Studio711.com – Ben Martens

In February, I completed The Life and Times of Ben Martens: 2002. Lulu.com did a great job printing off the hardcover book for me, so I went ahead with books for 2003-2007. I have been spending ~5-10 hours/week for the past two months and I'm finally done with the next 5 books. It takes an extremely long time to get everything edited, formatted, and laid out correctly. Tonight, I finished the process of uploading them to lulu.com and placing my order. For the low low price of $148.70 plus shipping, you can now have six books covering the first six years of my blog, or you can download the eBooks for free.

Like I said before, I know no one will read these (probably including me), but I think it's pretty neat to have these volumes sitting on my shelf. Except for 2002 which was only a half year of blogging, the other volumes are all 500-650 pages long. Somewhere in there, there has to be at least one page worth the tree it was printed on.

Maybe.

About two weeks ago, I sent the first volume of my book series to the printer. I'm going to print one book for each year of the website, but I wanted to see one volume in person before paying for all of them. The package arrived today and I'm immensely impressed with the quality. The book only costs $18.50 (plus tax and shipping) which makes it less than a lot of the books you see in the store. I would have expected to pay a lot more for a custom hardcover book of this quality.

The guys at Lulu are really onto something. I can't wait to get the next five years sent off to them for printing!

I've hinted at my newest project a couple times since last fall, but the first stage is finally nearing conclusion. As the title of the post implies, I'm writing a book. More accurately, it will be a series of six volumes – one for each year of the blog.

I have no illusions that anyone else will purchase this. It's purely a project that sounded interesting to me, and I think it will be interesting to see all those books lined up on my bookshelf. But how do you publish a book without spending thousands of dollars?

That's where lulu.com steps in. They are a printing/publishing company that makes it super easy for you to create your own books with professional printing and binding. You can choose from paper back, hard cover, coffee table books, and a large number of other formats. Each format has a bunch of different binding and printing options. You can even pay $50 and get a real ISBN number. I'll be skipping the ISBN number, but the books I'm getting printed are standard 6"x9" hardcover books with a color dust jacket and black and white pages.

For the past few months, I have been scrubbing old posts. The first 1000 or so posts didn't have titles or categories so that took a lot of time. I also had to write a program that pulled each post out of the database and stuck it into a word document while preserving the images and formatting.

It has been very tempting to edit the content of some posts. While I am ok with correcting spelling, I'm holding back from removing posts entirely. I disagree with some posts I wrote in the past, but that's part of what makes this an interesting project.

I'm getting close to sending year 2002 to the printer. Once I get that back and make sure everything looks as expected, I'll print off volumes for 2003-2007. It all depends on how I format the books, but I'm expecting to have well over 2000 pages in the complete set.

And now for the part that you can participate in. I'm trying to mimic an actual published book, and books that you buy in the stores always have quotes from reviewers. If you leave comments or send me an email with a review of the book, I'll consider using it. I realize I'm opening myself up for a lot of jokes, but that will make the book better. Don't worry, you're not going to hurt my feelings. If you don't make fun of the book, I will.

[Update] Fixed typo. Thanks JimW.

Since last fall, Tim and I have been working sporadically on a little project. We wanted custom beer glasses. But what should the logo be? We went through a ton of ideas and finally settled on “Dos Tios Restaurante y Taberna” which translates to “Two Uncles Restaurant and Tavern.” The sombrero has the date 2006 since that is when our common nephew, David, was born. It’s also the year that Tim and I became roommates. Why Spanish? Well Dos Tios sounds much cooler than Two Uncles.

The next task was to decide where to order and which glasses to pick. After comparing a lot of different online glass makers, we finally settled on Grandstand Sportswear & Glassware and model #194. The only catch is that these places usually require a minimum order of 72 glasses. Yikes! But it’s not all that bad. When he moves out at the end of the year, we’ll each be left with 36 and when I buy a house with a man cave in the basement, I’ll have plenty of glasses to stock the bar.

I’m extremely happy with Grandstand. The sales department was extremely helpful and responsive. Once we placed the order, they were on our doorstep in just over two weeks. One glass was broken in the shipment, but that’s very acceptable to me. Shipping that much glass isn’t easy.

So yeah, it’s a bit ridiculous, but it’s fun to have custom glasses to drink out of. Now we just need to go through and test all the glasses to make sure that beer tastes right in each one!