A new, fantastic, utterly terrifying, point of view…
So…
My workplace decided to move locations, from an easy 10 minute drive away to 50 minutes on the busiest motorways in this part of the country away.
I had been there for almost 10 years total over a 12 year time span and my medical conditions would mean I’d be killing myself to make that trip 5 days a week.
So I resigned from my job and have been “unemployed” for almost 2 weeks now…
But that’s OK! I have savings, and even better I have a plan:
- Week 1
- Do whatever I want, I deserve a break.
- Week 2
- Treat this week like a work week.
- Start a blog.
- Setup my YouTube Channel.
- Setup my Twitch Channel.
- Start exercising and eating right.
- Start properly looking for part time work.
- Week 3
- ?????
- Week 4
- Profit!
Here’s what actually happened:
Week 1
My wife got sick and was home from work for most of it. She caught a cold that’s been going around, one where the cough doesn’t leave for ages after everything else, a cough that wakes you up at like 2am every morning, a cough that doesn’t let you get back to sleep unless you’re sitting upright… Yeah, you can see where I’m going with this.
We got some heavy duty shelving units from (ex)work for free, but now I have the put everything in them[1]!
I tried testing the Elgato HD60 S I had purchased, as the first game I wanted to play was on my laptop and I wanted my PC to do the recording[2]…
And that’s where the issues started…
Turns out my PC[3] isn’t good enough to do that, OK, that’s fine, I’ll get my awesome gaming laptop to do everything… Oh hey, the bug where it BSoD’s every time you plug in headphones came back (I fixed it like 2 weeks ago!), making it impossible to use for recording as I can’t here the game audio (for any system)… Oh, shops are having EOFY sales, maybe I should get a new PC?… Oh, but I have no income and it’s expensive… OH, how about I get a USB-C headphone jack, as maybe the headphone port is the issue?… Oh, people on YouTube are saying you can fix the Elgato getting all the sound by using this Sound Manager setting… Oh, I don’t have that Sound Manager… Oh, Windows 10 doesn’t install it by default, so it’s simple to get!… Oh, now everything is echoing on my PC… Oh, the cable came, (thanks Amazon!), but I’ll install the Sound Manager on the laptop first… Oh hey, that fixed the headphone crash, but the USB-C cable works just fine and gives me something to point at, totally not a waste of money… But hey, now that I can use the laptop I don’t need to buy a new PC, so that’s a plus!… Oh, the week is over.
So… the week I wanted to relax was filled with stress and not much “relaxing[4].”
Week 2
It’s now Friday… and I have a blog!!! Yay!
But… that’s about it…
I got up at work hours on Tuesday cause I had a standard blood test to get in the morning. (My Doctor likes to get them done before seeing him so he can make sure nothing is out of the ordinary… I like my Doctor.) But that’s been the only day.
Even this site has been a headache to get up and running… (Although to be fair, watching, like, 30 seconds of a YouTube video got me to where I am now, so it wasn’t really all that hard.)
YouTube has been a nightmare to try and figure out. I tried to make my first Let’s Play video, and it worked… for about 10 minutes. The footage looked horrible the whole way through as I reset some of the settings for the game by accident, and my voice-over audio broke after 10 minutes because of a plugin I was trying. So I played an extra 20 minutes with garbled, totally useless, voice over. So basically a waste of a day…
I haven’t even touched Twitch yet!
I haven’t done any exercise.
I have a tube of Pringles right next to me as I type this out.
And I got knocked back from one job I applied for before leaving work, and there’s been literally no other prospects.
So… at least I have a blog!
To be fair it hasn’t been all bad.
I have most of the “studio[5]” set up how I want it, though the lighting is still bad and I still have a few other things to figure out.
I also have a halfway decent looking logo I designed, if I do say so myself.
I’ve installed all the software I need to edit my live videos.
And I downloaded 300 royalty free songs from YouTube, some of which inspired how my intro will look like… once I figure out how to animate it.
With most of these teething issues out of the way, I do feel like I’m wrapping my head around things… slowly.
I may have been in a Software Developer for 10 years, but I am far from “Techie” so I still have a lot to learn.
Now to make this place look like a professional blog!… Wait, what do you mean it’s already the weekend?!
Still… I’m excited to see what this new world has in store for me next!
[1] I spent about 2 days doing that… there were a lot of books and board games… and I’m really unfit.
[2] Yes I now know that I don’t need the Elgato to record on PC, but as my laptop isn’t super high spec I didn’t want to bog it down with recording while playing.
[3] The CPU and Mainboard are at least 7 years old, purchased while I was in the middle of TAFE with very little income because my mainboard exploded for no reason, and not much has been improved over the years, with the last big upgrade being an extra 8gb of RAM and putting in a GTX960 whenever Watch Dogs came out… 2014 or 2015? So yeah… it’s a little old.
[4] Spending time by myself doing nothing, (I’m an Introvert, so it helps to recharge me,) watching what I want to watch, doing what I want to do, etc.
[5] The spare room dubbed the “Geek room” of my house.