Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Jay’s Visit

When I moved out to Seattle, Jay and I went from roommates to pen pals, but we still try to get together in person every year or two. A couple weekends ago, Jay flew out here for a few days.

The first two days were spent skiing at Crystal. Unfortunately the day before he got here, the weather got really warm and the snow melted all the way to the peaks at the resort. It then froze overnight leaving us with some really hard packed snow. We stuck to the north faces of the hills and found some stuff that was soft enough to keep us entertained, and of course it was nice to be riding ski lifts together again.

He got to witness the biggest fall I think I’ve ever had. Thought it might mean that Tyla will never let me ski again, I will recount it here. Powder Bowl is one of the steepest/longest slopes on the mountain and the tiny chairlift that gets you to the top is littered with expert only signs. That being said, I’ve skied it many times before and if I had to pick my single best run ever, it would probably be one I took on that slope. This time it didn’t go quite as planned. Once we got through a band of rocks and into the main slope, I somehow lost a ski, and got turned around. I ended up doing a backflip straight down the mountain. I later learned that as my feet went up in the air I kicked a ski right at Jay’s head. Luckily he saw it coming and was able to duck. I think I only flipped once, but it was so steep that I was now rapidly descending the hill on my back. I got rolled over to my front and thought “I finally get to practice a self-arrest!” I gripped my one remaining ski pole with both hands and jammed it into the snow. That was supposed to stop me, but the snow was so icy and the slope was so steep that it barely even slowed me down. That’s when I really started to get scared because I had no way of knowing if I was going to run into something, and even if I didn’t, the 3-4 foot drop to a cat track at the bottom would surely cause trouble. I gingerly tried to dig my boots into the snow. If you dig in too hard you’ll just start cartwheeling again. Luckily that previously melted snow was very smooth and I was able to bring myself to a stop. From way up above I heard Jay yell to ask if I was ok. Luckily for me, he was able to collect my skis and missing pole. I was carrying my GPS during the slide, so while writing this post, I dug out the dataset and did some math. My slide lasted 130 yards at a constant slope of 38 degrees and reached speeds around 25mph. Thankfully I escaped with nothing but a pounding heart and wet pants which I still claim are from snow that got in during the fall. Jay had a pretty good fall and slide the next day, but he had to climb back up to get his own gear since I’d already headed part way down the slope. Thankfully he was ok too. So aside from those two events, skiing was a lot of fun. We spent most of our time exploring back in Northway and Green Valley.

We met up with Tim and Chelsea for dinner, and then the next day we went shooting at the trap range. Jay bought a Remington 870 too but hasn’t been able to shoot it because of the temps and snow in Syracuse. We had fun breaking some clays and then stuffed our faces with Mod Pizza.

All in all it was as great extended weekend. Thanks to Jay for flying all the way out here to visit and thanks to Juliet and their kids for loaning him to us for the weekend!

benmartens February 26, 2013 Skiing

Whooping Cough

Note: I realize that some of you are anti-vaccine. This post is being written because I find it amazing that we can have an epidemic like this, not necessarily to try to change your mind about vaccines.

Visits to the OBGYN are usually full of facts about things that have never crossed my mind before. On one of our first trips, we were asked if we had been vaccinated recently for whooping cough. I’d never even heard of it. Maybe I’m the only one, but I’ll explain a bit anyway.

The scientific name for whooping cough is pertussis. It’s a bacterial disease that causes severe coughing fits. In serious cases, it can result in death. A research paper from 2012 says that it affects 48.5 million people and kills 295,000 every year. It spreads through droplets produced while coughing, talking and sneezing. Young children are most susceptible to the disease and run the greatest risk of death if contracted.

It turns out that I had received a whooping cough vaccine at a few points in my life, though not recently. It’s commonly distributed as part of your tetnus shot, or TDaP which stands for Tetnus, Diphtheria and Pertussis. That’s usually given every 10 years but the pertussis vaccine is only good for three years.

