Hello and Welcome to this special episode
of The 8-Bit Guy. Since this is my 200th episode on this channel,
along with the fact that this month represents one year of doing this full time as my full-time
job. I thought I would give you a little special
episode, kind of showing what my life is like doing this kind of work. I decided to film myself doing my normal activities
on a relatively normal day a few weeks ago, and so here it is. All right, so it is 8 o’clock in the morning
and I come in here first thing and I sit down at my computer. Now, I’ve got to apologize for my voice. I’ve got a lot of allergy problems going
on this morning. It’s not uncommon in the morning, but I
don’t do much filming in the morning so it’s usually cleared up by the afternoon
when I do filming. But anyway, so the first thing I do is I come
in here and I look at my emails. And boy do I have a lot of them. I get a lot of emails, probably at least a
hundred every morning that I have to respond to. And they’re not just emails. Some of them are youtube messages, facebook
messages, and then a lot of them are direct emails. And I’m just looking right now. I wish I could show you my inbox, but I don’t
want to invade anyone’s privacy so again, there’s a lot of personal names and information
there. So, I’m just going to tell you about some
of the emails that I’ve got. Just looking though here, I’ve got at least
10 people telling me about The64 computer. It’s like, Hey David, are you aware of this
product, it’s called The64 computer, yada, yada yah here’s the website link, whatever. I’ve got about 10 people now and that’s
probably. I’ve probably gotten about 500 emails over
the last 6 months about that product. So yes, to everybody who’s watching, thank
you, I am well aware of The64 product. In fact, I’m supposed to be getting sent
one from the company that’s making it but I haven’t seen it yet. I’ve got probably another 5 people here
telling me about the, I don’t know how to pronounce this, sous vide sous vide cooker,
which people want me to use for retrobriting. So, yes, that’s probably the 300th email
I’ve had about that. So, thank you, I’m well aware of this product
as well. I probably have at least 10 people sending
me links to youtube videos saying, “Hey David, check out this video here.” And there’s a youtube link. Now, each of these videos that people want
me to watch are probably anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes long and there’s 10 people
at least wanting me to watch a video. And this is very normal. If you do the math, and you multiply the number
of minutes by the number of people, I’d be sitting here watching videos all day long
just to watch all of the videos that people want me to watch. And quite frankly, I just don’t have the
time. So, if you send me a request to watch a youtube
video, there’s a pretty good chance I’m not going to watch it. If there is something you write in the text
that really grabs my interest, I might click on it, but typically, of the 10 youtube videos
people send me every day I might watch one. I just. Don’t take it personally, but I just simply
don’t have the time. There’s at least 5 people here wanting me
to do repairs for them. And whether its. This person here wants me to repair their
Commodore 64. This person has got an Apple of some kind,
they want me to repair. whatever. But, bottom line is no. I just don’t have time to do repairs for
other people. Some of these people are offering to pay,
and some of these people are just thinking that I’ll do it out of the goodness of my
heart. Either way around it doesn’t really matter
whether you’re offering to pay or not, I simply don’t have the time to do it. If I did all of the repair requests that I
got, I would literally be doing repairs all day long. That’s all. I’d never have any time to produce any videos
or work on my game, or any of the stuff that I do. I do, however, get a lot of requests from
people who want something from me. And, if it is something reasonable, I try
to be accommodating. So, for example, somebody has recently asked
me to scan them a manual to a product that I’ve shown that I have the manual to. And they can’t find the manual anywhere
by googling it. And I looked, and I couldn’t find it either
online, so I’m going scan that for them later. That will probably take me 20 or 30 minutes. But, I feel like I’m kind of doing a service
because if that manual gets, you know, put online somewhere, then maybe the next person
that needs it will have it. I’ve also been asked to make copies of EPROMS
and stuff like that when people see I have a particular product. I can’t accommodate those because I don’t
have anyway to really read them at the moment. But there are a lot of things I try to do
if people need some help with something, if it is something that I can do and it makes
sense to ask me to do it. All right, so I also need to package up any
orders that came in over night from my website. So, I’ve already got a little pile started
here already. Now, I don’t normally get this much in one
day. This is a little bit of an unusual amount,
but the reason I’ve got this much is because I released a video last night. And for some reason that always jogs people’s
memories that “oh yeah, I need to go buy this thing from the 8-bit Guy.” So, whenever I release a video, I tend to
have a little bit of a surge of packages the next morning. These are actually Patreon rewards that I’m
working on. In fact, that’s what all these are here
too. So, people, when they pledge ten dollars or
more on Patreon, they can receive a soundtrack CD. So, of course I have to autograph all of these. So that’s how I do this. Never in my life did I think autographing
things would be part of my job. Nevertheless, I want to make sure people know
their donations are appreciated. I usually write little notes on the inside
of the box, addressing the person by name, so they hopefully don’t feel like they are
getting a form letter. Then I fold up the box, and put the shipping
labels on, and that one’s done. Of course, part of my daily routine is the
mail truck. It has a very distinctive sound and I can
usually hear it when it is coming down the street. So I just walk out there with all of my packages
and hand them to the mail man, and usually he hands me something in return. Often it is a donation, or it could be something
I bought myself for an upcoming episode. Nevertheless, I’m usually getting something
in the mail every day. Of course, when they are donations, I have
to film the unboxing. This is much more time consuming than it appears
in my monthly unboxing videos, which are heavily edited. Needless to say, the average box I receive
