Studio711.com – Ben Martens

I picked this up from MattB’s recent Facebook post. It’s a Forbes article entitled “Why Don’t More People Work As Programmers?” It does an excellent job of describing what it takes to be a great programmer. Programming is not something that you can learn by taking a class or two or ten. Give it a read if you’ve got a code monkey in your life. Our profession is a mystery to a lot of people. The article won’t explain the mystery, but it might help you appreciate the complexity of the trade.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/10/31/why-dont-more-people-work-as-programmers/

The fun part of Legos for me was usually putting them together. Grabbing random pieces and building from your imagination is fun, but building an actual kit was always special. There’s a great service that I just learned about called Pley. You set up a queue from about 250 different Lego sets and for $15/month, they will send you one of the kits. When you’re done, box it back up and send it back. Then they send you the next one. And yes germophobes, they are cleaned and sanitized before they go out again.

After having multiple chunks of skin cut out of my body over the last couple years, I think about UV light pretty much whenever I’m outside. There’s an interesting article on Slate about a photographer who took video of people under UV light. You can see how different skin features like freckles absorb and reflect UV light. And after watching the video, I’ll never look at sunscreen the same way again! It works by absorbing UV light so it doesn’t reach the skin. When people put it on in the video, it looks like they are smearing black tar on themselves. You can check out the video below but the article is worth a read too.

Patreon.com lets you see who else supports the same shows as you and then you can see what other shows they support. It was via that feature that I learned about I Like To Make Stuff. I’ve been looking for a good woodworking podcast that’s in my skill range (as opposed to The Wood Whisperer which is awesome but way over my head.) I Like To Make Stuff has been very interesting and I’ve already picked up quite a few tips and tricks even for the projects that I have no interest in doing. They’re pretty short and packed with good stuff. If you like wood working, check it out.

If you use Amazon regularly, be sure to check out AmazonSmile. You choose a charity and then Amazon gives them about half a percent of the money from your purchase. There’s very little work that needs to happen on your end to give the charity a nice donation. The hardest part is just remembering to start your session from smile.amazon.com so that your purchase qualifies for the program. There are lots of charities to pick from and if you run a 501c3 organization, you can add it. For those of you affiliated with the WELS, you might be interested to note that MLC is already on the list.

We make heavy use of OneNote which probably isn’t much of a surprise, but Tyla and I also use it a lot at home. We both have our own sections where we keep all kinds of notes and then we have a shared section where we keep the grocery list, ideas for gifts for friends and family, lists of doctors, and much more. It’s a great tool for getting rid of miscellaneous pieces of paper and for keeping in sync with other people.

OneNote used to be a paid product but now it’s completely free. You can get it on Windows Phone, Windows, Mac, iPhone and Android. The Office blog has more information and links to download all the freebies.

MattB posted an article on Facebook that I felt deserved it’s own post here. It’s from thefederalist.com and is called “The Death Of Expertise”. The article discusses how our society is full of people who search the internet for 5 minutes and then denounce legitimate experts as idiots. Here are a couple quotes from the article but I encourage you to read the whole thing:

Yes, it’s true that experts can make mistakes, as disasters from thalidomide to the Challenger explosion tragically remind us. But mostly, experts have a pretty good batting average compared to laymen: doctors, whatever their errors, seem to do better with most illnesses than faith healers or your Aunt Ginny and her special chicken gut poultice. To reject the notion of expertise, and to replace it with a sanctimonious insistence that every person has a right to his or her own opinion, is silly…

People in political debates no longer distinguish the phrase “you’re wrong” from the phrase “you’re stupid.” To disagree is to insult. To correct another is to be a hater. And to refuse to acknowledge alternative views, no matter how fantastic or inane, is to be closed-minded…

Thus, at least some of the people who reject expertise are not really, as they often claim, showing their independence of thought. They are instead rejecting anything that might stir a gnawing insecurity that their own opinion might not be worth all that much.