Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Temps in the Seattle area are often just a bit too cold for plants to grow well in a garden, so I decided to try a makeshift greenhouse. I picked up some PEX tubing and 0.7mil painters plastic. A couple clothespins later and I had a very rudimentary hoop house. It seemed like it was working really well for the plants that it covered so I decided to try a little experiment. I planted three zucchini plants at the same time and once they had all popped up, I put the hoop house over two of them. The plants circled in blue had the house and the one without is circled in red. What a difference! I think next year I need to expand this greenhouse idea.

We use Bartells for a lot of our photo printing since it’s so close, but lately we’ve had a lot of trouble using their photo printing website (LifePics). The interface is completely messed up. After trying it in IE, Firefox and Chrome with the same result, I decided to downgraded flash and it worked! I generally use IE with Chrome as a backup, so Firefox is where I downgraded Flash. Here are the steps if you’re having the same problems.

1. Download the uninstaller program from Adobe – uninstall_flash_player.exe
2. At the top of the Firefox window, click on the Firefox button and then select Exit
3. Run the uninstall Flash program that you download and follow the prompts.
4. Download Flash 10.3 from the Adobe site – install_flash_player_10_plugin.exe
5. At the top of the Firefox window, click on the Firefox button and then select Exit
6. Open your downloads folder and double-click the file named install_flash_player_10_plugin.exe to start the installation.
7. Follow the instructions in the installer. When the installation is complete you can open Firefox again.

Note that these instructions came from the Mozilla support site.

Last week I went to the doctor not knowing what was wrong and he diagnosed me with shingles… that disease that supposedly only affects older people. The doc said it can be caused in younger people because of stress, and coupled with some other stress related medical stuff I’ve had this year, I apparently need to take more time to relax.

But anyway, from a geek perspective, I found this interesting enough to blow right through that “Too Much Information” barrier and blog about it:

• You can only get shingles if you’ve previously had chicken pox.
• When you heal from chicken pox, the virus doesn’t die. Shingles is that old virus breaking out of your nerve cells.
• It follows right along a line of nerves in your body. The doctor showed me a page from a book with a nerve line that directly matched my shingles.
• It only happens on one side of your body.
• About a third to a half of people will get shingles at some point in their life.
• Someone over 50 is roughly ten times more likely to get shingles than a younger person.
• The common thinking is that you’re very unlikely to get it twice in your life but a Mayo Clinic report from last year indicates that might not be the case. My doctor never mentioned it being a one-time thing.
• There is a vaccine for it that can administered to older people (and there’s also a chicken pox vaccine for younger kids too.) The shingles vaccine was only licensed in 2006 but it’s supposed to reduce your chances of getting shingles by 50%.

Concern that I would give my newborn son a disease sent me to the doctor much earlier than I would normally have gone. That was a great move because catching it in the first 72 hours makes it much more treatable. The doctor said there was no concern about passing it on to my pregnant wife or to my newborn son. We double checked with our OB and she completely agreed. Woohoo!*

So while this week has not been at all fun, I’m very happy that it won’t affect my wife or my son!

PS. Please note that advice was given in my specific case. Don’t extrapolate to your situation. Talk to your doctor!

Arrested Development was cancelled after only three seasons. The ratings must not have been where they needed to be, but I think the show gained quite a bit of popularity when it came out on DVD. At least I know that’s how Tyla and I got into it. We were both thrilled to find out that years after it was cancelled, Netflix had put up the money for a fourth season! We renewed our streaming membership to get a crack at the episodes when they were released on Memorial Day.

Netflix was really slow that day. A quick check of Twitter indicated that lots of other people were having similar difficulties and I wonder if it was because Arrested Development came out? It’s still pretty big news to have an internet streaming company fund a “real” TV show so it doesn’t seem unlikely that the hype was more than they could handle.

As for the show itself, it’s fun to see all the characters again, but I’d probably rank the fourth season somewhere around the quality of the first season. It’s good, but not as good as seasons two and three. It is really nice to have all the episodes available at once instead of having them doled out one by one each week. I’ll be very surprised if this isn’t very close to the future model for shows. Getting one episode a week with a bunch of commercials in the middle really seems ancient and backward.

Thank you Netflix for funding this project and thanks to Ron Howard and crew for cranking out more episodes.

