Studio711.com – Ben Martens

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

Time Left In Chapter

One of the great features of the newer Kindles is that they tell you how much time is left in your chapter and in the book. It calculates this based on how fast you are reading. It’s one of the great features you can add when you’re reading digitally instead of with dead trees.

Unfortunately, for some reason the calculated time remaining isn’t always accurate. If you find that it’s not quite right, you can tell the Kindle to re-sample your reading speed and make a new calculation. To do this, click Search while you’re in the book and then search for “;ReadingTimeReset” (without the quotes.) Voila!

benmartens May 14, 2014 Gadgets

Elijah Update

It’s been nine months since I wrote the last “Elijah Update” post! I’m not even going to attempt to recap what has happened since that last post, but I’ll give you a summary of what’s going on in his life recently.

Tyla and Elijah keep pretty busy throughout the week. The main scheduled activities are Parent/Baby group, Stroller Strides, and Little Gym. They’ve also started swimming a little bit and will be starting swim classes later this year.

He’s gaining new motor skills every week and on Sunday he took his first steps! Tyla’s family happened to be at our house when Elijah let go of his little push toy and took about 5 tiny steps toward the grill. That’s my boy! You can see him thinking really hard about each movement to take a step and he still needs to build up his confidence, but I bet he’ll make rapid progress in the coming days and weeks. Lots of people says “Keep him as a crawler as long as you can” and stuff like that but I’m excited to have my little man walking! Yes, it’s more work, but by now I’ve figured out that being a parent isn’t something you do because it’s easy.

Elijah was really quiet for his first few months but now he’s always making some kind of noise. There was a period of shrieking which (I hope) is passed, at least for now. He loves to babble and make seemingly random noises and will sometimes even imitate our coughs and achoos. When he’s really excited, he kind of turns his tongue sideways and makes a sucking sound.

Milk is still the main food of the day but he’s experimenting with other foods that Tyla and I eat. He sits in his high chair for most of our meals and does some combination of smearing it on his face, dropping it down his bib, and putting it in his mouth. I don’t think he’s quite made the connection that this type of eating will also solve his hunger pains.

Night times are still a battle though we’ve kind of settled into a workable truce for now. We’re going on 11 months of not sleeping more than 3-4 hours in a row except for a couple somewhat random stretches when he was very young. This is probably the single most painful part of parenting for me (and I’m not even the one who has to stay awake to feed him!) and I’m praying that we get to a better spot soon.

We’re very blessed to have such a wonderful child in our home!

benmartens May 13, 2014 Family

First Mother’s Day

What do you do when your wonderful wife is having her first Mother’s Day? Celebrate! The party started on Friday night with New York Strip steak from the butcher. It’s the fanciest piece of meat that we’ve purchased from them yet and wow it was good! Saturday morning Tyla got to sleep in for a couple hours and then she took Elijah to a craft fair. We spent the afternoon walking around our neighborhood’s garage sales and found some great purchases. Dinner on Saturday night was one of Tyla’s favorite foods: sushi! On Sunday morning Tyla ran the 5k that she’s been doing for the past years (though she skipped it last year when she was pregnant.) After a long nap from Elijah, during which I washed Tyla’s car, we had her family over for lunch (grilled beef dogs and brats from the butcher). While we were grilling, Elijah took his first steps! Dessert was a giant cookie cake from Mrs. Fields.

I hope you had a special weekend! Elijah and I love you!

benmartens May 12, 2014 Family

Backyard Project

I grew up on 6.5 acres. I now live on 1/6th of an acre. I regularly wait up and think of Phil Robertson saying “Another day in the subdivision.” This house is great, but the yard is tiny. The nice thing is that it means we can afford to make huge changes to the yard. Ever since moving in, I’ve been collecting ideas on my landscaping wish list and now it’s time to make it happen. Here’s a list of some things we’ll back doing:

