Studio711 - Ben Martens

Microsoft Security Essentials

bwmartens — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 07:30:00 GMT

I have long recommended AVGFree as good virus scanning software. It now looks like Microsoft is working on a free software suite that includes virus and malware scanners. It’s called Microsoft Security Essentials and it’s currently in beta, but I’ll keep my eye on it and try it out when it’s released.

Cascade Loop

bwmartens — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:30:00 GMT

Ever since I arrived in Seattle with a motorcycle, I’ve been told about the Cascade Loop. It covers some of the most beautiful roads in Washington, but it’s also a big trip for one day. Today, I set out to conquer the loop.

You can see my basic route below. The actual Cascade Loops includes a run down Whidbey Island, but that would make a big day even bigger and I’ve traveled that road many times anyway. The highlight of this ride is going to be the northern stretch along Highway 20. That 5500 foot high pass is closed all winter long, and I’ve never been there.

The route is about 450 miles. I average about 50mph on long trips due to the need for frequent stops so that puts me at 9 hours. Factor in some extra sore muscles from a full day on the bike and I’m hoping to tackle this in 12 hours. I’m planning to Twitter my progress along the way so you can watch for updates on my feed.

I’m still undecided about whether I will come back through Stevens Pass or Snoqualmie Pass. Stevens is more scenic and gets me out of the hot weather on the east side of the mountains. Snoqualmie is 70mph interstate. I’ll make the call when I get near Cashmere. Interestingly it’s only 1 mile extra to go through Stevens than Snoqualmie, but I expect it’s about 15-30 minutes longer.

Quick Access

bwmartens — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 07:30:00 GMT

I set up a couple shortcuts on my website a long time ago, but for some reason I’ve never published them. It dawned on me that maybe other people would find this useful too:

gadget.studio711.com: Redirects to the skiing sidebar gadget page
video.studio711.com: Redirects to the video page (“videos” works too)
photo.studio711.com: Redirects to the photos page (“photos” works too)
moblog.studio711.com: Redirects to the photo gallery for the moblog

Eventually I’d like to enable you to type anything.studio711.com and if I haven’t configured a specific link for anything then it will do a search. I haven’t quite worked that one out yet.

PlayOn

bwmartens — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:30:00 GMT

There is a lot of TV content online these days from Hulu, CBS.com, ABC.com, etc. I don’t watch a lot of it though because I’m not a big fan of watching lots of content on my computer. I have a nice LCD TV with a good sound system. Why can’t I use that?

I recently downloaded the trial for PlayOn and ended up buying a license. If you have an Xbox360 or a PS3, this app will let you watch content from all kinds of online sources, including the ones mentioned above. The app runs on your PC and streams the content to your Xbox360. I used it last night to watch a bunch of episodes of Man Caves from Hulu and it worked exceedingly well.

Lake Easton State Park

bwmartens — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:30:00 GMT

Tim, Chelsea, Andy, Stephanie, Nick (an intern at Tim’s company), Tyla and I spent the weekend about 15 miles east of the summit of Snoqualmie Pass at Lake Easton State Park. We all convened at campsite 109 after work on Friday and crammed five tents onto the tent pad. The rest of the weekend was filled with cornhole, beverages, campfires, delicious food, and hanging out down by the water. The lake was beautiful, but the campground was very loud. I-90 was only a few hundred yards away. I guess when you try to cram train tracks, a lake, a campground and an interstate into a mountain pass, there’s not a lot of leftover room. It was great for a weekend trip considering how close to home it is(60 miles from my house.) On Sunday morning, we packed up and visited Mountain High Hamburgers on the other side of the interstate. It’s a Scherschel family favorite and made a nice end to the weekend.

Thanks to everyone for coming, and special thanks to Tyla for putting up with Nick and me talking about skiing all weekend. This winter he’s going to be living the dream: ski bum at Alta. Combine that with his lifetime full of 100 day ski seasons at Killington and I’m pretty jealous.

The next camping trip on the calendar right now is in late August when we take a trip out to the San Juans.

Photos are available in the gallery.

King of Pop

bwmartens — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 07:30:00 GMT

As you all know, Michael Jackson passed away proving once again that celebrities do die in threes. (Ed McMahon and Farrah Fawcet died recently too.) It’s weird to think that my kids will have very little idea who he was. I think it will be very similar to how I feel about Elvis. He was an icon to the generation before me, but he played very little part in my life.

I heard somebody say that Michael has a 50/50 legacy right now. Half the time you think about his incredible music, and half the time you think about his crazy antics and dangling his kid off the balcony. I’m guessing that, in the long run, the music will win out.

