Studio711.com – Ben Martens

I’ve written posts about how LLMs (large language models like ChatGPT, Copilot, etc) are changing my life, but I continue to have conversations with people who are hesitant about it. It seems like it takes that one “aha!” experience where to help someone internalize how this will revolutionize something in their daily routine. So here’s another post where I’ll share a bunch of examples of how I use it to see if any of them trigger for you. Once you get it into your daily flow, it becomes like GPS for your brain. It doesn’t replace you in anything, but it enhances your abilities dramatically. Just like I wouldn’t drive somewhere with a paper atlas anymore, I’d be left behind in life if I wasn’t using AI.

1. Argue Against Me. Humans love to have their own beliefs reinforced, but true learning happens when you can really understand the opposite viewpoint. AI is great for this. I’ll open up a prompt and explain my viewpoint and then say “Give me some logical arguments from the opposite point of view.” It’s very eye-opening. It’s how I wish all discussions would go but with AI, it’s a lot easier to get non-emotional responses.
2. Coding. There’s a lot of talk about using AI for coding. I code for a living so obviously I’m interested in whether AI is going to come for my job. I currently find it to be fantastic for small, self-contained problems like “write me a powershell script to do x, y, and z” but it’s not as good at “This class feels unnecessary to me. Rearchitect this project to clean it up.” I’ll keep trying the more advanced scenarios though because it improves so rapidly. If you’re interested in this topic, I recommend checking out this article: How AI-assisted coding will change software engineering: hard truths
3. Command Line Arguments. I guess this is related to coding, but sometimes I find myself using a command line tool with a ton of different arguments. Instead of reading the documentation, I’ll just say “I’m using ytdlp and I want to download only the audio of this video and I want it saved to mp3 format. Generate the command line arguments that I need.” Bingo!
4. Explain like I’m 5, 10, and 15 years old. When I get curious about a new area, I’m not sure how much I know, so I’ll ask AI something like “I’m curious about quantum entanglement. Give me separate explanations like I’m a 5, 10, and 15 years old.” The numbers might vary, but something like that will help me get quickly up to speed and lets me ask much more specific questions as I continue to learn. It’s awesome to be able to ask dumb questions in a private environment!
5. Sermon Summaries. Each Sunday I’m responsible for posting sermons from our church services on Facebook and YouTube. I like to include a quick blurb about the sermon and I’ve been experimenting with AI for this. I take the automatically generated transcript of the sermon, feed it into AI, and then ask for a 2-3 sentence summary in the style of the speaker. That “in the style of the speaker” phrase is a key piece of the prompt. It produces a much more natural sounding blurb. I still have to review it for theological accuracy and sometimes I’ll even give it more prompting about what type of source theology is acceptable, but in general, it’s a very solid start and much more eloquent than I would have generated on my own. And even if I could have written something good, using an automated solution like this is a lot easier for someone else to repeat.
6. Bible Study Companion. During our Bible studies at church, I’ve been typing the questions in and seeing what AI thinks about the answers. “What does placing Ruth in the line of the savior tell us about God’s salvation plan?” I read through the answers and it’s usually a cheat sheet for all the answers that the group will give. Every once in a while they miss one that I think is relevant and I can share it with the group. Now obviously this loses part of the self-reflection benefit of Bible study, but as someone who sometimes finds themselves leading the study, it feels good to have a tool like this in my back pocket.
7. Homework Helper. Sometimes I have a hard time explaining concepts to Elijah either because I’m unable to formulate it in a way he grasps or because we’re not working well together. In both cases, I fire up the voice version of an AI and have Elijah chat with it. Even if the AI explains it the same way I was, it usually goes over better.

Those are just some examples from my daily life, but there are other awesome ideas too. How about using it to learn a dying language and then safeguard it for the future? And this next example isn’t specifically related to LLMs, but imagine AI training to speak in the voice of someone who has lost their voice to disease? Now their text to speech actually sounds like them. We’re just starting to discover all the possibilities.

