[Using government phone as hotspot, so; no photo right now...]
I got home from busking at about midnight, which is the time that I had been going out the past few weeks.
I was up at my usual time of about 1:30 PM, and I did not smoke any weed, but rather sipped coffee and took puffs off my VUSE nicotine vaporizer.
Still, I felt the same sense of "stuck-ness" as I sat in the same spot on the couch. Even without the "wake and bake" of a morning joint, I felt like I was allowing myself to fall into a routine, the same one that had me showing up after midnight at the Lilly Pad.
So, I decided to take massive action and just pack up my busking gear to ostensibly just ride by the Lilly Pad to see what would be going on on a Wednesday afternoon which was about 72 degrees under pretty clear skies.
It was strange, riding the length of Royal Street and noticing all of the daytime buskers, who were already warmed up and had crowds around them, spurring them on. I didn't feel like I could match the energy level and planned upon just supplying light background music and seeing what fell into the tip jar.
But, once I started playing, I couldn't restrain myself from putting all my effort into it, and I was soon down to a tank top and made what turned out to be 18 bucks, playing from around 6:30 until 8:45, and then again from about 9:00 until ten.
That works out to exactly 8 dollars an hour.
I heard that the minimum wage here in Louisiana is $7.25, so I came out ahead of the hamburger flipper, but wasn't able to eat a hamburger on the sly, like she probably felt entitled to do, given her wage...
Well, I am doing this in my room, using the government phone as a hotspot. I am going to cut this short so I can check to see how much of my 2 gigabytes of mobile data I used just to do this, so I can gauge how to go about getting a whole month of Internet out of the thing.
I certainly shouldn't type all my stuff into the Blogger editor, which autosaves every so often, because I believe that uses data...
I got home from busking at about midnight, which is the time that I had been going out the past few weeks.
I was up at my usual time of about 1:30 PM, and I did not smoke any weed, but rather sipped coffee and took puffs off my VUSE nicotine vaporizer.
Still, I felt the same sense of "stuck-ness" as I sat in the same spot on the couch. Even without the "wake and bake" of a morning joint, I felt like I was allowing myself to fall into a routine, the same one that had me showing up after midnight at the Lilly Pad.
So, I decided to take massive action and just pack up my busking gear to ostensibly just ride by the Lilly Pad to see what would be going on on a Wednesday afternoon which was about 72 degrees under pretty clear skies.
It was strange, riding the length of Royal Street and noticing all of the daytime buskers, who were already warmed up and had crowds around them, spurring them on. I didn't feel like I could match the energy level and planned upon just supplying light background music and seeing what fell into the tip jar.
But, once I started playing, I couldn't restrain myself from putting all my effort into it, and I was soon down to a tank top and made what turned out to be 18 bucks, playing from around 6:30 until 8:45, and then again from about 9:00 until ten.
That works out to exactly 8 dollars an hour.
I heard that the minimum wage here in Louisiana is $7.25, so I came out ahead of the hamburger flipper, but wasn't able to eat a hamburger on the sly, like she probably felt entitled to do, given her wage...
Well, I am doing this in my room, using the government phone as a hotspot. I am going to cut this short so I can check to see how much of my 2 gigabytes of mobile data I used just to do this, so I can gauge how to go about getting a whole month of Internet out of the thing.
I certainly shouldn't type all my stuff into the Blogger editor, which autosaves every so often, because I believe that uses data...
OK here's what you do. Write your blog text out in Notepad, then cut'n'paste into the Blogger window. You're right about the constant updating which does use some data, but what really eats up data is video, audio, photos.
ReplyDeleteYes, my blog is 25 megabytes, and I have watched it creep up from around 14 megabytes, when I first started noting the size of the XML backup file (that I should be creating more frequently in the event that someone on my enemies flags the blog as being inappropriate, just as a way of lashing out, and then Blogger disables it, pending my jumping through hoops, submitting the site for review, hoping to get a real human being to take interest, but not one like Chuck Croll, of Martinez, California, who uses the moniker of Nite Cruzer, and who seems to be the captain of the Blogger Help Forum, who accused me of being a troll who was launching an attack on the very members of the help forum, claiming to know who I was and what monkiker I used to troll under and vowing to not only not help me solve the problem of my blog being removed but to "see where else he might be posting" and to eradicate me from the worldwide web to the fullest extent of his abilities to do so, as the piece of Silicon Valley driftwood that he seems to be-that Chuck Croll.
ReplyDeleteBut, my point is that, all the text I have typed into this blog over the past 12 years amounts to same amount of bits and bytes as an 8 minute video, shot on a cellphone.
So, by trying to include an 8 minute video in my post, I would be doubling the size of the data transfer, I do believe....
Comments, not so data intensive... : )
Wow who would pick on a guy who's basically living on Welfare and picking a guitar for a few bucks once in a while? I mean, wtf? You're not a Trump supporter, that I've been able to determine, at least not loudly so. I mean, you're an ex-middle-class white guy so of course you'd vote for Trump again if you vote, and you harbor a hate for anyone who's not white and middle class, but if they wanted to ban you for that they'd have to ban half of Blogger's sites.
ReplyDeleteThe other side is if they're jealous. You realize that most people in the US lead such miserable lives that even if they're making "decent" money (what is that any more? Over $10k a year? Over $100k?) they dream of being able to say "Fuck it all" and go play a guitar in New Orleans.
As I keep saying, blogs by buskers are extremely rare. Right now you're the only one on the entire Earth that I can find, and I actively look. Marvin Naylor's dead or something, and since I'm not playing trumpet and not up to speed on anything else, I no longer qualify.
But getting back to what activities gobble up data; this is why my blog, even if I get competent on something that's not trumpet, will never have audio or video - it takes me over an hour to upload 1 minute of video to YouTube. Yes, I live in Silicon Valley, and Yes, Silicon Valley is a playground for the rich, not for the 99%. If I wanted high speed access I'd have to pay several hundred a month maybe closer to a thousand dollars a month.
ReplyDeleteI literally have to leave Silicon Valley, go to my boss's house in Alameda County, to get decent upload speeds (for which he's paying a lot of money).
I'm not sure how it is in the rest of the US, but if it's like this in Silicon Valley, it must be at least as bad everywhere else.
So as I keep saying, concentrate on the music and let the Kool Kids with solid-gold iPhones and $1000 a month connect plans take video of you, put a URL on your guitar or something, and let the richies take care of the publicity.