Idaho Nachos

bwmartens — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:30:00 GMT

On our trip to Indiana, we stopped at Granite City for dinner. It’s one of Tyla’s favorites and I finally got to try the Idaho Nachos that I heard so much about. Last weekend we decided to try and make them for ourselves. I think they actually tasted better than the ones from the restaurant!

Ingredients

1 bag frozen waffle fries (we used unseasoned curly fries because we couldn’t find waffle fries)

2 cups shredded cheddar cheese

3-4 strips bacon

1 small tomato

Chives

Bake the waffle fries according to the instructions on the bag. Near the end of the baking, push all the fries into a pile and smother with the shredded cheese. Once the cheese is melted, pull them out of the oven and top with chopped bacon, diced tomatoes, and chooped chives.

Dip Ingredients

1 cup sour cream

1/2 cup mayonnaise

1/4 tsp onion powder

1/4 tsp curry

1/8 tsp paprika

1/4 tsp Worcestershire sauce

Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and top with parsley flakes.

This recipe makes a lot of dip. I think will probably cut it at least in half (maybe even less) the next time we make it.

Bottom line: delicious! They will go fast.

Face Squatting

bwmartens — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 07:30:00 GMT

Did you stay up until midnight (eastern time) on June 12 to get your Facebook URL? I did, despite a bad case of jet lag in Indiana. You can find me at facebook.com/benmartens. I set an alarm, got up, watched the countdown clock, and snagged it within the first thirty seconds. I wasn’t alone. It was a massive land grab. 500,000 people signed up in the first 15 minutes, 1 million in the first hour, and 3 million in the first 12 hours.

Why is it important? I don’t know. If Facebook really is around for a long time (the odds are against that) then it will be an easy way to send people to my profile. Since you only get one name and you can’t change it, it’s nice to know that I snagged the name I wanted.

Did you? If you haven’t yet, go to facebook.com/username and get your address. The odds are that it will never matter, but if it does, you’ll be prepared.

Kudos to Facebook for handling the incredible rush of traffic!

DOMS

bwmartens — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 07:30:00 GMT

A day or two after a big hike, I get a strong reprimand from my legs. I always thought it was lactic acid, but after looking it up, it appears I’m wrong. Lactic acid usually disappears in about an hour after exercise. What I’m really feeling is delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) and it occurs 24 to 72 hours after exercising.

I read some conflicting theories about what DOMS actually is, but the general consensus is that as the muscles are rebuilding and growing, they press on nerves and blood vessels. There doesn’t appear to be anything you can do to get it to go away quicker, but on the flip side, you probably don’t do any harm by continuing to be active during the pain.

I know there are some workout experts and biology majors who read this so maybe you can jump in and correct me.

Hiking Mt. Si

bwmartens — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 07:30:00 GMT

If you spend much time in this area, it doesn’t take long to recognize Mt. Si. Just east of North Bend, this chunk of rock is about 4200 feet above sea level. The hike to the top is 4 miles long and gains about 3300 feet. It’s one of the most popular day hikes in the area, but for some reason, I’ve never done it. I can see it when I drive out of my house and it bugs me every day that I haven’t been to the top.

Last Saturday, Tyla and I set out to change that. The hike up was actually easier than I had expected. The trail was indeed quite busy, but it was mostly hikers who knew what they were doing and not the random people in flip flops that you find on Tiger Mountain. We made decent time compared to the other people that we started with. It took us right around two hours to get to the top and about and hour and forty five minutes to get down. Interestingly, the down hike hurt more than the hike up.

We spent about an hour at the top. I even tried to climb to the top of Haystack Rock. That’s the piece of rock you see jutting out of the top of the mountain. When you reach the stop on the trail where everyone has stopped, keep going and you’ll see where the real end of the trail is. Every year, people die climbing Haystack, and now I know why. Tyla was the smart one and decided to sit it out. I had to climb it. It was a very steep climb, but going up was simple. Combing down was another story. It took me about five minutes to climb up but twenty to climb down. I even got stuck while climbing down and had to go back up to find another way down. I’m not sure I’ll be doing that again soon.

We didn’t get very many good pictures because it was cloudy for the whole hike. There are a couple shots in the photo gallery including a 3D profile of the GPS data. Nevermind the fact that there is a bit of drift in the data. We hiked the same trail up as we did going down.

Tyla, thanks for hiking with me! I love seeing all these amazing sights with you!