These topics come up in a lot of podcasts, but one good one I listened to recently was an interview with Reid Hoffman who recently wrote a book called Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future. You can listen to the episode here: Unlocking AI’s Potential: Reid Hoffman Discusses ‘Superagency’. I got the “GPS for your brain” quote from that episode.

So if you tried AI once and it gave you a dumb answer or didn’t work for you, don’t give up. One piece of advice is to use the voice version of the AI and just talk to it. That can feel a lot more natural. Or if you want to chat via text but aren’t getting good answers, there’s a whole school of knowledge called “prompt engineering” which is about how to craft the right types of questions. As an example, one thing I hear at church a lot is “AI gives me too much reformed theology.” Sure, maybe it does by default because that makes up a lot of the theological material on the internet. But you could also start your prompt with something like the following:

Serve as an AI theologian with a primary focus on interpreting and teaching Christian doctrines based solely on the Bible as the ultimate source of truth. Use the creeds of Christianity (such as the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian creeds) as supporting documents to clarify key doctrines. Supplement interpretations with insights from faith leaders, especially Martin Luther, whose writings emphasize justification by grace through faith and the authority of Scripture. Maintain a Christ-centered perspective throughout all discussions, ensuring that interpretations align with a literal and historical reading of the Scriptures.

You’ll get a much better response from that prompt! Also, there’s a “think deeper” button in many of the tools now. This helps apply an iterative response to the AI’s response which takes a little longer but can give better results. And while I still use mostly free tools, remember that the free option you’re using is old tech. If you want the latest and greatest, you’ll need to explore the paid options.

Need some links to get started? Here’s my current list ordered by most frequently used first:

• Copilot
• ChatGPT
• Google NotebookLM
• Grok
• Perplexity

I’ve been a happy user of MailStore Home for years. It lets me easily archive mail off of my various email accounts, store it locally, and still easily search it all. (I’m probably paranoid, but I don’t like having years of my personal emails stored on free email services.)

Due to some security changes and lack of support from MailStore, my Outlook.com accounts no longer work with their tool. It’s hard to complain too much when I’m using a free tool. They make their money from corporate customers. So I was off to search for something else.

There are lots of other options, but I kept seeing people recommend Thunderbird which is the email client from the Mozilla Foundation (makers of the Firefox browser.) I was able to export all my emails from MailStore to EML files and then import them into Thunderbird. It will take me a while to get used to the search interface, but functionally I’m back on track. I don’t like the interface enough to switch from my regular email client to just using Thunderbird, but it’s easy enough to open Thunderbird every once in a while and archive some emails from my various accounts to my local folders.

So if I’ve previously recommended MailStore to you as a way to archive your email locally, my new recommendation is Thunderbird. It’s a nice way to have access to all my old emails without letting companies scrape through my content. If you don’t care about that and if you don’t run out of space on your free email accounts, then you can ignore all this.

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

Last week I wrote about our trip to central WA. Part of the fun of those trips for me is the logistics of doing it with an electric vehicle. This one was a particular challenge because there are no superchargers up around the Grand Coulee Dam and it was going to be a long loop. If we left with 90% charge my estimate was that we’d get back with 15%. That’s ok, but it’s about the minimum that I ever shoot for.

While the Tesla itself will do everything it can to avoid you running out of power (as long you tell it where you’re going), my favorite pre-planning tool is A Better Route Planner. I’ve got the knobs tuned really well for our car and I can often predict it as good or better than the car itself at the start of a long drive.

To buy us a little extra cushion, I planned for us to eat a picnic lunch at the Gehrke Windmill Garden which Plug Share said had a handful of free NEMA 14-50 plugs which are good for about 10% battery charge per hour. I haven’t yet made any plans that require one of those random free spots to be functional, but I was happy to try it out and it did indeed work well. We added 6% to our battery while we ate and in the end, we made it back to the supercharger in Moses Lake with 20% so without the 6% charge we would have only been 1% off my pre-trip estimate.

