Studio711.com – Ben Martens – Page 87 – Just trying to get through life without looking stupid, so far it's not going very well.

AQHA Ford Discount

You can learn a lot online about your upcoming vehicle purchase. I’ve already written about finding the official order guide and invoice price list in a forum. That was a big help when negotiating the price for my truck. I also learned that members of the American Quarter Horse Association get $500 off their new vehicle. Membership is only $40 and you have to be a member for 60 days before you can use the rebate. Have I ever told you how much I LOVE quarter horses? Obviously I became a member of this wonderful organization.

I was all set to use my $500 discount when Ford corporate swooped in and extended the immediate family discount (A-plan) to nephews. My uncle was able to give me one of his awesome discount codes. The AQHA rebate doesn’t apply to A-Plan vehicles so I didn’t get to use it. Oh well, $40 down the drain and we get some horse magazines fore Elijah to look at.

If you’re in the market, check out the AQHA page and be sure to read the fine print to make sure it applies to you: https://aqha.com/partners/ford/

benmartens August 17, 2016 Links

Puget Sound Basins

When we booked the stay in the caboose, I looked at a map, noticed it was on water in the south end of Puget Sound and I assumed it was on Hood Canal. Wrong. It turns out that the sound is divided up into a bunch of different “basins” and Hood Canal is just one of them. We were actually staying on the “South Basin”. The Wikipedia article about Puget Sound has a very nice map showing the different basins and I’ve included that map below.

It felt like the difference between high tide and low tide was huge while we were down there in the South Basin, but surely the tide is the same everywhere, right? Nope. Here’s a quote from Wikipedia: “The difference in height between the Higher High Water and the Lower Low Water averages about 8.3 feet (2.5 m) at Port Townsend on Admiralty Inlet, but increases to about 14.4 feet (4.4 m) at Olympia, the southern end of Puget Sound.” It has something to do with all the interconnections and interplay between the basins, but I couldn’t find any good info explaining the physics of it.

The shoreline is over 1300 miles long! That’s roughly the driving distance from New York City to Miami. We’ve explored only a tiny portion of it, but there are lots of great spots for further investigation in the future.

benmartens August 16, 2016 Commentary

Great Northern Railway

The caboose that we stayed in was once part of the Great Northern Railway. I had never hear about it before but I learned some interesting stuff while I was there:

The railway line stretch from the St. Paul to Seattle.
It’s the only transcontinental railroad that was privately funded. It was built out in sections so that each part became profitable before expanding.
The Stevens Pass tunnel was constructed as part of the creation of this railroad.
The book The White Cascade tells the story of a Great Northern Railway train caught in a major avalanche. It’s a great book if you’re interested in history.
It started in the late 1800s and ran through 1970 before being merged into the Burlington Northern railroad.

If you want to read more info, the Great Northern Railroad Historical Society has a pretty deep website.

benmartens August 15, 2016 Commentary

Best Of YouTube

It’s time for another round of the best stuff that I’ve seen on YouTube recently. First up is a cheap way to add some weights to your shop. I inevitably finish a glue-up and then scrounge around looking for heavy stuff to put on top to hold the boards in place. I think I’ll need to make some of these:

When we travel with Elijah, the flight attendants always make a special point of telling us to put on our own masks before helping Elijah. Every time I think, “Yeah right. I’d help my kid first!” This video was the first time I understood why it’s important to put your own mask on first.

And finally, Minute Physics explains why it takes more acceleration to get to the sun than to other stars.

benmartens August 12, 2016 Links

Caboose Vacation

Tyla came across a caboose on the southern end of Puget Sound that you could rent as a vacation home. It was available on her birthday weekend, it was in an area that we haven’t visited much, and Elijah loves trains so it seemed like the perfect fit. We headed down there last weekend and had a wonderful time.

The caboose has been nicely remodeled inside. They doubled the width of it so that you actually have a little room to stretch out. The main body of the caboose has the entry area, two sets of bunk beds, and a living room with a TV. The extended area has the kitchen, queen bed and a bathroom. The only interior door is to the bathroom so it’s a cozy setting.

The property overlooks the South Basin of Puget Sound and there are stairs leading down to the water so you can explore the shore and use the provided kayaks. We took advantage of the kayaks for short trips each day. Elijah was able to sit on my lap while I paddled.

I know that tides have been around for a while, but we were still amazed at how much water was moving in and out twice a day. The little cove by the caboose was probably 6-8 feet deep but it completely drained out with each low tide.

These rental properties often include a book where guests can leave a comment. They’re usually pretty generic, but it’s such a great opportunity to leave a funny/awkward message. Here are a couple that I thought about using:

Thanks for letting me poop in your house.
We came here to celebrate my beautiful wife’s birthday. My ugly wife doesn’t get birthday trips.

This concludes a busy month of vacations and adventures for us. There’s still more fun on the calendar, but I think we’re looking forward to a little time at home too.

benmartens August 11, 2016 Family, Travel

Road Angles

How steep is that crazy hill by your house? Are they steep enough to ski if covered by snow? Hills look a lot different from a car than they do from foot or on skis.

It turns out that roads aren’t very steep at all. A good ski run is 15-25 degrees of slope with the craziest runs being up near 40 degrees. The steepest you’ll get on most roads is 5 degrees and that is certainly accompanied by warning signs. Most hills on the highway are barely 1 degree.

