Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Snoqualmie Valley Rifle Club

There’s a small shooting range at the bottom of the hill on 202 leading up to Snoqualmie Falls. You’ve probably driven by it numerous times and never noticed the dirt road leading off into the woods. MikeF took me there as a guest a few months ago and I’ve been trying to find time to join the club ever since.

That time finally came in July. Logan and I headed to the monthly club meeting to turn in our paperwork and pay our dues. Then we attended a one hour safety briefing at the range and received our badges with the gate code.

Why join the club? We always shoot trap at the range in Kenmore, but their rifle/pistol ranges are very restrictive. You can only put one bullet in your gun at a time, the longest range is 100 yards, and more than a few people have told me that the rangemaster loves making people feel like idiots. No thanks. For the cost of less than six range days at Kenmore, you can get unlimited access to the Snoqualmie club. It’s basically a big field with a bunch of safety rules that are policed by the members who are present. The range is 200 yards long and there aren’t too many rules about what you can shoot or how you can do it as long as you’re being safe.

The club has been around since 1946 but they had been closed to membership for quite a while. A couple years ago they opened up applications again and have been getting a steady stream of 10-20 new members every month. They’re now up around 800-900 members, but apparently traffic at the range has been pretty low. Once the ammo shortage clears up and our national leadership changes out, I expect traffic to pick up again. Since there is no room to expand the range, my guess is they will shut off new applications again. As long as I keep my membership active each year, we’ll always have a great place to shoot!

Let me know if you’re interested in checking it out. Members are allowed to bring a guest or two on each visit.

benmartens July 25, 2013 Sports

Music Library

My music collection is over 70GB. I’ve spent more time than I care to remember curating it. And now I’m coming to the realization that I should probably delete it. There’s very little point to keeping a local music collection anymore with all the various cloud music services that are available. We subscribe to Xbox Music which means that we get unlimited access to play any of the songs on the service from our phones, computers, or Xbox’s. Why bother monkeying around with local files?

I came to this point quite a while back with movies. When DVDs went out and BluRay came in, I vowed to not end up with shelves full of discs I never used. If I want a movie, I can rent the disc from Netflix or stream it on Netflix or Amazon. That has been a good choice too so I just need to pull the trigger with the music.

The only difference with music is that we’re still holding on to a few music players without internet connections, namely a bunch of Zunes and a cheaper player that I use on my motorcycle. That’s about the only time when we really need to have local files.

Are you still downloading MP3’s or are you just streaming full time from the internet?

benmartens July 24, 2013 Geek

Bottoms Up!

I love beer. The Pacific Northwest is one of the best places in the country for a beer drinker. There are 186 breweries in Washington alone and it seems like new ones are popping up regularly. With all the great beer around here, I was amazed when I saw the latest list of beer consumed per capita by state. Washington ranks 45th on the list! You people disappoint me.

Here’s the full list in order from most to least:

  1. North Dakota
  2. New Hampshire
  3. Montana
  4. South Dakota
  5. Wisconsin
  6. Nevada
  7. Vermont
  8. Nebraska
  9. Texas
  10. Maine
  11. Louisiana
  12. Mississippi
  13. Iowa
  14. Delaware
  15. Wyoming
  16. South Carolina
  17. New Mexico
  18. Missouri
  19. Hawaii
  20. Oregon
  21. West Virginia
  22. Alabama
  23. Ohio
  24. Colorado
  25. Arizona
  26. Illinois
  27. Alaska
  28. Pennsylvania
  29. Minnesota
  30. Oklahoma
  31. Kansas
  32. District of Columbia
  33. Idaho
  34. Florida
  35. North Carolina
  36. Michigan
  37. Arkansas
  38. Virginia
  39. Rhode Island
  40. Massachusetts
  41. Tennessee
  42. Indiana
  43. Georgia
  44. California
  45. Washington
  46. Kentucky
  47. Maryland
  48. New York
  49. New Jersey
  50. Connecticut
  51. Utah
benmartens July 23, 2013 Links

Android Dominance

It’s pretty common these days to hear that Android is taking over, but when I saw this chart [source], I was amazed at how far Android has come. In just three years, they’ve gone from 10% market share to ~80%.