When we do a trip like this, I always travel with our mobile connector and all my various adapters. If we got into a big bind, I would pull into an RV park and ask if I could pay $20 to take a couple dollars of electricity from them. We’ve never needed it, but it’s nice to have that as an option if we ever really got into a bind.

This probably sounds crazy to non-EV people and it would have made me way more nervous before we got into the EV world, but now I just view it as expanding my comfort level. When we first got the car I got nervous when we dropped below 50% charge. Now I’m much happier to play games to optimize our supercharging (15-50% is MUCH faster than 50-85% for example) and I’ll try to arrive at home with 10% or lower so that I can “fill up” with much cheaper electricity at home. Part of the fun of all this for me is knowing that in 10-20 years, this will all sound silly because there will be so many chargers everywhere. Our family goal is to hit every county in Washington. Privately I’m keeping track of which counties we hit in the Tesla versus our gas truck because I think it would be fun to say we hit them all in an EV. Some of the northeast and southeast counties will be quite a challenge!

Bonus fact: The Model Y was already the world’s best-selling vehicle in 2023 and now it is very close to being the best-selling vehicle in the US, already having knocked off the F150 and hot on the heels of the Rav4.

For our big family vacation this year, we chose a cruise to Alaska! Tyla and I did two cruises (cruise 1 post and cruise 2 post) before Elijah was born, but we had saved an Alaskan cruise because it was so easy to do. Sometimes those easy/local things get put off for a long time!

This cruise was on Royal Caribbean’s “Quantum of the Seas” ship. We chose it because our first two cruises were with Royal Caribbean and the related Celebrity cruise line. We knew they had good family programs and Elijah was still within the age limit for their kids club.

We had four stops on this cruise:

• Icy Strait Point, Alaska – This isn’t really a town. It’s a purpose-built cruise port and the small fishing village of Hoonah is nearby. We didn’t schedule an excursion here and just ended up walking along the shore about halfway to the town before returning. The popular activity here is a giant zipline. It was cool to set foot in Alaska for the first time, but the port didn’t wow us. While we were parked in the port, we spotted a few whales!
• Skagway, Alaska – We were excited for this port because it was a bigger town and because we had booked a zipline excursion. (The most popular excursion is a train ride up into the Yukon.) Unfortunately, we never got to stop there! The winds were gusting over 40 knots, and they were blowing the ship around so much that it couldn’t dock safely. The captain tried twice but it didn’t work out so the rest of our itinerary was slightly modified. We were bummed to miss the port but thankful that we booked through the cruise line, so our excursion was immediately refunded.
• Endicott Arm and Dawes Glacier – This wasn’t really a stop, but it was a “view from the ship” destination. We drove through the narrow fjord called Endicott Arm. It’s only about a half mile wide so getting a giant cruise ship through there is a bit of a feat. The Dawes glacier is at the end of the fjord and there are an increasing number of icebergs along the way. We were excited to spot seals on one of the icebergs as we went by. We went as far as we could before the icebergs got too thick and then the captain spun the ship around so we could all view it easily.

• Juneau, Alaska – Our modified itinerary gave us a full day in Juneau instead of just the afternoon. We got off the ship in the morning and spent a couple of hours walking around the shops near the port. After lunch back on the ship, we got off again for our Jeep excursion. This was basically a 4.5 hour car rental. The Jeep came preprogrammed with waypoints and a related audio guide. The best stop was the Mendenhall Glacier. We stopped at the main visitor center area and did a 2 mile hike out to Nugget Falls. It was pretty rainy all day, but we were prepared, and the Jeep was stocked with extra umbrellas. It also had gold panning equipment, but we only discovered at the very end that the gold panning spot wasn’t in the default waypoint list. We added that to our trip and spent a few quick minutes realizing that understanding the concept of panning for gold is a lot different than remembering how the different tools work in the cold rain while you’re in a hurry to get back to the ship! After returning the Jeep, we had about half an hour before they pulled up the gangway so Tyla and Elijah were kind enough to let me stop into Alaskan Brewing and have a beer.