Little did I know that I’ve been walking through a whooping cough war zone for the past year. The Department of Health for Washington has a good website with lots of information about the outbreak. This report shows that last year the levels were 15 times greater than the baseline and eight times greater than what they would call an epidemic! Thankfully the numbers are starting to decline through education and vaccination.

The docs recommend that we get the vaccine ourselves and also ask anyone who is planning to have close contact with our child to do the same. I got mine done last week (insurance covered the cost) and Tyla will get it at a specific upcoming point in her pregnancy. Even if you’re not around babies a lot, it’s worth considering getting vaccinated to help control the spread of this disease.

benmartens February 25, 2013 Commentary

Choke Tubes

When Logan and I took the trap shooting class, they suggested that I go two steps tighter on my choke tube. The choke of your shotgun determines how the shot flies out of the barrel. As the shot gets farther from the gun, the area it covers expands. That’s good but if you expand too much then your target might fly right through the middle of your pattern. You can screw different choke tubes into the end of your gun to constrict or free up that pattern. To test the pattern, you can shoot at a piece of paper placed at a specific distance and see what the pattern looks like.

My Remington 870 came with a modified choke which is about in the middle of what you can do with choke tubes. I ordered a full choke. It probably only takes about 4-6” off my pattern size, but it should get rid of some of the holes in the pattern. There have been a few times when I knew I shot perfectly but the bird never broke. Hopefully that won’t happen anymore.

My first attempt at the range went pretty well. In the second round I tied my high score. Hits give a much more satisfying explosion because more shot is hitting the target.

I’m reading a book about trap shooting. The author says it’s easy to get too wrapped up in choke tubes. He says you should pattern your gun, pick a choke tube, and stick with it. “Choke tubes change inches while misses happen in feet.”

benmartens February 22, 2013 Sports

Post Office Cutbacks

It looks like the Post Office is going to cut Saturday delivery to save money. It’s a novel idea: cut costs to balance your budget. No wonder it’s causing so much confusion in D.C. But regardless of the politics or whether it’s even legal for them to do this, I think the Post Office is missing some big opportunities.

What is the biggest asset of the USPS? They employ a workforce that touches almost every household in the country 6 out of every 7 days. How many dotcoms have we watched fail because their service couldn’t handle the costs of a workforce like that? Maybe they really have to cut Saturday delivery to save money, but what else could they be doing to make more money instead of just delivering mail?

Imagine if you could pay a USPS worker to knock on the door of your elderly relative every day and report back to you if nobody answers the door. Or what if you could pay a USPS worker to clean any packages or fliers off your doorstep when you’re on vacation?

It seems that the volume of mail is going to keep declining. Are they just going to keep cutting days of service? Or will they make use of their army of employees to broaden their horizons and change their business model?

benmartens February 21, 2013 Commentary

By The Beard Of Dallon!

In the post about my beard, I mentioned that part of the reason for doing this was that when I was a kid, I saw some pictures of Dad with a beard and thought it was hilarious. It seemed like a fun thing to do for my son too. Mom has embarked on a project to scan in thousands of slide photos and she stumbled across the photos of Dad’s beard. I think it looks pretty good! The shirt in the second photo maybe not so much.

Tyla commented that Mom looks about as thrilled with Dad’s beard as Tyla is with mine. I had to explain that for as long as I can remember (and apparently longer), Mom’s eyes are magically closed in almost every picture! There may be some supernatural forces at work.

But seriously, thanks to Mom for digging up these photos and for spending countless hours in front of the scanner salvaging these slides. It will be an amazing historical record of our family for decades to come.

benmartens February 20, 2013 Commentary

CascadeSkier Architecture

A lot has changed since the last article about the architecture of the CascadeSkier apps. So let’s get geeky and peek behind the scenes.

The ecosystem includes a Windows 7 gadget, Windows Phone app, and a Windows 8 app. With all of these various applications (and more floating around in my head), it made sense to keep the clients as simple as possible. The complicate part is pulling in raw weather data from 11 different mountain sensors, 11 weather forecasts, and various web cams and links for each resort. That all happens on a centralized server. When the clients start up, they pull in a text file that has all the polished data and they display it. It makes it fairly easy to crank out new clients, and there’s a centralized location to make any changes to the data.

