Dec. 5 Uploading Woes

                I woke up cold and sore Wednesday morning, but it was my own fault. I hadn’t bothered to roll out my pad and sleeping bag and I’d just slept on the wood planks.  I still got sufficient sleep, so I’m honestly debating whether the additional comfort is worth the minutes it takes to lay out and pick up the pad and sleeping bag.

                I don’t really have anything pressing to do today, so I’m at a bit of a loss. I might hear back from Indian Creek today, but I doubt they will call me that soon. After burning a pot of oatmeal I cook up a second one for breakfast. Anytime I try to cook anything I generally have to do it twice like that. It’s how I roll. One for the squirrels, one for me. That’s also why I try to buy groceries that come ready to eat.

I pull my laptop out on the picnic table and work on one of my philosophy papers until the battery runs low. I guess I might as well head on over to Dunkin’ Donuts for the day. It’s going to be a leisurely day, I can already tell that. Maybe I’ll leave my stuff at Dunkin’s and go next-door to Win-Dixie for some more fruit & snacks.

When I get to Dunkin’s the first order of business is to upload my new video to Facebook. Yesterday, I did the blog post in the form of taking a camera with me all day and showing video of my day instead of writing about it. I’m excited to share it, but the connection is slow and it’s going to take over three hours for the video to upload. Meanwhile I can’t do much else online because the video upload is taking all the bandwidth. About an hour in the video is a third up, but the connection flickers and the upload stops! I start it over again but a couple of hours later the same thing happens. The connection seems to automatically reset every two hours or so and it keeps stopping the upload. YouTube uploads from Chrome or Firefox are supposed to automatically resume after interruptions, but it isn’t working! I try it in both browsers, each time uploading for hours and sitting there bored to tears only for it to get about a third of the way up before failing! I don’t know what else to do, but it may be a while before I can find someplace with a better internet connection and upload the video I made. )-: I’m really bummed about this! Uploading videos to YouTube has always been tricky for me. YouTube has an online editor, so I try rendering the video into four pieces and uploading one at a time. Even if this works, I’m not sure if I can have it up before closing at 8:00 and I’ve been trying to upload this 13 minute video all day!

As the first portion uploads, I walk over to Win-Dixie for some food. Oranges are good. The individual ones are $2 a pound, but the 4-pound bag is $5. I’m not sure I can eat four pounds of small oranges before they go bad, but with that price difference I’ll try. Bananas are a definite. Cheap and tasty. My bag of mini croissant rolls is going faster than the jar of peanut-butter, so I get more of those. I feel like I could use another item, but I’m not sure what. I need something fattening. I’d go for ice-cream, but homeless, Florida, and ice-cream are not a good trio. A 6-pack of Snickers bars should do the trick. I carefully select the shortest check outline but the cashier is having trouble with something in the order ahead of me and she has to re-scan the entire order three times! I know how to fix the problem though. All I have to do is pick up my four items and go to the other line. I’m sure this line will start moving as soon as I do. I opt to let the kid figure it out on her own. I could always use the patience training anyway. Every minute I stand there patiently I’m becoming a more whole and complete specimen of sanctification.

Back at Dunkin’s part #1 of the video is at 98%. When it finishes I queue up the next three sections. It’s 6pm already, I don’t know if I’m going to get this to work tonight, but I’m trying… meanwhile I play games on my phone while I pass the hours. The second portion finishes uploading at 6:45 but gives me an error message saying “the server has rejected the file. Please upload again.” Aaaarg!!! That file was uploading for nearly an hour! All I can do is keep trying. Since the resume-upload function isn’t working I start splitting and rendering the video into 16ths so that anything that uploads successfully will stay up instead of having to re-start the whole thing over and over again! I’ve accepted the tragic news that we still don’t have flying cars in late 2012, but shouldn’t we be able to upload YouTube videos by now??

7:50pm: Part #3 upload successfully complete! That’s two of the quarters! I’ve been here trying to upload this video for ten hours and I just now got half of it up with ten minutes till closing time! I’m uploading in 16ths instead of quarters now, so there will be smaller setbacks, if any, and I know Theresita will let me stay in the shop until a half hour after closing time when she has to leave, and then I’ve got a two hour battery life that I can spend sitting outside the door after closing, so it’s still remotely possible that I will get this video uploaded for you all to see tonight…
It's ten of nine. Dunkin's is closed and I'm sitting on the sidewalk out front uploading. I've got just under two hours left on the laptop battery, but a quarter of the video left to upload and more processing after that to get it on the blog.
Well, I'm giving up for the night. It's 9:30, my laptop battery is slowly draining and it's never going to make it long enough to get this video up for everyone tonight. Hopefully I'll have it on the blog sometime tomorrow. Heading back to Haulover Park. I think I'll take the few extra minutes to roll out my pad and sleeping bag tonight.