• Victoria, British Columbia – There’s a US law that says a cruise cannot leave a US port and return to a US port without stopping in another country unless it is registered in the US. That would have huge tax implications for the cruise lines so there’s always at least a token stop in another country. In this case, we arrived in Victoria at 5pm and left at 10pm. Unless you’re eating dinner on shore and exploring in the dark, this isn’t really an ideal stop. We didn’t schedule an excursion but we did get out and walk around. We headed east out of the port along the coast and found ourselves out of the crowd and enjoying sunshine for one of the first times on the trip.

With the skipped Skagway stops and the two ports where we mostly just walked around, a lot of our time was spent on the ship. Thankfully the ship had a ton of things to keep us busy!

• SeaPlex – There was an indoor area on the top decks called the SeaPlex and we spent a lot of time there. Aside from the usual staples of ping pong, foosball, cornhole, etc, they had a big sports are that would change throughout the day. Over the course of the trip we used that area for bumper cars, roller skating, laser tag, soccer, and dodgeball. It was quite impressive and they did a good job of knowing which events needed to have a pre-registration so you didn’t have to wait in line for a long time.

• iFly – There is a chain of indoor skydiving places called “iFly” which is basically a cylinder on top of a giant fan that lets you practice free falling. The ship had one of these too! We pre-paid for an extended session which got us extra instruction and two 1-minute flights. One minute sounds short but it felt plenty long when we were in the tunnel. All three of us did that initial session. Later we discovered that we could also sign up for a single flight for free. I’m glad we did the paid session first because the free one included very little instruction. Tyla was nice enough to stand outside the tunnel and take pictures and video of Elijah and I flying!

• Rock climbing – There was a two-story rock-climbing wall on the side of the ship with a wide variety of routes for different skill levels. The wall was closed most of the time because of wind and rain, but Elijah got to spend about an hour there our last full day on the ship.

• Pools – The ship does have an outdoor pool, but it wasn’t used a lot on this cruise because of the weather. The indoor pool got a lot of use but somehow never seemed overly crowded. Elijah spent a lot of time in there and especially enjoyed it when the water was sloshing around during the rockier days at sea.

• FOOD – My main challenge on a cruise is figuring out how I’m going to be hungry enough for my next meal! The two basic choices for food are the main dining room and the buffet. We chose to eat our breakfasts and lunches in the buffet and then ate dinner in the dining room around 7 or 8pm every night. We chose the “My Time Dining” option which gave us a private table and the option to move our dining times around. We were very lucky to get a window table and the same great waiters every night. They would usually end up encouraging us to order multiple appetizers, entrees, and desserts so that we could sample many different items. Aside from all that great food, there were also endless ice cream cones, pizza, and hot dogs available. There are a lot of specialty restaurants that cost money, but we were more than happy with the included offerings.

• All Access Ship Tour – We paid for a 2.5-hour tour of the boat and got incredible behind the scenes access to backstage of the theater, galley, laundry, engineering, food storage, and even the bridge! They provided little speakers that hung on your ear which made it easy to hear what was going on. It’s amazing to see everything that needs to happen to keep 4000+ guests fed and entertained. There are people working extremely hard for long hours with no days off so that you can enjoy your time napping and overeating.

This cruise was quite different from our previous cruises.

• It was obviously much cooler and wetter than our Caribbean trips.
• In the Caribbean, we barely remember ever feeling the ship move, but the movement was impossible to ignore on this trip when you were walking around or lying in bed. It never bothered us or kept us from doing anything.
• On the first cruises I remember lots of naps and downtime where we would kill an hour or two just reading or staring at the ocean. With an 11-year-old in tow, that didn’t happen as often and we had to spend a lot more time figuring out how to keep him entertained and fill time. I once heard someone say that as a parent, you don’t take vacations, you just play tour guide for your kids. So my love of cruising so I don’t have to worry about logistics didn’t play out this time, but it was still worth it.

