Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Sports

The Psychology Of Perfection

While very often I believe that “done is better than perfect”, trap shooting is not one of those times. Don, Logan and I headed to the range for the first time in about nine months. I generally hit around 18-20 out of 25 and my best round ever was 23. I thought I’d be pretty rusty, but on my first round I just kept hitting them. I was able to stay pretty calm until I got to the last position of 5 clays. 20 in a row. Wow. Just a few more. As I hit, one, two, three, and then four of them my nerves really started to take over. I had 24 in a row, already setting a personal best, and I was now one trigger pull away from the elusive perfect round. It’s not as difficult as bowling a 300, but it’s still pretty rare. You get a badge from the gun range and the envy of your fellow shooters. All those thoughts were swirling through my head. I tried to clear them out, take some deep breaths, focus on just one more shot like I had been doing all morning. I called “PULL!”, the clay flew out and I thought “Oh good, an easy one!” I moved the gun along the flight path pulled the trigger and… instantly knew it was wrong. I’m pretty sure I led it too much and the clay sailed to the ground unharmed. 24 out of 25. A great score, but it was obvious to everyone that I choked under the pressure.

As with many other sports, once you figure out the mechanics, trap shooting is mostly a mental activity. Can you stay focused? Can you keep your nerves in check? Can you get into the zone and let your body do it’s job? It’s a very interesting challenge because the only way I’ve found to get better is to train and be in that situation. Faking it works to some extent (pretending you have a prefect run even if you’ve already missed) but it’s not the same. The pressure is getting easier over time and that’s what keeps me going. I used to freak out when I was close to getting 20/25 and now I am almost blasé about it if I’ve already missed one.

Will I get to 25? I know I can do it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes a few more great runs to get me there so I can conquer these nerves.

benmartens June 20, 2014 Sports

Power BI World Cup

I’ve been posting lots of quick, little examples showing off pieces of our Power BI offering, but now I’ve got a huge one for you. Our team recently acquired access to a HUGE data set of statistics. With the World Cup starting up, we decided to use World Cup statistics for a great demo.

It’s running now at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/powerBI/solutions/demo/qna/qna-demo-worldcup.aspx and I encourage you to check it out. Ask it any question about World Cup statistics and watch the magic unfold! The stats we used to build up the data model behind the scenes is super detailed so I think you’ll be surprised about what you can ask. Hopefully a bigger example like this makes it pretty obvious how useful Power BI could be operating over your own company’s data sets.

benmartens June 13, 2014 Geek, Links, Sports

2014 Indianapolis 500

Tyla, Elijah and I flew back to Indiana for Memorial Day. This trip was planned around the Indy 500. I lived a few hours away from the race for most of my life but I never went to the race. This year, I decided it was time to change that.

In it’s prime in the 90’s, the race drew 400,000 fans making it the biggest single sporting event in the world! There were some issues with the series, but the event still gets about 200-250,000 visitors each year. With so many people going to a single location, Dad, Luke and I decided we would get there early to fight our way through traffic. We planned to arrive at 9, three hours before the race started, and it worked out quite well. We had very little traffic getting in and found our reserved spot in the North 40 parking lot.

We killed some time walking around and a bit of the track and into the infield. The track is HUGE. It’s 2.5 miles per lap so we obviously didn’t explore very much of the overall festivities.

We arrived in our seats about a half hour before the race started with a cooler full of water and beer, and a backpack full of snacks. We also each rented the FanVision devices which combine driver radio scanners, TV broadcast, and headphones/hearing protection. It’s a great way to keep up with what’s happening in the race.

The weather was perfect making for a great race day. It was between 80 and 85 with not a cloud in the sky. Thankfully there was a breeze throughout the race to keep us from getting too hot in that mass of people. We stayed in our seats for the whole race (most people did) since it was a lot of work to work our way to the aisles.

The race was awesome. I can’t do justice to the sights and sounds of cars traveling in excess of 230mph and doing an entire 2.5 mile lap in less than 42 seconds. I actually felt a little queasy for the first quarter of the race and I think it was a combination of the hot sun and the fact that seeing cars move that fast just doesn’t make sense when you see it.

Watching on TV gives you a better view of the strategy involved in the race, but being there in person gives you all the emotion of the race: screaming fans, roaring engines, cars whizzing by, etc. It was an experience I’ll never forget! We sat near the top of the stands in Turn 3 which gave us a great view all the way from Turn 2 through Turn 4. The more expensive seats are on the front stretch, but I think we were all happy with our choice. Remember that if you buy tickets for a race, the higher you sit, the better your seats!