A configuration file sits on the server. It has a section for each resort and instructs the data cache how to pull the weather data from the raw mountain sensor feed and how to find the three day forecast from NOAA. It has contains a list of web cams for each resort and a bunch of related links like trail maps.

Every 15 minutes, the data cache refreshes by reading the config file, making about a couple dozen requests to various websites to pull in the data, and parses the data into a format that the clients can easily consume. At roughly the same interval, a tile cache generates live tiles for each resort so that the tiles don’t have to be generated on the phone or in the Windows 8 app. Depending on what parameters you pass in the URL to the live tile cache, you can get the tile with any combination of Farenheit or Celsius and metric or imperial.

Using the two caches also relieves pressure on all the various data sources. I don’t know how they’d feel about thousands of clients pinging their servers multiple times every hour. They probably wouldn’t notice, but this is better overall because the clients only have to make a single call to get the data from the cache and it’s instantly available.

This is the sixth ski season for the Cascade skier family of apps and it’s still going strong. The phone and Windows 8 apps are some of the highest rated and most downloaded apps in their categories. There’s even a line of clothing if you’re a superfan (or if you’re my mom.) In the grand scheme of things, this app is just a blip on the radar, but I’ve had a blast with it and it’s fun to hear from people who use and love the apps!

benmartens February 19, 2013 Geek, Projects

Crystal With The Scherschel’s

Five years ago, Tim and Chelsea gave snowboarding a try. That didn’t really stick so this year they decided to give skiing a try. Tyla decided that skiing while pregnant wasn’t a great idea, but she still came along with us and hung out in the lodge. After a few laps on the bunny slope, Tim and Chelsea were ready for the Chinook lift and after lunch they advanced to Forest Queen. They did a great job and made huge improvements throughout the day. It was fun sharing lift rides with them and seeing them enjoy a sport that I love too. Hopefully they’ll head back out to the slopes again soon!

benmartens February 18, 2013 Skiing

Beer Bottling

A couple weeks ago, Don, Logan and I made two full batches of beer at Gallagher’s. Last weekend it was done and ready to bottle. Each batch makes about 140 12oz bottles so we had a lot of work ahead of us. Thankfully Ken and Tim showed up to help.

We had been saving enough bottles so we didn’t need to buy any at the brewery. We did, however, have to sanitize them before starting. Note that this is sanitization, not cleaning the bottles. Don took charge of running that machine and keeping us stocked with bottles. Logan and I took turns filling the bottles while Tim and Ken took turns capping the bottles and putting them in the boxes. We all shared the responsibility of drinking some of the beer. We ended up with about 11 cases of beer and we bottled it all in under two hours. Half of it is like Redhook ESB and the other half is a hefeweizen. I’m not a huge fan of the hefeweizen but it’s good and I love the ESB.

Once ski season is done I’d love to get in a more regular habit of making beer there. The final cost for our beer was about $1.15/bottle which isn’t bad at all. That’s about what I pay at the grocery store. So far we’ve made three of their 50 or so recipes. I want to come up with my own concoction, but I don’t know enough about how the flavors work together. I guess I need more practice!

benmartens February 15, 2013 Commentary

Master Bathroom Remodel

When I wrote the “before” post for our bathroom remodel, I said I’d have finished pictures in a couple weeks. That was being very generous in case there were mistakes that I found to have them clean up, etc. I’m happy to report that the job is finished and I will make the final payment tomorrow. This room is perfect! As a reminder, here’s the before photo:

And here’s what it looks like now!

