Saturday, April 23, 2022
7:14 a.m. Room 1102, Phannu House
Mae Sot, Thailand
Lately, I’ve been really tired in the morning, and I don’t know why. I don’t think it is a function of not getting enough sleep. Last night, I went to bed pretty early. And the math tells me that I got enough hours of sleep. But I guess they weren’t quality hours of sleep, because I feel exhausted.
Luckily, yesterday was largely uneventful, and I don’t have a lot of things to write about this morning. I spent some time working on YouTube videos, of course. That’s a given. I have just one video to complete from my second visit to the Mae Hong Son Loop. I should be able to finish that today. I also did a fair amount of eating yesterday. I still had the snacks that I bought when I walked to the hospital. That was a fasting day. So even though I bought potato chips and other snacks, I didn’t eat them. I put them all in the fridge, and I started munching on those as soon as I woke up. Over instant coffee, I had the pastries that I bought from the man who was also selling shirts. And for lunch, I went to the shop across the street and had their noodle dish. In the afternoon, I had some potato chips with coffee. For dinner, I went to Salvador Mary Jane’s for Pork Adobo. And as an evening snack, I had a cup or two of Corn Flakes with milk. I remember I went for a walk to the water filter, and I got a bag of drinking water. I also walked to the shop downtown, and I bought Corn Flakes, CoffeeMate, and Nescafe.
Beyond that, I’m not entirely sure where my time went. I know I spent some time on technology. I spent an hour or two researching Patreon, and that was interesting. Patreon is turning out to be a much larger world than I expected. There is a lot that can be done through Patreon. I watched some YouTube tutorial videos about how to set up a successful Patreon, and these people tended to say pretty obvious things, but I guess it’s good to hear all those thoughts collected in one place. They talked about the tiers, for example, and how to set those up. You choose the amount of money that people can contribute each month. And you can name those tiers and specify the perks that come with them. My sense is that you have to be careful with this. People commonly set up too many tiers and then promise to do too much. And I guess once you set it up, you are stuck with it. If you promise to make a personal video every month for people at a certain tier, for example, you might end up in trouble. It could require far too much time to do that, and you don’t realize how much trouble this could cause over time. The recommendation is to create a type of perk that is something you would do naturally anyway. This is where my idea of making my journal a perk fits in. I write in my journal almost every day anyway. And therefore, making my journal a perk would not require a great deal of time. I listen to one podcast where the podcasters promised to give their patrons a personal shoutout in every episode. And this, in my opinion, became a nightmare, because they have to do it. And it is the worst part of their podcast. I hate having to listen to them shout out all their patrons one-by-one in every podcast. It’s awful.
Anyway, I have started making a rough outline of how my Patreon could be structured. I’m just putting together a random set of ideas. I might establish my Patreon page today. I believe you can open a Patreon page but not launch it. You are expected to work on your page and set it up and finalize it and perfect it, and then you go live with it. So I might as well try to get the Planet Doug name for my Patreon and then go from there. I don’t have to do a lot of work on it. But I’d like to get started and start thinking about it.
I also set up my email address for PayPal. At least I think I did that yesterday. That took some time to figure out, but it was easier than I expected. It didn’t take long to create the email address through the Planet Doug website. I have that figured out now. I tested it, and it works fine. I called it Contribute@PlanetDoug.life. And then I logged in to my PayPal account on my laptop. I realized that I couldn’t add an email address to PayPal through the mobile app. It had to be done through a browser. And once I opened up my PayPal account on my laptop, it was easy to add the email address. And I was pleased that PayPal hasn’t been giving me any trouble. For a while, I had password issues, but that problem has gone away. Now I just need someone to test it. I didn’t even realize it until I went to my PayPal account, but I’d already added a second email address to it. So I knew how to do it. I’d just forgotten. In fact, I was confused, because in LastPass, I kept noticing that I seemed to have two different PayPal accounts already. And I didn’t have a clear memory of setting up a second one. I didn’t know it was even possible. But it turns out that I just had two listings for the same PayPal account based on two email addresses. I thought those extra addresses only worked for sending money. But apparently, they can be used to log in to your PayPal account as well. That seems strange to me, because one of my ideas for adding the Contribute@PlanetDoug.life email address was that this would keep my main email address hidden, which is good because that’s the one I use to log in. But it appears that all of them can be used to access your account. This reduction in security gave me the boost of energy I needed to add two-factor authentication to PayPal. So at least it is more secure now because of that.
And I think that was the whole day yesterday. My room here at Phannu House is still quite messy and dirty. For some reason, I just haven’t been in the mood to clean and organize for a while. I’ve just let the room collapse around me. It’s a mess. And my month at Phannu House ended last night. Today marks the start of a new month, and I have to pay to stay here longer. I imagine I will pay for a full month. I still have a lot of work to do that will keep me in Mae Sot. And it’s more economical to simply stay here. It has gotten much hotter this month, and I’ve been running the air conditioner a bit more. They do charge a lot for electricity at Phannu House. I believe the legal maximum a hotel can charge is seven baht per unit, and that is what they charge here. I did some calculations yesterday, and I think my electricity bill will come to around 1,400 baht. That isn’t a lot of money, but it’s still significant when you think that it is nearly 50% of my actual rent. It’s the equivalent of paying $1,000 a month in rent but your air conditioning bill comes to $500. That’s a lot when you look at it that way.