When the race ended, we took our time getting back to the car (not that we had much choice with the sea of humanity trying to leave). Instead of starting our car and moving a couple feet every 10 minutes, we fired up the grill and cooked some brats. That worked out perfectly and by the time we were ready to leave, the traffic was just dying down enough for us to get out without much trouble.

Our ride back took a little longer than planned because we got a flat tire. That’s normally not a problem for a car full of three guys but the safety cable that straps the tire to the bottom of the car was rusted on and we couldn’t get it off. Someone who lived nearby finally stopped to see what was going on and came back with just the tools we needed to get it loose. The rest of the drive was uneventful.

I’m so happy with how the day turned out and thankful that I could experience this. Thanks to Dad and Luke for going too! And thanks to Tyla for watching Elijah all day while I was playing! All that being said, this was more of a single experience than something I want to do every year. It’s great to try but I don’t need to do it regularly.

Photos and video don’t do this justice but it will at least give you a taste of what we saw and heard.

benmartens June 9, 2014 Sports, Travel

NFL Draft Day

The NFL Draft has come and gone and I’m surprised at how little the league is embracing big data. Statistics and data show that it’s actually a detriment to take one of the top picks because you pay those players much higher salaries with no guarantee that they’ll actually live up to the hype. Seattle consistently traded down to lower picks which is the statistically good move. You get more picks at lower pay rates and therefore have a better chance at getting a great player. The book “Scorecasting” has a great chapter on this and you can read an excerpt about the draft on their site.

Here’s a summary of Seattle’s draft showing how they apparently used this data analysis to their advantage. They traded away their earlier picks and got three extra picks compared to what they started with.

1. #32 to Minnesota for second round (#40) and fourth-round (#108)
2a. #40 and fifth-round (#146) to Detroit for second-round (#45), fourth-round (#111) and seventh-round (#227)
2b. Paul Richardson (13, 45) WR Colorado
2c. Justin Britt (32, 64) T Missouri
4a. Cassius Marsh (8, 108) DE UCLA
4b. #111 traded to Cincinnati for fourth-round (#123) and sixth-round (#199)
4c. Kevin Norwood (23, 123) WR Alabama
4d. Kevin Pierre-Louis (32, 132) LB Boston College
5. Jimmy Staten (32, 172) DT Middle Tennessee
6a. Garrett Scott (23, 199) T Marshall
6b. Eric Pinkins (32, 208) DB San Diego St.
7. Kiero Small (12, 227) FB Arkansas

The NFL media machine really hypes up this event, but it’s going to be interesting to see what happens when all the teams wake up to the Moneyball approach.

benmartens May 16, 2014 Sports

Super Bowl Champions

I’ve never lived in a city where the hometown team has won any major sporting event. It was so exciting to see the Seahawks not only win, but completely embarrass the Broncos! I don’t usually listen to sports talk, but when I flipped it on for the past two weeks, all I heard was about how smart Peyton Manning was and how the Seattle defense wasn’t going to be able to handle him. Wrong.

We celebrated the win with a house full of friends as we had been doing throughout the playoffs. It’s fun to watch your team win but it’s even more fun to be surrounded by friends when it happens.

The city has gone wild. People on Twitter were reporting a lot of fires and rioting which is unfortunate. Hopefully the police keep that nonsense under control. It’s Seattle. I can’t imagine things will get too out of hand.

Congrats to the Seahawks! It’s fun to cheer for a team with a bunch of previously unheard-of players with very low salaries. They’re in it for the game, not for the money and it showed. They played with a lot of heart. Everyone on the team plays a role, instead of being a one man show. As proof of that point, they scored in every way possible during the Super Bowl: safety, field goal, and touchdowns both by the offense and kick return team. Kudos to you Seahawks!

benmartens February 3, 2014 Sports

Football Squares With Power Query

Squares is a popular game when you get a big group of people to watch football. It’s a game of chance where all the money that goes in is redistributed to the attendees. If you’re unfamiliar with the game, you can find lots of websites like this one with the basic rules.

After people pick their squares, the paper ends up getting passed around all over the place as people wonder if they are in line to win some money. What happens if Team A kicks a field goal? Ooo I’ll win if Team B scores a touchdown before the end of the quarter!