DIY – Man Caves

bwmartens — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 07:30:00 GMT

I saw another advertisement for “Man Caves” on Do It Yourself network, and I was again frustrated that Comcast doesn’t provide that channel in my area. (Oh and Comcast, why do people down the street have 10 more HD channels than me? I want Speed in HD please!)

Anyway, I don’t know if this show came before Andy’s website, but it has always intrigued me. The difference is that this time I realized it might be available online. I typed in hulu.com and voila, both seasons are available! I’m looking forward to catching up on them.

Offsite Backup

bwmartens — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:30:00 GMT

My Windows Home Server is still near the top of my gadget list. All of my files are automatically duplicated across multiple hard drives, and all my computers are automatically backed up every day. That still doesn’t help with the natural disaster scenario. Last September, I started backing those files up to a portable hard drive that I kept at work. That worked, but I was never completely happy for various reasons. The top two were that my portable drive was filling up and none of the files were encrypted.

I was about to pay for Jungle Disk which runs as a service on the WHS box and backs up to Amazon’s S3 storage service. I figured it would cost me about $10/month to store all my photos and videos. Then I realized that I pay for 150GB of storage on GoDaddy and my entire website only used about 2% of that space.

I started coding and eventually came up with a solution that encrypts each file, encrypts the filename, and FTPs the file up to my GoDaddy server. The folder on the server is locked down, but in theory, even if someone did get to the actual files, they’d have a hard time knowing what files were interesting and then have an even harder time unencrypting the files. That’s the theory anyway. I’m still not confident enough to post my source code. If you want it, email me.

The net result is that I have an application running on the server every day which syncs the GoDaddy encrypted storage folder with the current contents of my Windows Home Server. Now I have a data backup plan which not only protects against my own stupidity and hardware failure but also against anything that destroys my house. I’m now using about 100GB of my allotted 150GB. For an additional $8/month I can get “unlimited storage and bandwidth” from GoDaddy. That’s a potential expansion point for the future.

PS. You don’t necessarily need to go this crazy with your own data protection plan, but if your precious files only exist on one hard drive, you are setting yourself up for a very painful experience. There are so many cheap and easy options to avoid data loss these days. If you need help picking one, let me know, but don’t call me for help when your hard drive crashes and you lose four gigabytes of pictures of your cat. You’ve been warned.

The People You Meet

bwmartens — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:30:00 GMT

I sat in a group of about 15 people this week at work that was designed to get us all to know each other and also to meet one of our senior managers in a smaller setting. As we went around and introduced ourselves, he asked us to share something that other people probably don't know. My tidbit was that I used to work for a defense contractor, specifically on ballistic missile defense. Another guy in the group (my age) used to work for the Russians on their nuclear missile program. Another guy in the group said he has a PhD in high energy physics. And finally, the last guy used to work on SDI. The rest of the facts were interesting too ("I have chronic hiccups"), but it was odd to have four people in the room with similar experiences.

Gas Prices

bwmartens — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:30:00 GMT

I was pretty surprised on the way home to see gas at $2.99. Wasn’t gas under $2? When did we start pushing $3? Looking at GasBuddy shows that we are back at the same prices as October of last year. It was fun while it lasted. How far will the prices go up this time?

Tyla Meets Indiana

bwmartens — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:30:00 GMT

On Thursday night, Tyla and I headed out of SeaTac on the redeye to South Bend via O’Hare. Thanks to Megan for the ride to the airport! The weekend is a blur of fun memories. Our first stop on Friday was Dairy Queen to see the Cowan’s, get some delicious ice cream, and show her where I worked in high school. Friday afternoon we swam in our pool which wasn’t nearly as cold as I thought it would be. On Friday evening, we headed for dinner at Granite City, one of Tyla’s favorite chains. Saturday looked a little wet so we stayed close to home in the morning with a canoe trip down at the lake. After waiting out the rain at a showing of Pixar’s new movie “Up,” we headed for a quick trip past my high school on the way to Silver Beach on Lake Michigan. Sunday morning I saw a lot of familiar, smiling faces at church. Sunday afternoon, Grandpa and Lynnette drove up to spend some time with us (and give their stamp of approval to Tyla.) The afternoon saw us swimming some more and playing bocce ball. Monday we packed up, said goodbye to Rachel, Luke and David and flew back to Seattle.

What a weekend! A huge thanks goes to Tyla for making the trip back with me. It’s so much fun to travel with you! It was great to see the family, even if David did seem to like Tyla about a hundred times more than me. (Can you blame him?)

There are, of course, photos in the photo gallery. Can’t wait to do it again!