One year ago today: August 27, 2022, pretty tall trees, folks.
Five years ago today: August 27, 2018, focus on hot dogs.
Nine years ago today: August 27, 2014, nearly famous.
Random years ago today: August 27, 2011, that much negotiaton.
Trump’s mug shot is everywhere. The Democrats can’t walk down a street without seeing it. They thought it would be the ultimate humiliation for Trump, in fact it increased his lead by 7 points. It would appear the leftoids are just too stupid to leave well enough alone. They can’t spot the pattern that their old tricks backfire when used on Trump. It just convinces more folks that everything anti-Trump is a political hit piece. What’s more, we’ve hit another batch of good Columbian coffee. It’s not the best, but pretty good. Why, I think I’ll have another. The best picture I can give you today is my avocado incubator, better living through plastics. So far, the bean has not sprouted.
Oh heck, I’ll go over it right away. It has to do with the nature of computer communication. The computers are designed to have eight bits to handle data, this allows for 256 different characters and such. But for all eight to be sent and once it requires a lot of wiring. The parallel cables inside you computer are not the greatest for stringing devices together. Instead of sending eight signals at a time, you can send two groups of four and reconstruct them at the end. This cuts down the number of connections when you are pairing a microcontroller with a computer, though I’ve ever attempted doing this on my own without a kit or custom equipment.
Good morning. Baked chicken and garlic grits after sleep in until 9:00AM. Why not, it’s August. I was looking at alternatives, to read what I found, skip to today’s addendum. The reason I’m doing this is cost. I like Synthesia so far, but it creates expenses, as in so does this blog but I’m less willing to absorb such costs since I’m a writer, not a publisher. I’ve heard of things like micro-pay and soft walls but same as ever, good luck finding a real person who uses these and is willing to show me the ropes. I recall the micro-pay systems where you got fractions of cents and a payout when they added up to some arbitrary total. Why can’t I find them now?
What I want is out there, but since it was useful, has some dork come along and changed it? A lot of what I found was old-school even back when I was attending an old school. I believe in advertising—in its place. And that place is a catalog where people who are seeking make the decision to see it. I also believe a good product sells itself. By going on-line this morning it is me against 100 million Internet garbage-pickers, who by their own standards are fully employed. My target is a penny per view for the avatar version. One cent for my two cents.
Where would this put me? Well, when I log on I necessarily look at the statistics and this morning I would have made $19.21. That is over 60 times as much as my savings account generates in a month. True, Sundays are a good day, but there are at least 52 of them per year. How many good days should one expect in these troubled times? One notable aspect so far is the “lastest advice” being ladled out by so-called blog professionals is they are quoting things mentioned in this blog as long as twenty years ago. Only one of them suggested proof-reading your work.
I don’t like soft paywalls, they are annoyingly overused by newspaper sites. They are easy to get around. To me one of the worst mistakes the Internet community made was adopting PayPal as a standard. The Internet was supposed to be anonymous and anyway people will use 12-foot ladder if they really don’t want to pay. I’m just informed I’ve used jargon, I’ll explain a bit. A soft paywall is those articles that show you the first few sentences, then fade and ask for money. The ladder is a play on the old “show me a ten foot wall and I’ll show you a twelve foot ladder”, that bypasses the paywall by making it think your search is a web crawler and there, I just did it again.
By moving a fraction to fast, I missed a classic shot of the father red cardinal feeding the dark colored bird like a little chick. Am I witnessing some ordinary behavior I’ve just not seen before? The bird that hops is almost the full size of the cardinal by now. Here’s an article in “The Guardian” that typifies the leftoid standpoint. They go on forever that there is “no evidence” of election fraud in 2020. They don’t get it. Let me spell it out. It does not matter if there is no evidence and it does not matter how many times you say that. The majority of Americans think there was. When you can change that, get back to us.
It was a pleasant afternoon in the rain, the nice kind you see in tourist brochures. I got caught in the shed for a half –hour. Rehearsal is slated for 6:00PM tonight, we have that preliminary list of 10 songs which I hope will keep things moving along. Historically this is another slow point, where people begin to realize there is work involved. I’ll take my acoustic along, as there are tunes suitable for two guitars and I can strum just well enough to be a contender. We are at the stage of coordinating our intros and outros. It is not uncommon for guitar player to drop intro and start right in with the singing. They usually learn quickly to drop that habit.
Empty Disneyworld lane.