At the beginning of this month, I mentioned that Zane Lamprey is trying to fund his new TV show through Kickstarter. He did get an impressive amount of money, but with only a few days left, he only had about $350K of his $500K target. The way Kickstarter works is that if you don’t hit your goal, nobody pays a penny. Amazingly enough, he blew through his target with about a day to spare! He’s said that for $500K he can do five shows and for every $100K over his goal, he’ll add another show. He posted a pretty thorough breakdown of where the money goes. Here’s part of his post from http://chug.tv 

Someone posted on my Facebook yesterday questioning how it could possibly costs $100,000 per episode to “follow you around with a camera”.  I explained to him that $500,000 six ways is actually $83,000.  But, there is also a 5% cut that Kickstarter takes and another 5% that Amazon takes to handle the thousands of transactions.  And, we have to fulfill all of our obligations to you, the Kickstarter backers. We’ll still have to buy, print, and ship thousands of t-shirts, hoodies, medallions, posters, DVDs, Blu Rays, as well as the travel, food, and venue rentals for the dinners and parties that we’ll be doing in LA, NYC, and Chicago.

And while that may still be a lot of money to have a camera follow a guy around to bars, it’s a very small budget to make an actual network quality TV show.  With Chug, as we did with Three Sheets, we’ll have over a month of planning and pre-production where the producers will need to lock down locations, hire fixers (international translators and location scouts), get shooting permits, carnets (certificates that allow us to ship our gear in and out of the country), coordinate travel, and get insurance (which alone is about $25,000).  Then, while shooting, there are: two camera guys, (with expensively rented cameras, gear, and lights), a sound guy, (with expensive rented gear), two producers, and the executive producer. This is aside from hidden daily costs like the flights, rental cars, train tickets, hotels, per diem, and food.  Then, as we’ll end up with dozen of hours of raw footage, we’ll need to hire editors, assistant editors, a post production supervisor, motion graphics animator, writer, and producers to put the show together.  And, during the several months that the production will be on-going, all of those people will obviously need to be paid… except me.

The money raised by Kickstarter, in fact, won’t be enough to fund Chug.  No money that comes in from the Kickstarter campaign will go into my pocket. I’ll actually be putting in my own money to get the show made to the quality that you should expect from a TV show.  The fact is that I am gambling on the idea that I can sell Chug to a network after the show is made and after the Kickstarter backers have all been given their rewards.  Even though they’ve all said “no” already, I have faith that some network will see what an amazing show we’ve made, be surprised by the dedicated fan base, and hire us to make more episodes.  That’s my contribution and dedication to the show.

It’s interesting to note that he’s not making a penny off this and is using it as a way to produce some episodes and attempt to sell them to a network. It’s a lot less risky for a network to buy episodes that are already done than to fund production and hope to make their money back. Then if the episodes do well on TV, they might buy more!

Congrats to Zane and his team for surpassing their goal and thanks to them for making more episodes! I’m excited to see them!

Ever since there was even a hint of spring, we’ve had a bird sitting hanging out in a tree in the back yard singing the same short song over and over again. He’s at it for probably 14-15 hours a day. We’ve named him Kevin. I don’t know why it’s Kevin. That was just his name. But as I listen to him over and over and over and over again, I wonder what kind of bird he is. Can you identify him? And do you have and lady bird friends that might be interested in hooking up with him?

Over the last couple weeks, I received my NRA membership card and my Concealed Pistol License from the state. Some people cheer when they hear that and others cringe. Why did I get them? Allow me to explain…

I probably wouldn’t have joined the NRA except that it’s a pre-req for the Snoqualmie Valley Rifle Club. MikeF took me shooting there a few weeks ago and it looked like a place that I want to join. Before I can even attempt to fill out a membership form, they need proof of an NRA membership so I joined. The NRA is like that friend that says things you generally agree with but says them in such an obnoxious way that you cringe a bit. So I’m a member, and I stand with them on just about everything, but sometimes I wish their tactics weren’t quite so divisive.