I’m not sure what Apple has planned to combat this. So far they’ve been sticking to the original model that they debuted in the very first iPhone: a grid of icons on a tiny/thin phone. And where does Windows Phone or Blackberry fit into this? They’re also-rans, making up ~5% of the market.

Seeing outside of your bias is difficult, but I do firmly believe that for Windows Phone is the best phone OS for most of the population. I seriously doubt it will ever reach those kind of market numbers, but who knows. Defeating PlayStation seemed like an impossible task for the original XBox, but XBox is now at least splitting the market and has a huge following.

benmartens July 22, 2013 Gadgets

NSA Spying

I’m not going to debate whether or not it’s good for the NSA to be tapping all of our communications. There are plenty of talking heads screaming at each other already. What I’m here to say is: DUH.

When the news broke about all this wiretapping stuff, I thought, “Don’t we know this already?” I guess not, but it should be assumed. And even if the NSA wasn’t doing it in what they claim is an attempt to protect you, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others are doing it all the time to serve you ads. Forget the NSA, everything you do online is already stored in huge databases whether it’s your ISP, companies following you around the web serving you ads, or the end service that you’re using. Most of your traffic flies around the internet in plain text and is trivial to read/store. It’s not just on the internet either. Stores are tracking you as you walk around based on the signals emanating from your cell phone. And when you’re outside, companies have huge databases full of your location at all times of the day based on which cell phone towers you’re connected to. This isn’t conspiracy theory stuff. It’s very simple technology that’s already widely used.

We should make sure all of these companies and organizations are following our current laws, but more importantly we all need to take it upon ourselves to be smart about what we do and how we store our data. If it’s important and it’s not encrypted, then you’re basically screaming it through a megaphone on a busy street corner.

Your data security is your own responsibility. If it’s important, then it’s important enough to encrypt. And if you don’t want to encrypt, don’t send anything over the network that you don’t want the world to read.

benmartens July 19, 2013 Geek

Light Painting

Last year at the Scherschel Fireworks Extravaganza, we messed around with using sparklers and long exposures on the camera. This year I wanted to try it again, but instead of sparklers, I had picked up some red, green and blue battery powered glow sticks. They had lanyards attached to them which made them very easy to swing around. The results were quite interesting and I’d love to try it again. Here are a couple examples. For the bottom one I moved around creating the light swirls and then stood very still and briefly shone a flashlight on my face for a spooky effect.

If you want to try this yourself, you’ll need a camera with manual controls and a sturdy tripod. Specifically I took these photos with a 30 second exposure, an aperture setting around f/10 and ISO 100. It takes a few test shots to dial it in just right, but once you do, it’s easy to repeat.

benmartens July 18, 2013 Photography

Microsoft Store

Tyla’s laptop died. It was some kind of hardware failure that we worked around for a while but eventually consumed the device, and I couldn’t resurrect it. It was time to shop for a new laptop.

We get employee deals with most of the major manufacturers through work, but I also included the Microsoft Store in our search. We don’t get any special discount there, but I’ve heard good things about them. Indeed the prices were excellent, they offered free shipping, and if we had picked a model that was in stock, we could have picked it up immediately. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case, but our new HP Pavilion TouchSmart arrived in just three days via UPS for $499. I was amazed that we could get a touch screen laptop for $500. I think the only change we might make to this in the future is swapping out the 5400rpm 750GB drive for either a hybrid drive or a straight SSD.

When the Microsoft Store sells a device, they put their extra special touch on it. When it boots for the first time, you aren’t flooded with a bunch of adware for AOL or McAfee. It’s a very clean machine with up to date drivers. I always format new machines when I get them, but I didn’t see any need* on this one.