I know this thanks to a fun display on my new truck. It shows the pitch and roll of the truck as well as the how much the front wheels are turned. I suppose this might be important in certain off road situations, but mostly it’s just something fun to look at.

benmartens August 10, 2016 Gadgets

Power Over Ethernet

I dare you to try and buy just one security camera. That’s how it started for me. Now I have six. I might need an intervention.

The last one I put up was an “extra” that we had lying around after we upgraded one of the cameras to a newer 1080p. This old one is only 640×480 but hey, why not use it? I decided to stick it on the back corner of the house, but that meant a long cable run from my network closet and there’s also no power nearby. Power over Ethernet (PoE) to the rescue!

In your standard ethernet cable, half of the wires are unused. The PoE specification defines a common way of transmitting power over those extra wires. This means that instead of running a network cable to the camera along with installing a new outlet nearby, I just had to run a network cable.

You also need something to combine the network signal and the power on one end and deconstruct it on the other end. For the injection side, you can either get a standalone plug/ethernet jack combo thing or you can purchase a switch with PoE built in. I chose the latter since I’ll be using this more in the future. My WiFi access points are already PoE so I can get rid of the two injector plugs and switch them over to this unit. And while it’s possible to buy PoE versions of these cameras, I don’t have those yet so I had to buy a splitter for the camera end.

The hardest part was running the wire 40 or 50 feet under my house and even that wasn’t hard, just dirty and cramped. Elijah loves it when I go down there and always asks if he can poke his head in there too.

The end result is a really nice view of either the cul-de-sac or our back yard depending on which way the camera is rotated. It’s not going to do much for security, but it’s fun to see Elijah playing during the day while I’m at work or just get a little extra assurance that everything is ok while we are away.

P.S. If you are interested in setting up something like this at your house, I have a post detailing my basic setup. You can get more posts by searching my site for “foscam“.

benmartens August 9, 2016 Geek, Home Improvement

Happy Birthday

Happy birthday to my wonderful wife! I love you!

benmartens August 8, 2016 Family

Tolt MacDonald Camping

Tyla and I used to go camping once or twice a summer before Elijah came along. Then we got a little gunshy about camping with a munchkin. We have visited Tyla’s family at a campsite multiple times but we’ve never slept at one overnight. It was time to try it out for real.

I picked Tolt MacDonald park as a location that wasn’t too far away but one that still has some interesting stuff for us to explore. It’s the same park where we had our family photos taken. I know there are lots of you who would have been happy to come along, but we wanted to do this first trip by ourselves to make some family memories and then be ready for bigger trips with more people.

We had great weather for the trip and Elijah loved it! We all went to bed together at night around the time the sun set and he was zonked so he fell asleep quickly. We spent Saturday down by the river playing the sand and we also drove over to Snoqualmie Falls. I haven’t been there since they redid the lower viewing area. They have it completely blocked off so that it’s impossible to get down to the rocks below the falls. I’m glad we had opportunities to explore there years ago before access was shut off.

Elijah got to roast his first marshmallows over a real campfire and eat meals outside. He loved it all and didn’t want to go home at the end. The only misstep we had was that he woke up at 6am on the last day and couldn’t get back to sleep. He hasn’t figured out how to keep quiet for very long so we went on a 2 mile hike through the woods to avoid waking up everyone else. All in all, the trip was a success though.

Personally, I was thrilled to go camping with the truck. It was so easy to toss everything in the back. And this was the first time we had fully set up our new tent. That tent is going to last us forever. It’s built really well and worked great. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for my air mattress. I vaguely remember a leak from the last time I used it years ago but for some reason it didn’t get thrown away. So I spent the second half of both nights laying on the ground. I remembered to toss it in the trash this time.

It was a really nice weekend and I’m excited that we can start adding these trips back into our summer schedules again.

benmartens August 5, 2016 Family, Outdoors

Wheel of Time Recap

On August 15, 2014, I started reading the Wheel of Time book series. I had heard that it was good and decided to give the first book a try. After I finished it and was hooked, I realized that there are 14 books in the series and it’s pretty much a single story. The series seem almost arbitrarily divided into individual books. If you include the prequel (which I’m reading now), it’s 11,916 pages long, but it so totally worth the effort and time. The story starts off so simple and small and ends up enormous and complex in a glorious way. If you enjoy fantasy, I recommend that you check it out. It’s a big commitment and the writing isn’t always perfect, but it’s extremely good.

The writing actually gets better towards the end. Robert Jordan created the series and wrote the first 11 books in the series but he died before he could finish it. One of my favorite authors, Brandon Sanderson, was asked to finish it. He picked up Robert Jordan’s notes and did a wonderful job with the end of the story. He kept the style much the same but got rid of a few annoyances I had with Jordan’s writing.

I’m a bit surprised that this hasn’t turned into a Game of Thrones-style TV series. The Wikipedia page for the book series indicates that some TV deals are supposedly in the works but that doesn’t mean much. Hopefully something will eventually come out… and hopefully it does the books justice.

Now it’s time to pick a new book. It has been so long since I’ve read anything other than this series that it’s going to feel really weird to switch gears. Thank you all for the various recommendations that you’ve given me. My general algorithm for picking a new book is to look at my Good Reads “to read” list, sort by average rating, and then find the highest rated one that my library has in ebook format. Looking at that list, I think I might cleanse my pallet with a little non-fiction and check out “How Star Wars Conquered the Universe“.

benmartens August 4, 2016 Books