As for the Concealed Pistol License, there are a few reasons for that:

• As anti-gun fever increases, I want to add one more to the stats of people who carry guns. It’s a stat that gets quoted in lots of news stories and the more of us there are, the stronger our silent voice is. If only 1 in 1000 people have a CPL, it might seem easy to get at law passed against them. But currently in Washington state, the numbers are more like 1 in 12. KIRO7 has a neat map that lets you see what percentage of your city has the right to carried a concealed pistol. (Note that everyone has the right to carry a gun in the open but you’ll probably end up getting busted for disturbing the peace.)
• There’s a 5 day waiting period if you want to buy a handgun. If you have a CPL, there’s generally no waiting period. It’s one less hoop for me to jump through and saves me a trip.
• A CPL relaxes a lot of the restrictions about transporting guns in your car. While I try hard to abide by all the rules when driving to and from the range, this gives me a little cushion in case I get pulled over and I’m accidentally doing something wrong. (This is a bigger deal in other states. Washington has very reasonable laws about transporting firearms.)

Those are the big three reasons. And of course, it does actually give me the option to carry a concealed pistol if I want to. But given that I don’t even own a pistol yet, that’s not going to happen for a while. And even when I own one, will I carry it? Probably not most of the time. I won’t ever carry until I know exactly when I would be willing to pull it out, and I’ll have to do some thinking about that.

For now my gun enthusiasm is targeted (haha) more at sport shooting and less at self-defense. Shooting is a wonderful sport that combines physical preciseness and mental control. I’m loving it!

You know that feeling of guilt/frustration you get when those yellow pages come to your door and you drop them straight in the recycle bin? It’s such a waste of energy and resources. I just learned about a site called YellowPagesOptOut.com. Just as the name implies, you can opt out of the various phone books that you receive. Type in your zip code and the site will show you which directories are normally delivered. For our area, there were six books on the list! I opted out of all of them and hopefully it means that there will be one less thing getting tossed out at our house.

For those of you who were fans of Three Sheets and Drinking Made Easy, there’s good news: Zane Lamprey is attempting to launch a new show! It will be in the same vein as the previous shows. He travels around the world, enjoys local alcohol, learns a bit about the culture, and has fun doing it. He’s a got a good formula and it’s been frustrating to see him have such a hard time getting a network to support him.

He’s finally given up (?) on the networks and decided to fund this effort through Kickstarter. The show is called CHUG and they’re trying to raise $500K. It’s a lofty goal so I hope you’ll join me in pledging a few bucks to help him out. If you’ve never done a Kickstarter project, it’s pretty easy. The site lists out what you’ll receive for giving various amounts of money and you only pay out if the project hits it’s fundraising goal. There’s no guarantee that you’ll actually receive any of the rewards though! It’s possible that whatever you’re sponsoring will go belly up and fail completely so keep that in mind. I don’t have any fear of that with Zane’s project as he’s a pro at this and has been doing it for a long time.

Starting a project like this also means that once he reaches his goal, he can walk into a network and say “Look, I’ve already got the money to produce the show. All you need to do is pony up the cash to promote it and give me a time slot.” That’s a pretty interesting offer, especially with all the new Internet networks that I blogged about yesterday.

Good luck Zane!

PS. If you are a fan of Zane, be sure to listen to his weekly podcast!

We’re all familiar with CBS, ABC and NBC, but the new “TV channels” are shaping up to be Amazon, Netflix and YouTube. All three companies are purchasing exclusive content for their sites. And these are some pretty big deals with names like Kevin Spacey, Bill Murray, and John Goodman. When you stop and think about it, if you have a Roku box or some other way to watch these sites on your TV, there’s very little difference between watching a show on Amazon or watching a show on NBC. House of Cards was released recently on Netflix and got great reviews. There are a lot more shows in the pipe including a new season for Arrested Development which I’m thrilled about.

Looking ahead 5-10 years, it’s pretty easy to imagine this type of “TV” taking over the traditional television model. On Netflix, Amazon and YouTube, producers can create the exact show they want. There’s no need to break at specific points for commercials or create a 1 hour show that is exactly 42 minutes long so that all the commercials fit. Plus, all the episodes can be released at once which is increasingly how people like to consume a series.

It’s all very intriguing and there are plenty of people cutting the cable cord to consume their TV completely online. While I love the idea and do consume content from the web, I’m still happy with cable TV for the sheer ease of use. Cable comes into my house, gets recorded by one of the four tuners in my Windows Media Center PC and then gets streamed out to the various TV’s in our house, computers or even our phones. Doing something similar without a cable subscription requires us to remember which app we open to watch which show and right now it’s not worth the hassle for our household. Kudos to those of you who are blazing a trail for the rest of us!