If you’re looking for a new laptop, I recommend including the Microsoft Store in your search. You can’t customize the devices like you can buying direct, but you also get a machine that is very clean and ready to go straight out of the box.

* In the end I actually did have to reformat the laptop. The drive was partitioned with GPT instead of the older MBR scheme and my backup solution (Windows Home Server 2011) only supports MBR. There’s no way that I know of to revert from GPT to MBR without killing all the partitions and starting over.

benmartens July 16, 2013 Gadgets

Reality

I was told many times, “You can’t prepare for fatherhood” and my joking reply would be, “Great, then I’m not even going to try.” That was sort of true, but even though I don’t think we went nuts planning for parenthood, I did have some expectations. And they were wrong.

The biggest one is probably how often a baby eats. I had heard that 2-3 hours between feedings was normal. Ehh that’s not so bad, right? Well, what I didn’t know was that the clock starts as soon as they start eating. So out of that 2-3 hours, take out 20-30 minutes for the actual feeding, some more time for changing a diaper, and then more time for trying to get him to fall asleep again.

Lots of people told us to “sleep when he sleeps.” Sure, that’s a good idea, but the flip side is that we’re awake when he’s awake, even if it’s 2am. And we’re so used to sleeping once per day for 7-8 hours that sleeping in 1-2 hour segments for weeks on end is really draining! Thankfully Tyla has usually been able to take an afternoon nap with Elijah and I’ve been known to stumble down to my car for a quick 15-20 minute nap in the parking garage at work. I’ve resisted adding up how much sleep I’m getting each night because I think that would make me even more tired.

There have been many times since Elijah’s birth that I’ve thought about the Mark Lowry comedy skit “it came to pass.” He says his favorite Bible passage is “And it came to pass…” When Elijah is screaming in the middle of the night for an hour straight and we can’t figure out what’s wrong, I remember that it’s going to pass. When we’re trying to drive him somewhere and he’s so unhappy in the backseat, I know it will pass. And when he’s snuggled up to me sleeping peacefully, I enjoy it because it’s going to pass!

Today is Elijah’s one month birthday which means that Tyla and I have successfully kept another human alive for one month. (That reminds me of another great comedy skit, this time from Kermit Apio.) The last month has had it’s hard times, but overall I feel like we’ve had it pretty good. Elijah is generally well-tempered and we can usually figure out why he’s crying to get him happy quickly. He’s eating well and gaining weight at a great pace. Every time I look at him, I’m filled with immense pride and excitement for the adventures we’ll have together in the years to come. I love you little man!

benmartens July 15, 2013 Family

We Shipped!

I’ve been at Microsoft for over seven years working on various iterations of a common idea. Over the years, our product direction has been tweaked and adjusted quite a few times in big and small ways. I don’t think anybody could have seen this result back then. But that’s part of what makes this milestone so great!

So what did we end up shipping? It’s officially called Microsoft Power Query for Excel and we’re part of the Power BI for Office 365 package. You can find our team blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dataexplorer/. There’s plenty of news coverage too.

This product is an add in for Excel, and in a nutshell we make it super easy to connect to data whether it’s data you already know about or data that you need to search for. You can pull data from SQL, Azure, DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Terradata, Oracle, Sharepoint, Hadoop, Active Directory, websites, Facebook and many more. Don’t know where to find your data? Open up the search pane and find it! Once you’ve identified your data source, you can easily transform it, clean it up, and/or merge it with other data even if the data sources are huge. You’re working with a preview of the data and building up a script in the background as you make changes. Once you’re done, you can hit Refresh and we go back out to each of those sources, run the transformations again, and give you the final result with fresh data!

There’s no rest for our team though. Stay tuned for more exciting things! (Assuming you find data exciting… and who doesn’t?!)

benmartens July 12, 2013 Geek