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Another milestone and a lot of work with the music. We focused on some of the arranging and two hours in the Florida heat left us beyond weary. When we arrived at the pavilion, some other group had pre-empted it for a private party. So I finally learned where the Prez lives, it’s 25.1 miles from here. Yep, he’s like me, we practice in the garage, not in the house, but we got some of the priority work done. I see he has never arranged music before and lacks anything like the stage time that alone can bring confidence into a show. To counterbalance that he is a fast learner and does not need explanations why things are done but once.
This is not hit parade music and some of the bluegrass versions he knows clash a bit. Here are the tunes we got through and have a structure we agree on and play well enough.
The BreezeQuick analysis of the rehearsal. The enthusiasm is still there, though it’s clearer now that he’s got a lot less experience than I estimated. His realization that this duo idea is a winner easily takes care of that but he was truthful that he did not front the band. He picks it up easy enough with the right bass line and he’s impressed by how his favorites, the Merle stuff, sounds. We spend ten minutes going over the general rules of adapting music for duos and he knows it is a wealth of information he’d not easily find anywhere else.
Tell Me Momma
Lonesome Fugitive
Cocaine Blues
Memphis
Red Bandana
These Boots
A Long Time Leavin’
Pirate Looks 40
By lack of experience, I mean two facets. One is unsubstitutable stage time, my guess is his total is not even a hundred hours, that is, less than 25 gigs. The other is undirected practice time. While he’s learned by what I’d call guitar attrition, he’s never sat down with anybody and had them go over the “why”, the easy way, the not-so-easy way, or explain the process of getting the sounds out of the instruments.
The upside is how quickly he gets it once he knows “why”. He can apply new learning to the very next tune. Examples would be how to fake intros, the application of a chorus pedal to fake instrumental breaks, and how to focus on a distinct strum no matter what I play. Some of it is damage that needs undoing, say for instance how he tends to speed up when play bass notes ahead of the beat. He had never been shown the correct way to "mute" or how to play four-measure patterns. But ten hours of practice makes a world of difference at this point.
ADDENDUM
To me, it has always been a pity how making money on the Internet, for most people, quickly degenerated into advertising. That’s stupid people for you, to the stupid initiate, the original monitors did look a lot like television sets. Result? Entire generations of dorks who honestly think being blasted by advertising on-line is normal. A reasonable look at Synthesia shows the true minimal cost of publishing in avatar for is closer to $85 per month. That’s without going into the details. That’s a brake on the situation unless there is a possibility of revenue.
No way I could be the first to wish there was some way to (for example) charge 1¢ per view. When I ask around, I get pooh-poohed by people who evidently don’t know their basic economics. A fraction of a cent is fine. The potential was always is insane considering the size of Internet audiences. In my opinion is the way the entire system should have been set up in the first place. Instead you get bullshit free offers and you can’t buy a thing on-line without telling a stranger enough information to steal your house.
My thinking is there must be countless people like myself who do not want to get caught up in the whole classic Internet bullshit of “curating”, “metrics”, “content marketing”, “platforms”, “subscriptions”, or free offers.
Knowing I can’t be the first and only person thinking this, I went on a one-hour quest for information. Some of this repeats steps I took twenty years ago. And I got back the same load of garbage. The entire crop of current users seems to have bought into what is probably the crappiest way to make money. This is America, walk in slap your dollar on the counter, take your bubble-gum and leave. That’s the way it should be. What do you get instead? Let’s list what you don’t want, yet this is what you get because of “majority rules”.
a) build a “relationship” with your “influencers”Not for me. I’m not mixing it up with anybody over a “bubblegum” transaction. The Internet wants the same data for a big deal as a small one. I kept finding references to Drizzle, but their web site will not display on my system due to security violations. Also, I keep seeing the statistic that by “small transactions” they mean a minimum of twenty cents—more than I had in mind. I rejected any who had minimums over $5, that is not micro by a long ways yet. You’ve probably encountered Drizzle if you’ve seen that notice that you’ve used up your quota of “free” articles.
b) solve other people’s problems
c) engage your audience
While some of this is a repeat for me, I’m still at the research phase. There is no intention to monetize this blog and it remains ad-free. But that avatar is a separate issue. One thing I learned today is there is no one site I can go to that supplies what I want with a couple of keypresses. They’ve turned the Internet into quicksand. I imagine a group of “expert users” some day getting a laugh at me stumbling along here. But, such people always get their turn sooner or later.
I did find several articles mentioning Drizzle and they contained a fairly consistent complaint. It is that how much you get paid depends too much on how other sites perform. Once again, majority rules rears its ugly head. Remember the old saying, with majority rules, every meal is pizza.