requires about 30 minutes to film me opening it. Then I usually spend some time cleaning and
organizing the things that I receive, and then of course comes the hard part, which
is figuring out where I’m going to store it until it is time to use it in a video. My museum is full. I have a lot of stuff just piled up around
my workbench in my studio room, so there’s no room there. So, I have some shelves in the attic and that's
where a lot of it ends up going. The donations have become quite a challenging
problem since I’ve run out of practically any space to put anything. Now, I know a lot of people have suggested
that I rent out a storage unit. The trouble is, I’ve done the math and it
just doesn’t work out. I mean, most of the stuff I would be putting
in there is not worth all that much, so you know, if I’ve got lets say three or four
thousand dollars worth of stuff I’m putting in there, but the storage unit costs over
a hundred dollars a month to rent, if you do the math, after just a few years I will
have paid more money to store the stuff than what the stuff is worth. So, it just doesn’t work. That being the case, I’ve been trying to
find more creative ways to store things here in the house. But, unless I want to start putting things
in the kitchen and bathrooms, I pretty much don’t have anywhere left to go with it. I recently got in a bunch more T-Shirts so
now I need to fold them, sort them by size, and inventory them. This is surprisingly time consuming. Some larger orders have in the past taken
me two whole days just to fold. So, finally I get to the part of the day where
I actually start working on video projects. So, this is for a recent video I made on the
Advantech I.Q. computer and what I needed to do was connect
the computer to a video capture device so I could capture video directly from the composite
video source, which makes it much easier for my viewers to see what is going on during
the demonstration. This takes me about an hour because I always
record way more footage than I need, mostly because I never know exactly what footage
I will need until I start scripting and editing. Next I needed to spend some time setting up
the camera and filming the disassembly of the computer. This takes another couple of hours. Filming things always take much longer than
doing the same task without filming it. I usually take a break around this time from
video work and focus on some house chores, whether it be cleaning the litter box, doing
the dishes, or cleaning the microwave, even though my wife claims I never actually do
this. Every evening I go to one of the local parks
and take a walk. I do this mainly because I need the exercise. I typically walk anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes,
with intermittent jogging. During this time I often am thinking about
what I’m going to be doing in my next video, or if I have a convention coming up, I’ll
be reheasring my speech to myself, and lately I find myself thinking about my game and how
I’m going to solve certain problems. In the evening I’ll usually code on my game
for about an hour or so. For those that don’t know, I do the coding
on a modern computer, and then test the code in DOSBOX. At least once a day I’ll copy the game over
to a floppy disk and test on my Tandy 1000 to make sure it works on real hardware. Of course my cat is more interested in biting
me at this moment. It’s just one of those things she does. I think I should mention, by the way, I didn’t
have any guests over this day. But quite often, around once a week or so
I do have fans that stop by for a visit. This is, of course, by appointment only as
I can’t just have people showing up unexpectedly. But I actually enjoy the visits and these
are pictures of some of the neat people I’ve met over the last year or so. So, the day is winding down and I’ve had
a shower. I’ll usually relax and watch some TV for
a while. I really enjoy watching old sci fi shows like
Doctor Who, Blake’s 7, Red Dwarf, and many others. But I also have some modern shows I keep up
with such as The Orville, The Big Bang Theory, Rick & Morty, and a few others. And, that about wraps up my day. Now, that was a fairly normal day. Obviously some days are different depending
on what’s going on that day. You know, one of the benefits of being self-employed
is that I do get to make my own schedule but that’s kind of a double-edged sword. Because, while it is true that if I don’t
feel good one day or I’m just not motivated I can literally just take the day off whenever
I want. The reality is, that doesn’t happen very
often. I’m a highly motivated type person and so
I wind up working pretty much every day and that means weekends and holidays. And I mean, even if I have like insomnia or
something and I can’t sleep, I might be up at like 2 o’clock in the morning editing
video or working on game code or something like that. So, it’s kind of hard sometimes just to
step away from the job, because I get bored if I’m not doing anything constructive for
any amount of time. I also wanted to mention something else. Since I do get so many emails every day, I
thought it might cut down on some of them if I posted an F.A.Q. or frequently asked
questions on my website. So, if you’re thinking about contacting
me, of course my contact information is on the website, but now there is also an FAQ
so maybe you can get your question answered before emailing me. I also wanted to mention that this month has
seem a little bit of a slowdown in videos and it’s not because I haven’t been working
on any, it’s just because some of the ones I’ve been working on have kind of encountered
some roadblocks and I’m just going to have to put those to the side for a little bit
and just kind of press forward with some of the other videos I have on the schedule. So, in fact, one of the next videos you’re
about to see is going to be the restoration of an IBM PC Junior. I’ve actually been working on that video
for a while. Most of it is filmed. So, you’ll probably be seeing that in the
next week or so, as well as more of the Commodore history series. I’ve actually got 8 episodes of that planned. I’ve only produced 3 of them so far. And yes, the Amiga will be featured in the
Commodore history series. A lot of people keep asking me about that. And after I’m done with that, I’ve got
about 20 more at least partially scripted computer documentaries from everything from
Tandy, Atari, Apple computers, and so on. Of course, I’ve got a lot more restoration
projects that I’m going to be working on here really soon. And I’ve probably got some more modern game
reviews coming up and a lot of other stuff, so you know, stick around for that stuff and
thanks for watching!
