Studio711.com – Ben Martens – Page 94 – Just trying to get through life without looking stupid, so far it's not going very well.

Safeway Monopoly

For the last couple months, I’ve been playing the Monopoly game at our local grocery store. When you buy items, you get game pieces and if you collect all the pieces in a specific set then you get the associated prize. I know it’s ridiculous to play but it was something to do during the times that I was watching Elijah but he was content to play by himself.

The most I ever won was a free DVD rental from Red Box (not even a BluRay) and a free jar of pickles. Yay. Totally worth my time.

I’d love to know exactly how much they actually pay out. They say they are giving away a hundred of million dollars, but there are so many sneaky ways that they don’t actually end up paying.

Many of the game pieces include $0.25 coupons for specific products. I imagine that most people, like me, immediately toss those.
It’s a lot of work to keep track of everything. You have to stay on top of it to have any hope of winning so that weeds out a huge number of people. I bet a lot of gamepieces get lost or just thrown away when they are taken home.
If you do keep up with it, you pretty quickly figure out that there are some game pieces that are common and one from every set that is impossible to get.
If you assume that a decent percentage of people who get the tickets don’t actually end up following through with analyzing them all, then it follows that the rare pieces that you need to win are ending up in the trash somewhere.
The game is spread across the country and across many grocery chains.

I knew all this going in, but I still played.

When it finally ended, I looked up the odds. I should have done it from the beginning. Here are some of the interesting stats:

Each set does indeed have a rare piece, but there is also a semi-rare piece. The odds of getting the semi-rare piece are 1 in 5000. So if you get to the point where you only need one more, you’re doing pretty good.
Free Redbox rentals are the easiest to get. The odds of finding the rare piece for that prize are 1 in 1620.
If you take out the little instant winner prizes (like Redbox) and the prizes that just gives you two more game tickets, then your odds of finding ANY rare game pieces are 1 in 4157.
Lots of the game tickets include a code that you can enter online for another chance to win. All I ever won there was more of the free ticket coupons. If you take out those, the odds of winning anything online are 1 in 80,598.

It’s relatively easy to collect all the non-rare pieces. The whole game really boils down to just finding those rare pieces. I’m guessing that I probably acquired around 400-500 game pieces over the course of the game. So even with all that work, my odds of winning anything were tiny. Put all those numbers together and I had about a 10% chance of winning anything worth more than $10. Bump it up to a prize worth more than $100 and my odds fell to less than a percent. That’s not a very good return on my time investment.

benmartens May 11, 2016 Commentary

100 Years

My parents attend St. Paul Lutheran Church in Sodus, MI. That church just celebrated it’s 100th anniversary! It’s an impressive milestone for any organization. She said that 293 people showed up for the service! They had extra chairs all over the place and people were in overflow rooms too. The image in this post is one that she snapped from the balcony during the service. The area paper also has a writeup that includes older pictures of the church.

It got me thinking about my current church. That church started in 1959 so if I’m still around for the 100th anniversary, I’ll be 79 years old!

benmartens May 10, 2016 Commentary

Cashing Gift Cards

I recently won a $15 gift card to a place that I’d probably never go. Sure I could have given it away, but I keep hearing about these places that will buy gift cards from you so I decided to try that out.

Coinstar is an easy one and they are in the Safeway right down the street. That seems to be the fastest way to go, but they take a big cut for the convenience factor. You can hope to get about 50% of the remaining value of the card. There are some slower options online that will give up a little higher percentage. I ended up getting about 65% from cardcash.com. There are multiple ways to get them the card (either type in the info or send it to them) and lots of ways to get paid (check in the mail, PayPal, another gift card, etc). Obviously your best bet is to use the card but if you are stuck with a card that you won’t use, this is better than nothing.

Cardcash also sells gift cards at a reduced rate. You might save 5-15% off the value of the card. The cards I looked at were all pretty big ($100-200) but if you know you have a big purchase coming up, it might be an easy way to save some money.

benmartens May 9, 2016 Links

No Complaining

Starting yesterday and lasting for two weeks, I’m not going to complain. I’ve noticed that I do a lot of complaining and it coincided with hearing a couple different people talking about doing this challenge. It’s kind of like Whole 30 but I can still eat tater tots and it’s 14 days instead of 30 days.

“They” say it takes two weeks to form a new habit so hopefully I’ll form a new habit of changing my gut reaction to various situations. It’s good to see opportunities for improvement and think of ways that you can change your environment for the better, but whining and complaining has no positive impact and just slows down the improvement process.

This has already been very difficult! If you notice me complaining, especially in the next two weeks, feel free to kick me in the shin.

benmartens May 6, 2016 Commentary

Kite

kiteflying We had a classic sitcom moment in the park this week. A couple months ago, Elijah was given a cheap kite while he was out shopping with Tyla. The weather, the wind, our schedules, and our moods all finally aligned and we headed down to the school football field to try to fly it.

There was about a 1″ square picture showing how the strings were supposed to be tied on and 2/3 of that picture was covered by a UPC sticker. How hard can it be right? I got the strings attached and tried to launch it. For some reason it kept flipping around so the string was coming out the “back” of the kite and wrapping around. It obviously didn’t fly very well and I realized that duh, I tied the strings on wrong.