It’s difficult to get good photos in such a small space but hopefully you get a decent idea of what it looks like now. Everything is in the same place and the cabinets are the same, but everything else is new. You’ll notice that we didn’t pay the contractor to paint for us. We’ll do that ourselves later. Tyla also wants me to point out that the “ugly curtains” are being replaced too. Here’s a list of some of the more visible changes:

  • We had a half wall between the shower and the tub. That’s gone now.
  • The tub deck juts into the shower creating a little ledge for bottles or to help Tyla shave her legs. That’s actually where the wall used to be but now it’s even with the top of the tub so the shower floor is the same height. That extra ~6” of space makes the shower feel quite a bit bigger.
  • The frameless shower glass is probably my favorite feature and one of the bigger splurges in the project. Three brackets and two hinges hold the hole thing together! The door swings both ways and auto-centers when it’s within 20 degrees of center.
  • You already know the story behind the tile. I’m thrilled with the way this looks. I was really trusting the designer on the first round of tile, but I love what we ended up with and I feel much more confident that it will still look nice in 15-20 years.
  • The countertop was another good score. The original plan was to use a product called Caesarstone but the counter guy suggested another product that was half the price and about the same. (The difference is that it’s not from Italy and it’s not as eco-friendly.) Because of the size of our counter, we had to buy a full slab so the cost savings was enormous.
  • We went with undermount sinks. Tim and Chelsea put those in their bathroom and I love the look. They should be easy to clean too.
  • All of the plumbing fixtures and towel bars are new. They are the Moen Brantford line in brushed nickel. Tim suggested that we wide mount the sink faucets given the length of our counter and they look great.
  • There’s a door to the bathroom! It’s one of the changes that’s easy to overlook because it seems like it should have been there all along, but it’s new.

There are also some great changes that aren’t quite as obvious:

  • The shower uses a Moen Posi-Temp pressure-balancing valve. They say that it won’t let the water temp vary more than 3 degrees if someone turns on a sink or flushes a toilet. From our limited testing so far it seems to work very well.
  • The shower is built for a big man! In almost every shower I use, I have to duck to wash my hair, but not in this one! The bottom of the shower head is 6’6” off the shower floor and the shower glass is extra tall too so I don’t splash over the top.
  • We swapped out our noisy 50 CFM vent fan for a super quiet Panasonic 110 CFM model. It’s so good that it makes me want to replace our other fans with this model.
  • Our other big splurge on this project was a heated floor. It’s on a 7 day programmable timer and feels wonderful.

The project all went remarkably according to plan. They finished a couple days before planned and our total overrun was less than 2%. The only surprises in the project were:

  • The vent pipe for our fan was a smaller diameter than normal and just ran to a soffit vent instead of going through the roof. I kept this one simple by having them put on a reducer and leave the pipe as it was. I can fix that separately if needed, but it will probably be fine the way it is. Since I kept that simple, it didn’t cost any extra.
  • The old shower head was never lined up with the shower drain and the new shower pan made that even more obvious. Of course there was a stud in the way so they had to carefully remove it and do some new framing.
  • When they plumbed the supply lines to the tub, they went from 1/2” to 3/8” and back to 1/2”. The plumber fixed that up. The tub was also not set in mortar or framed in. It was simply hanging about 3” off the ground. I can’t believe it never cracked! The nice part was that we were able to reuse the tub since it just pulled right out. The next people who remodel won’t be so lucky because it’s now set in a mortar bed.

Now that the project is done, I can give a 100% recommendation for Ron Palmer Construction. He was not the cheapest bid, but he was super detailed. The other contractors gave one page bids. Ron’s was 9 pages with only one page of boilerplate content. Everything was completely broken down so I could see exactly what he was charging for each task. We had a schedule listing what they would be doing every single day. His whole team was very professional and friendly. We had no problem leaving them a key to work in our house each day. From day 1 until they end, they did a marvelous job of protecting the rest of our house and cleaning up after themselves. They had plastic down on the carpet all the way out to the front door, padding on the hardwood floors, and even a huge plastic sheet with a zipper door separating our bed area from the bathroom dust. And as I said before, he was almost spot on with his cost estimate and beat his schedule. Once we save up our pennies for the next remodel, I’ll have a hard time picking anyone but Ron.

So there you have it. The project we talked about the very first time we saw the house is done! Given the same budget, there’s nothing I’d do differently.

benmartens February 13, 2013 Home Improvement