  • Take down almost every tree and plant on the property
  • Lift up the northeast corner of the lot about 30 inches and add a retaining wall. This will level out the yard and give us more usable space.
  • Add drainage along the west edge of our lot to catch rain running down the hill onto our property. This should keep the back yard from turning into the swamp it is now.
  • Tear down the fence and build a new one
  • Take down the basketball pole and hoop and install a new one
  • Tear out all the sod and dig down a few inches. Replace it with better topsoil and new grass.
  • Add a planter area at the end of the sidewalk to help keep people from driving through the yard in the dark or the snow
  • Add new plants and trees

That’s most of it I think, but as you can see, this is an enormous project. Thankfully we have the expert, Tim, to lead us. He and I will be doing most of the work ourselves with help from any of you who want to stop in. We’re going to start and finish the back yard before digging in to the front yard.

I got a head start on the project by removing the cedar swing. I dismantled it over the course of a few evenings and then took it all to the dump. Seeing this small bit of progress has me very excited to dig into the rest of it! Expect a lot more posts about this.

benmartens May 9, 2014 Home Improvement

Wet

I’ve said this enough that you probably know it by now, but even though people think about rain when they think of Seattle, we actually get less rain than most other major cities in the country. That being said, 2014 has ben WET. At this point, we’ve already received the amount of rain that we normally get by Halloween! Last Saturday was the second rainiest day in May ever. Even if we got no more rain for the rest of the year, it still wouldn’t be the driest year on record.

The long range forecast says we’re heading toward an El Nino weather swing which generally means drier weather for the Pacific Northwest so we’ll see if this keeps up. But for now, our umbrellas are getting a lot more use than normal. [source]

benmartens May 7, 2014 Commentary

NRA Membership

I let my NRA membership lapse. I had it for a year because it was a requirement for joining the gun range. It was a tough call because overall, I generally agree with the things that the NRA supports. I started off in their corner but they turned me off.

  1. As soon as you join, you’re automatically signed up for more junk mail (both electronic and physical) than you can imagine. You have to unsubscribe one by one and it takes forever.
  2. There’s a non-stop call for more money. The world is going to end and Obama is going to personally come to your house and take your guns if you don’t give them money NOW.
  3. They don’t come off as a level-headed organization. Just because the anti-gun lobby is whacko and illogical, that doesn’t mean that the NRA should go to the other extreme and scream just as loud. Why can’t they provide calm, logical arguments? It seems like that would go over a lot better with the public. Just being louder doesn’t mean you’re right.

If you thought that you got a lot of mail when you were a member, wait until you try to quit. It keeps coming and so do the phone calls. Finally one of the callers started the conversation with, “Is this a good number to call you at?” I replied, “No, this is a bad number. Please don’t ever call it again.” So far that seems to have been the end of it.

So while I still agree with most of their stances, I’m out. I know some of you are lifetime members and that’s great. I’m probably going overboard, but I have better things to spend my money on right now. If it was free I guess I might still have my name attached.

benmartens May 6, 2014 Commentary

Patreon

The Internet has enabled anyone to become a content creator. Quality content isn’t common, but there are more than a few people producing incredible content. The trick has been for these Internet shows to get enough money to support their high production values. Enter a website called Patreon.com. Patreon provides an easy way for viewers to give money to the people producing the content. Some content producers balk at this and view it as begging for money. I think the opposite is true: if Internet content gives me value, I want to give them money so they can keep doing what they are doing. We both benefit from the relationship.

The general format is that users say they will give $X for each episode but they can also set a monthly limit. So I might say that I’ll give you $1 per episode but I’ll limit it to $2/month. If you make three episodes in one month, you won’t get any money from me for that third one. So when you see total donation amounts per episode, remember that’s only guaranteed for the first episode of the month. It will probably drop down a bit for any episodes after that.

It has been quite successful for a couple of my favorite shows.

I’m hoping that some of the other web content I enjoy moves to this model so I can help support them and keep them “on the air.” The whole idea is a throwback to the middle ages when the wealthy would pay musicians and artists. The difference is that now we can crowdfund these and make it all happen with a tiny amount of money from a large number of people. I’d much rather give money directly to these independent creators than the huge chunk of money that goes to the cable company every month.

benmartens May 5, 2014 Commentary