With the missed port and the different dynamics of having three people’s wishes to coordinate, I would say that this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I booked it, but it turned out differently great. We have a lot of wonderful memories together and we’re all dreaming about doing it again!

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

It’s been a while since we’ve had one of these updates, but I’m still loving the car and looking for excuses to drive it. We have 48,000 miles on it and we’re still on track to meet my goal of having this car cost the same or less over 100k miles than the car we would have purchased instead.

The topic today is a quick one with a big impact. Previously when you opened the app, it would immediately wake up the car. When the car is awake, it consumes a percent or two of battery just sitting there. Ideally it falls back into a very low power sleep mode quickly but sometimes that can take hours to happen. (Side note: why does it take so long? I wish I could push a button and force it into sleep mode.) TeslaMate let me easily see if the car was asleep without waking it up, but a recent change to the Tesla app now does the same thing. If I open the app while the car is asleep, it will stay asleep until I issue it a command.

We try to get back to my parents’ house in Indiana every summer and this year was no exception. Things were almost thrown off by a case of COVID, but then I learned that the CDC has updated their isolation guidelines. Thankfully that all worked out for us and the case was very mild (not even a fever.) It unfortunately did mean that we didn’t see some higher risk family members, but we still had a good time.

Dad and Mom surprised us by installing a new diving board! There was a diving board for all the years I lived there but about 20 years ago, it had to be removed because the rusty base couldn’t be safely held to the concrete anymore. The board was a BIG hit and got a lot of action! I’ve always wondered at what age I’ll do my last backflip and hmm… we might be past that point already. Either that or I need more height to get it done. Each time I tried it, I made it about 3/4 of the way around.

We went swimming every day but we also visited the new South Bend Chocolate Company location, played disc golf, picked berries, played croquet on Elijah’s made-up courses, went to a farmer’s market, and ate a lot of good food. I did edit a bunch of our videos together to remember the event, but don’t expect a cinematic masterpiece.

Thank you Dad and Mom for all the work you do to make our trip easy and enjoyable!

In May, I built my own 36×16 LED panel. The project was a lot of fun to build and taught me a lot, but honestly, I haven’t used it much since then. The original plan had been to build two of them and use them as Christmas decorations, but I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve turned it on. The software side of things was a mess which is a bit ironic given my profession. I had improved on the tutorial by writing my own app that ran on the desktop and communicated directly with the ESP8266 board. The board had very simple firmware which just received a stream of bytes and displayed it. That worked ok and I got a pretty good refresh rate, but the main issue was that after a few minutes, the board would stop updating and I couldn’t figure out why. After a long day of coding for my day job, I could never convince myself to spend time debugging this.

Fast forward to late November when I was watching a video from “The Hook Up” on YouTube about his Christmas light setup. It was at that moment that I realized that most of these Christmas light displays and lots of maker projects run on an LED control package called WLED. It’s free and open source and it’s very customizable. Could it work with my custom matrix?

About an hour later, I had it working, and most of that was me just fumbling around learning things. There was already a version of WLED that was compatible with my ESP8266 board so I loaded it on and instantly had a webserver that I could access from my desktop or phone. The built-in software is fantastic but there is also a big ecosystem of projects built on top of WLED if you want, for example, to display an animated gif on the matrix.

In the last week I’ve had it on more than I did in the previous six months. While it’s too late to build another one to use for the front window for Christmas, it has me thinking about next year.

I’m less and less enamored with politics as time goes on, but it seems unavoidable as we head into presidential election season. Since I know this is a common frustrating for people, I thought I’d share some of the things I do to try and stay sane:

• Beware of people who use name calling. They’re trying to get you on their “team” and create division. Even if you happen to agree that the other person deserves it, it’s not healthy.
• Beware of people who try to play to your emotions to get you to agree with them. Reading a news story or watching a talk show shouldn’t be like getting riled up about sports.
• Beware of people who speak in absolutes or hyperboles. AI isn’t going to kill us all. Their opponent getting elected won’t be the end of the world.
• Remember that even the choice of news sources can be full of bias. Not reporting on a story can be just as bad as taking a slanted view of the topic.
• Think about how concerned you are about telling people what you think about a politician. Imagine if you felt that strongly about sharing Jesus with them. What if for every conversation you had where you shared your political opinions, you also had one where you talked about Jesus? Which conversation is more relevant and important?
• In a world where you want to tell everyone about Jesus, why would you alienate more than half of everyone you meet by telling them about your political opinions or even hinting at them?