By then I had already knotted the incredibly tiny string so much that it was impossible to undo so I had to cut it. Thankfully Tyla suggested that I use some of the string that was wound around the handle to get the kite strung up and that worked great.

Fifteen to twenty minutes later, I finally had the kite in the air. Elijah tried it for about 30 seconds and then took his shoes off and went to play in the “sand box” (the long jump pit.)

benmartens May 5, 2016 Family

Family Photos

Tyla is always on the lookout for good gift ideas, especially for her parents. This year she came up with the idea to get a family photo session so we’d all have some nice photos. Our photographer was Kelly from TwoSwallows Studio and she did a great job! We met her down at Tolt MacDonald Park in Carnation on a Saturday morning and took a bunch of pictures. Just a week later she had them processed and in our hands. Thanks Kelly! And thanks to Tyla for doing all the research and planning!

benmartens May 4, 2016 Family

Northwest Trek

There is a wildlife park about 1.5 hours south of us called Northwest Trek. We headed there last Saturday to celebrate Megan’s 30th birthday. None of us had ever been there before, but I left pretty impressed. Your ticket includes a spot on a 1 hour tram ride through their ~500 acre preserve. The ride includes lots of sightings of animals like elk, deer, big horned sheep, mountain goats, and bison. Some of them were right beside the road and you had to stick your head out the window just to see them because they were so close! Elijah LOVED the trip and spent most of it with his head hanging out the window. Later in the day I asked him what he liked best about the tram and he said it was watching the wheels go around when he stuck his head out the window.

After the tram ride we walked a bit through the other area of the park which has predators like bears, cougars, etc. We ended our visit at the brand new giant playground.

On the way back we stopped at the Ram for some delicious burgers and beer. Aside from spending 1.5 hours in the car with a screaming toddler on the way down, it was a very nice trip. Happy birthday Megan!

benmartens May 3, 2016 Family, Travel

Beer Stats

Dad, Luke and I all use the Untappd app pretty regularly. Think of it like Facebook for beer. You “checkin” when you have a beer and you give it a rating. You can see what your friends are drinking, get recommendations, etc. I love it because it’s an easy way to keep track of all the different beers that I’ve tried and how much I like each one. It’s a great encouragement to keep trying new things.

I recently tied into their API and wrote a quick app that lets me download the data locally for analysis. There are lots of questions that I want to answer, but here are a couple fun charts to get started.

The first is a chart showing how many checkins we’ve each had by IBUs (International Bitterness Unit). It doesn’t show how much we LIKE them, but it does show which ones we generally try.I’d love to expand this to show how this has changed over time.

Here is one showing the cumulative number of checkins we’ve had over time. This chart is a little sloppy because each user series should have it’s own color, but there are only three of us so it’s not too hard to follow. If you look at the end of the chart, Luke is the top line, I’m the middle and Dad is the bottom. You might think that after a while, you run out of new beers, but if that’s true, we haven’t hit that point yet. We’re all on a pretty steady upward trajectory.

I took a look at which beers have the highest combined score from the three of us. The beers with wider distribution are more likely to win because to get to the top it helps if we’ve all tried it. Since I’m out on the west cost and they are in the midwest, most of the time our beers don’t overlap unless they are bigger breweries. Here are the top six in order.

Deschutes Brewery Red Chair NWPA
Bell’s Brewery Two Hearted Ale
New Belgium Fat Tire
Great Lakes Elliot Ness
Great Lakes Burning River Pale Ale
Deschutes Brewery Mirror Pond Pale Ale

Looking at the bottom of that list is a little silly because there are only 40 beers that all three of us have tried. I expanded it out to beers that at least two of us have had. There are 129 in that list and here are the bottom three. I bet you won’t be surprised.

Coors Light
Miller High Life
Bud Light

I’m looking forward to playing around a lot more with this data. If you want access too, just let me know.

benmartens May 2, 2016 Geek

Coding At Home

When people ask me how to get a job where I work, I tell them to be curious and experiment at home. I’ve learned so many valuable things from tinkering with code at home and it has made a big, positive impact in my career.

In the past it has been a lot of website stuff, but since my move to WordPress, that has pretty much disappeared. Lately it has been stuff that a computer science geek would call “ETL” (Extract Transform Load) programs. I enjoy taking my data out of one system and storing it in a common place that I control. For example, my Ecobee thermostat logs a ton of data every day but it lives in the EcoBee server. I use their programming interface to download the data and store it in my own database. I do the same thing with my irrigation controller, fantasy football and a few other gadgets and services. There’s not a lot you can do with the initial data right at the beginning, but as time goes on, you build up a pretty large data set and you can start to see some interesting trends. As I move into more of a data science position it’s great to have a big dataset of data that’s interesting to me personally.

Learning is a lot more fun when you’re doing it to achieve a goal that interests you. So why not find interesting things to learn that can benefit you in your job?

benmartens April 29, 2016 Geek

Drawer Slides

In some past woodworking projects, I avoided using real drawer slides because they add so much cost to the project. Amazon to the rescue! There’s a line of slides from Gliderite Hardware that is very affordable. Depending on the size of your drawer and the quantity that you order, you can get a pair of drawer slides for $3-7. They are full extension slides which mean that you can pull the drawer all the way out of the cabinet and you can also upgrade to soft close drawers to make sure tiny fingers don’t get pinched.

benmartens April 28, 2016 Woodworking