A strange thing started happening over the last month or so that I wasn’t expecting. I put a quick video edit of the trip I took with Bennett to pick up his Hudson on my YouTube channel, which has historically been very quiet. I use it mainly just as a place to park random videos to be embedded on the weblog or a random forum post. I shared the link with Bennett, Bennett shared it with some friends of his, and it wound up getting about 5,500 views and the channel gained about 20 subscribers in two months. That led to more comments and likes on the Travelall video updates I’ve posted. So I went in to YouTube’s backend and cleaned up the channel, added some categories, and created new title cards for all of those videos.
I don’t know what the end goal is here; I don’t intend to quit the day job and pursue a career as a YouTube creator, as exhausting as that sounds. But I think I’m going to put a little more time into the production of each video to see what kind of traction I can get. Would a sponsorship be nice to have? I wouldn’t turn it down.
Another interesting realization came when I glanced at the initial walkaround videos I shot when I first got the truck. I can’t believe how lousy the thing looked when it first arrived. The paint was garbage, the interior was a horror show, and without a grille it looked like a drunk hobo passed out in the driveway. It’s come a long way. Each time I go outside and cringe at the condition of the front fenders I have to remember how much worse everything looked in March, and how much I’ve done to it since then. I think I’m going to do a before and after 1-year progress video to really compare how far we’ve come.
I spent about three hours last night working on a project for one of Jen’s long-term clients, who’s asked us to help her with something new. Jen met her 22 years ago (!!) while working at a design studio. She’s kept in touch with us and we’ve worked on projects with her over the years, and she brought us a new and interesting assignment which will leverage our knowledge of Illustrator to the maximum. It’s not the most glamorous work but I’m strangely happy to have some side work coming in again. It’s been a long drought since I stepped back from web development but this is different enough that I like the challenge of a new problem to solve. The initial test run was somewhat tedious, but hopefully I can find a way to streamline the process and make things move faster.
Cabel Sasser runs a studio called Panic, which makes excellent software for the Mac, has dabbled in video game production, and recently designed and shipped their own handheld video game console. Yesterday on his weblog he posted a number of scans of a series of catalogs produced in the 1980’s which featured gadgets of all kinds. The DAK catalogs had everything from breadmakers to radar detectors to audio equipment, and they used to come to our house addressed to the previous owners. As a young impressionable middle-school student I read the description for one of their products, a graphic equalizer, and obsessed over it for months. I recall asking for it for Christmas, my Dad turning me down, and me being a dick about it, which still haunts me.
Eventually I earned enough money to buy it, and I hooked it up to the huge Fisher audio system I’d bought the previous summer with money from painting the house. As I recall it didn’t amplify anything (the ad copy claimed my stereo would “literally explode with life”) but made the mix a lot muddier, no matter how much I fooled with the channels. I messed with it for months but eventually disconnected it, having learned an expensive lesson about believing ad copy without reading any reviews.
Thanks Cabel, that totally took me back. Read his post—it’s a fun look into the wild and crazy days of direct mail in the 80’s.
I’ve been an on-again, off-again user of Mint since it first started, and I found it really helpful for providing an overall picture of how well our spending/saving/debt picture looked as a household. They made it easy to hook into the APIs of each banking institution, bypassing all of the platform-specific stuff and presenting the information in a clear interface. They got bought by Intuit a while back—you know, the company that makes tax preparation software falsely advertised as free and actively lobbying to stop Americans being able to file taxes for free—who have now announced they’re shutting it down. They’re pushing people to some new paid service called Credit Karma, which I’m sure will offer half the services and suck really badly. The enshittification continues.
Honda just released an electric update to the Motocompo, a tiny foldable motorcycle they designed and built for city traveling back in the 1980’s. The original gas-powered bike was produced for two years and now sell for ridiculous amounts of money; the new Motocompacto is listed for $995. Cleaner, lighter, and just as funky, it folds down into a 30″ x 21″ x 4″ box, is good for about 15 miles of range, and takes 3.5 hours to charge. If I was commuting into DC every day and had a longer walk to deal with, I would have already placed my order for one.
I spent three and a half hours at a vet ER with Hazel Monday night, who was pacing the house with her tail between her legs whining. by the time we were all ready to go to bed, she was getting more and more frantic, so I put my shoes back on and headed out to Elicott City to get her checked out. We sat in a cold exam room for a while and they took her in back to get checked out. I explained why she was wearing the headscarf and the symptoms we were seeing, as well as the fact that we haven’t seen her poop in several days. They presented a me with an expensive estimate which I approved, and they took her back for some invasive and embarrassing treatment. Poor girl. We then waited in the exam room for another half an hour of constant whining until they got the bill and meds together and cut us loose. We crashed out at 3AM and the girls mercifully let us sleep in as late as possible. Hazel is still uncomfortable; hopefully the medicine will get things moving for her soon, and the pressure will be relieved.