When I started playing disc golf towards the end of last summer, I started learning that I was right in the middle of a big surge of interest in the sport. It really spiked when COVID hit and the interest has continued. UDisc is the most popular app for tracking scores and finding courses. They have an annual report about the growth of the sport if you’re interested in stats.

It’s been a big hit in our house because it’s something that all three of us can enjoy, and it’s generally free. UDisc says that 90% of all disc golf courses are free to play. You can get a starter set of three discs for about $30 and I used my starter set for a very long time before buying some specific, fancier discs for $15-20/each.

I’m writing this post because I realized there have only be a couple blog posts that mention disc golf. Considering how much I have been playing, that feels a bit off, so I thought I’d use this post to answer some of the questions I had as I got into it:

Where do you play? There are courses at lots of local parks. UDisc says that 28% of Americans live within 2 miles of a course and 88% are within 10 miles. You can find them by going to https://udisc.com/courses or searching on internet maps. I’m lucky to live near a great course at Blyth Park in Bothell.

It seems intimidating. How do I not look like a moron? This is the biggest thing that held me back from playing. I regret the time I lost worrying about this. Disc golfers are generally super friendly! With so many people joining the sport, you’re probably not the only newbie out there. If you don’t know what to do, find somebody else who is playing and just ask them. Or if you look confused, someone will probably offer to help.

What do you do? When you get to the course, find the first tee. Sometimes there’s a map showing all the holes. Or if you have the UDisc app, it will show you a map of the course with your current location noted. That app is really helpful as you go from hole to hole looking for the next tee. Once you’ve found the first tee (usually some kind of a concrete or dirt pad about 2 feet by 6 feet), throw your first shot. Walk up to your disc, make sure one foot is right behind where your disc landed, and throw your next shot. Eventually you’ll make it to the basket and your disc must end up in the basket. Count your strokes and move on to the next tee.

How long does it take? My local course has 10 holes. (9 and 18 hole courses are the most common but it’s not super rare to have a different number of holes.) I can play a round by myself in 30-40 minutes, but obviously if there’s a lot of traffic on the course that can slow things down a bit.

What is the etiquette? If you’ve ever played traditional ball golf, a lot of etiquette is very similar. Some general guidelines are:

• Wait until the people in front of you are out of range before you throw. Generally this means waiting until they’re done with the hole.
• Yell “Fore!” if your disc is heading toward someone else.
• Whoever is farthest from the hole throws next.
• Play “ready golf” by knowing which disc you’re going to use and being ready to throw when it is your turn.
• Be aware of people throwing on holes near you. Disc golf courses can be tight and it’s easy for errant shots to veer into neighboring holes.

What’s the difference between a disc golf course and a traditional/ball golf course? While both have “tees” and “fairways” and conceptually are similar, the physical appearance can differ in a few ways:

• Disc golf holes are shorter. Most holes will range between 200-350 feet if they are beginner-friendly while long/pro holes can stretch over 1000 feet in some extreme cases.
• Disc golf courses have a lot more variety. Courses might be set in thick woods, an open field, zig zagging across an old golf course, etc.
• Disc golf courses make a lot more use of natural terrain and obstacles and some will even include man-made obstacles like a tall fence stationed at a key point in the middle of the fairway to make the hole more interesting.
• Some disc golf holes include a “mando” (short for “mandatory”) which means that you must go to the right or left of a specific obstacle.
• There’s no “green” for disc golf. There’s an imaginary circle around the basket with a radius of 30 feet and there are slightly special rules in that zone, but generally this isn’t explicitly marked.

