part of a smallish community inside the huge 3.5 million population of greater Seattle.

* Not true, but probably not far off.

PRISM is still a hot topic in the news as more and more information leaks out. I happily stay far away from politics, especially on this site, but when there are people spreading incorrect tech facts out there, I feel compelled to speak up.

I believe there are definitely some reasons to be disturbed by this news and to call my representatives to make my feelings known. However, as with most popular news stories, there are people arguing the same side as me but who I completely disagree with. Those people say they are appalled that someone was reading their email or their web traffic. Their email is private! Umm… what? Even if the NSA wasn’t reading your email, you know who can read it? Your email provider, your ISP and countless other people along the route. Not only CAN they read it, but they DO. How else can Gmail serve up those contextual ads based on words that are in your email? How else can they filter out spam? How else can they sell information they glean about you to advertisers and other businesses? And even if THEY aren’t reading your email for some reason, I assure you that China, Russia and other countries are. There’s nothing difficult or illegal about the technology since it’s all sent across the Internet unencrypted. It’s trivial to read it.

Now if you want to call for changes in the scope of the NSA’s powers, create better oversight and transparency, or stop the government from using their web snooping to profile citizens, then that’s fine. But please don’t muddy the waters by being surprised that someone is reading your email.

On a related note, there’s an excellent open letter from a guy named Ben Adida to President Obama which makes some fantastic points about this whole debacle. He does a wonderful job of communicating his point logically without letting emotion ruin the argument. Here’s my favorite quote from the letter, but please go read the whole thing:

What would have become of the civil rights movement if all of its initial transgressions had been perfectly detected and punished? What about gay rights? Women’s rights? Is there even room for civil disobedience?

Though we want our laws to reflect morality, they are, at best, a very rough and sometimes completely broken approximation of morality. Our ability as citizens to occasionally transgress the law is the force that brings our society’s laws closer to our moral ideals. We should reject mass surveillance, even the theoretically perfect kind, with all the strength and fury of a people striving to form a more perfect union.