This year I’m going to geek it up a bit (surprise surprise) and do this with Power Query. People will put their names into a grid inside Excel and then we’ll randomly assign 0-9 to each row and column. From there, the magic of Power Query takes over. Here are the basics of how the document is set up:

  1. The table where people enter their picks is loaded into the Power Query flow with the “From Table” operation.
  2. The current score is grabbed with “From Web” and looks at one of the many pages will report the current score. That score is then modded to contain only the final digit in the score for each team.
  3. Another query then takes those score digits and looks up the corresponding value in the table of picks. That resulting value is the name of the person who will win if the score doesn’t change.
  4. The current score table also contains some extra columns that calculate the last digit of the score if either team scores a field goal or a touchdown. I turned the query in step 3 into a function and then called that function with each possible scoring combination.

The end result looks like this. Simply hitting the Refresh button in Excel will refresh the green table showing who is current in line for some money and who might win if various things happen in the game.

benmartens January 31, 2014 Geek, Sports

Your Favorite Team

There are a lot of transplanted people in my group at work and with all the recent hubub about the Seahawks, there have been some interesting discussions about team loyalty, bandwagons, etc. I’ve heard two opposing viewpoints:

  1. You grow up being a fan of a team and you are their fan forever.
  2. You should cheer for the team in the town where you live.

I think I do a little of both. I’ll always have nostalgia for the Cubs and Purdue, but as I’ve moved around, I’ve also cheered for the local team. I even cheer for UW now after they broke my heart beating Purdue in the 2001 Rose Bowl. It’s easier to follow the games on TV, easier to attend them, easier to find apparel, and it’s more fun for me to be cheering along with other city residents. Tell that to group #1 though and you get told that you’re a disloyal bandwagon fan.

Which side do you fall on?

benmartens January 24, 2014 Sports

Seahawks In The Super Bowl

I’ve lived in a lot of different cities which means that cheering for the Bears, Colts, Vikings, and Eagles could have all made sense in the past. With all that traveling, I didn’t really cheer for one team (except for a stint where I cheered for the Cowboys? I think it was because of the Aikman, Emmitt, Irvin trio.)

After a year or two in Seattle, I knew that I wanted to stick around this city for a long time. It was also really hard to follow my old sports teams so I decided to cheer the Mariners and the Seahawks. Last year I finally started watching every Seahawks game.

So I think that makes me a bit of a bandwagon fan. Oh well.

This has been such a fun year to cheer for the Seahawks! I lived in Philly in 2005 when the Eagles lost to the Patriots but I wasn’t really an Eagles fan. This time around it’s exciting to ride the wave of Seahawks fever that is coursing through the city. Aside from a few guys with, um, strong personalities (ie. Richard Sherman), this roster seems like a great group of guys. Russell Wilson seems like a genuinely fantastic individual, and it’s fun cheering for this rag-tag group of low draft picks with low salaries. There’s no way the Seahawks can afford to keep this roster together once contracts run out so we’ll enjoy it while it lasts.

TimS, AndyD and I bought those jerseys from China a few weeks back but Tim and I have pretty much ditched ours. Andy got a mostly gray one which looks quite a bit better than our navy ones. I just ordered a Seahawks t-shirt from nflshop.com so this one will be official with all the right colors, etc and I won’t be embarrassed to wear it.

P.S. Sherman posted an article on Monday explaining his actions.

benmartens January 21, 2014 Sports

NASCAR Signs With NBC

For the past few years, the NASCAR season has been split across three networks: FOX, TNT and ESPN/ABC. FOX does the best job and TNT coverage is a joke. When we adjusted our cable package, it meant that I wouldn’t be able to watch the races that were on TNT or ESPN. However it looks like that will be changing. In 2015, FOX will get the first 12 races and NBC will get the last 24 races. That means no more TNT or ESPN. I think that’s a win for the sport both because it means fewer changes of network and it drops the two worst coverage teams. Hopefully NBC can put together a good team. It will also give them something big to show at the end of the season when CBS and FOX are running NFL games and will be a big lead-in to their Sunday Night Football games.

benmartens January 16, 2014 Sports

NFL Jerseys

A couple weeks ago, TimS told me about a website that sells NFL jerseys for really cheap. They come from China so it’s a good bet that they are unlicensed. There seem to be a lot of websites that do this but the one we looked at was UnboxingJerseys.com. They have tons of jerseys from lots of sports. I even found an old school Ryne Sandberg Cubs jersey on there. Lots of the jerseys are available for $20.

Ordering from them is sketchy. Don’t use a credit card that you care about getting stolen. Every email you receive from the website and the payment company are full of typos and grammatical errors. Shipping takes about two weeks. You’re only paying $20 so don’t expect a perfect replica. For example, on the Seahawks jerseys, there are multiple green colors used. But from a distance it looks good and you’re not paying $250 from nfl.com.

benmartens January 3, 2014 Links, Sports