Why do my discs always go to the left? Because of the physics of a disc, most discs will curve to the left, especially at the end of their flight. As people get better and can put more speed and spin into the disc, they can have different flight characteristics depending on the disc. As a beginner, I just plan for the curve.

Do discs get lost? Yes. Most people write their name and phone number on the back of the disc and people are pretty good about calling or texting if they find your disc. Thankfully I haven’t lost a disc yet, but I’ve probably spent more time than is reasonable looking for lost discs. Losing a disc isn’t as common as losing a golf ball though which is good because people get more attached to their discs as they learn how each specific disc flies.

What are some good sources for learning? I subscribe to quite a few disc golf channels on YouTube. Here are three of my favorites. All of these have a lot of videos so click on their playlists section to zero in on content that interests you.

• Robbie C Disc Golf – Robbie has a lot of beginner friendly videos and always focuses on mechanics that are helpful to average players.
• Overthrow Disc Golf – Josh was a full time professional tennis coach before switching primarily to teach disc golf. He is excellent at breaking down body mechanics into simple steps.
• Foundation Disc Golf – Foundation is mainly an online store that sells discs, but they have a fun YouTube channel as well. There is a ton of content of them playing rounds with various tweaks to the rules (like only using the worst selling discs in their store, playing doubles but taking the worst shot, etc.)
• JomezPro – Over the past few months, Elijah and I have started watching the final round of the touring pro tournament series. JomezPro posts very nicely produced coverage of the rounds 12-24 hours after they finish. It’s wild to see what the pros can do and it’s interesting to get to know the various players in the game.

Can you be a professional? I guess I answered this with the JomezPro recommendation above, but one of the most interesting parts about disc golf for me is that anybody can be ranked on the same charts as people who get paid to play the game. If you join the PDGA for $50/year, as soon as you play in a sanctioned tournament, you’ll be assigned a rating. Your rating goes up and down every time you play in a sanctioned tournament so you can directly compare your skill level against the pros. On the PDGA website, you can see how much money everyone makes in tournaments. As a local player, you’d be doing very well to make a couple hundred bucks a year. The highest level pros would do well to make $100,000/year from tournaments, but they are likely to have additional sponsorships that make them more than that. Estimates are that the highest paid pros may be making around $500,000/year but that’s a guess.

It’s a deep rabbit hole, but you can easily play casually and have lots of fun. According to my UDisc app, I’ve already played 19 rounds this year (39 last year). With the longer days and drier weather, I’m able to head to the park quickly after Elijah goes to bed to play a round in the evenings. It’s a relaxing way to get away from the computer screen for a while and get some fresh air. I’m more than happy to play a round with you if you live near me and are interested!

A huge percentage of our mail is junk… or it was. This is the point where I’d normally hit you with some stats about how much junk mail we get per day, and honestly, I did start collecting it at one point. Normally collecting data about random things is fun, but even data can’t make junk mail fun. So even though I didn’t count the junk mail rate, I did throw it all into a box for a month or two, and then I signed up for PaperKarma.

This isn’t sponsored, but the idea of PaperKarma is that it helps you unsubscribe from junk mail. You take a picture of the junk mail with your phone to help it search for the company that sent it, you tell it the exact addressee for the junk mail, and then they go off to tell the company to stop sending you mail.

I was skeptical at first but we signed up for a six month subscription for $16. Since I had a big backlog of junk mail, I was able to enter in a lot of mail right away. Again, I don’t have data, but we get WAY less junk mail than we used to. Some still sneaks through, but I know I’ll never be rid of it all and just reducing it has made me happier.

The only real nitpick I have with the service is that the photo of the junk mail seems pretty pointless because it rarely works. I end up typing in the name of the company so why include the photo step?

I plan to let our subscription lapse for a while and see how long it takes to build back up, but I won’t hesitate too long to resubscribe for a bit to beat back the flood.