Full Time

For the past couple of years I've been working only part time, mostly on Sundays and Mondays, and whatever other nights they needed me.  But now I'm assigned four nights a week: Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, which is 40 hours, and sometimes other nights.  So I'm going to be broadcasting a lot more than I used to.

I already miss having the time off.  At least I'm not working every night, like I was over the holidays.

I lost my Bluetooth

Wednesday night, after I finished my broadcast, I parked my cab and gathered up my stuff, and realized that I could not find my Bluetooth earpiece.  I  looked everywhere, but it was gone.  It was a Jawbone ICON.  I used to have a different one, but got the Jawbone a couple of years ago because it supported the A2DP Bluetooth profile, which lets me listen to audio wirelessly from my iPhone.  It listed for $100, but I got it on sale for $80.  Last year it went through the laundry, so I got another one off of Amazon for $50.  I've been using it mainly to listen to podcasts while I work.

I was tempted to get the latest version, the ICON HD, which lists for $100, $90 on Amazon.  The difference is that it supports AVRCP, which means that you can pause and play audio with the "talk" button, and the speaker is 25% bigger, i.e. louder, which are exactly the two things I find lacking in the ICON.

However, I found the ICON on Amazon for only $18, so for now I'll settle for that.  Maybe next year...

Update: I saw my day driver searching the cab, so I asked him to let me know if he saw my Bluetooth. A minute later, he had it in his hand. (He didn't find what he was looking for.) So now I will have two. Maybe I'll keep the new one as a spare.

Broadcasting again

AT&T has been throttling my bandwidth for the past few months.  As soon as I hit 2 GB, my downloads slow from up to 5 or 6 Mbps to about 120 kbps.  However, my upload speed is unaffected, at around 1 Mbps, so I can still broadcast video.  Therefore, I have decided that I will refrain from broadcasting at the beginning of my billing cycle, until I reach the cap and get throttled.  Then I have no incentive to not use any more bandwidth, since it's still "unlimited".  My billing cycle ends on the 16th, so I will keep broadcasting until then, then take a break until I get throttled again.  

But just the normal, conservative use of an iPhone when I'm driving full-time uses up the bandwidth fairly quickly, even when I'm not broadcasting.  I know that some might think I'm a "data hog" who is slowing down the network, but I do most of my broadcasting late at night, when there is little network traffic, and the rest of the time my usage is just a trickle.  That trickle adds up when you're away from wifi all the time.  The reality is that the problem is not caused by "hogs", but by signing up more users than the capacity of the network.  See this article at Boing Boing.