Month: April 2013

What I Made by Mining Bitcoins

As an experiment, I started running a Bitcoin miner at around the same time I published my article How to Mine Bitcoins for Fun and (Probably Very Little) Profit. It’s participating in BitcoinCZ’s mining pool, which is where I got this report on its progress:

As I wrote in my earlier article, Bitcoin miners work by confirming Bitcoin transactions and competing to be the first to record them in the “blockchain”, a sort of general ledger of every Bitcoin transaction. These additions to the blockchain are called, quite naturally, blocks. A miner or pool of miners that successfully wins the competition to add a block to the blockchain gets 25 Bitcoins as its reward (creating the block also creates a 25-Bitcoin transaction), and in the case of BitcoinCZ, that reward is split proportionately among the various miners in the pool.

Looking at the BitcoinCZ report, I’ve made somewhere between 0.00036 and 0.00047 BTC since Saturday, depending on how pessimistic or optimistic you are. At the present Bitcoin exchange of 1 BTC = USD$94.13 (as of 11:57 a.m. today), I’ve made somewhere between 3.4 and 4.4 cents.

What I Made by Writing About Mining Bitcoins

As you’re probably aware, I make a little “walking around money” through the ads on this blog. Here’s that StatCounter report on how The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century has been doing in terms of pageviews over the past week:

Click to see the graph at full size.

The most-viewed article for the past week was How to Mine Bitcoins for Fun and (Probably Very Little) Profit; it currently accounts for almost three-quarters of all the pageviews. While I can’t get a direct report showing how much each article contributes to my ad revenues, it’s possible to come up with an estimation. My estimates show that in the past week, the Bitcoin mining article has made me somewhere between 32 and 45 dollars.

To summarize: I made 1000 times more money by writing about mining Bitcoins as I did by mining Bitcoins.

Tonight’s Show

Tonight, from 10:00 p.m. – 11:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (UTC – 4), Dead Red Velvet, my friend Karl Mohr’s arty, gothy, cabaret-y music project, will be airing a live internet performance, and I will be joining him! I’ll be backing him up on accordion for the goth-tastically maudlin-yet-catchy song Can Your Remains be Buried with Mine?, which I performed with him at the Tranzac Club back in 2007, as pictured below:

Yeah, it got weird, and it was cool.

A number of us will be piling into Karl’s place, where we’ll be broadcasting the show, including:

• Host Louise Bak,
• Musician Ian Revell,
• Darren Hyde, who’ll be doing the interpretative painting,
• Steven Cerritos will both film the proceedings and project films

Here’s how Karl describes the event:

Not a regular concert, Dead Red Velvet has never broken down the stage/audience barrier mid-concert before. We see this as a technology-mediated event with an interesting set of intersecting filters and advantages. With the help of our host, we hope to bring the warmth and spontaneity of an intimate house concert with all the distributive power and interactivity of the internet. Weird!

You’ll be able to log in and converse with us as well. It’s going to be interactive, odd, and fun!

Hop online tonight at 10 EST and join us! We’ll be at onairgigs.com.

How I Met Karl Mohr

I first met Karl Mohr in 1990 at the start of the school year when he was a frosh at my alma mater, Crazy Go Nuts University. I was DJing a party for incoming students and he wanted to congratulate me on playing Nine Inch Nails’ Head lIke a Hole, a song he hadn’t expected to hear, what the demographics of the place being largely preppie. It turned out that like me, he was a synth player, and that chance meeting turned into a friendship with some interesting collaborations. We even took a couple of courses together, even though our disciplines were vastly different (he was a music major, studying composition; I was in computer science), thanks to the Music Department’s strong support of electronic music and technology courses.

I probably wouldn’t have become the Accordion Guy without Karl. I’d had the accordion for a few months, but didn’t take it to the streets until Karl suggested that we take our squeezeboxes to a hospital cuts protest on Saturday, May 1st, 1999. We ended up wandering all over downtown Toronto, playing rock and pop tunes to surprised passers-by until passed Toronto’s most notorious goth club: The Sanctuary Vampire Sex Bar.

There, after playing a Marilyn Manson-style “Happy Birthday” for Mark the Bouncer, DJ Todd, who watched the whole thing, issued a challenge.

“Come back tonight,” he said, “and play anything that the crowd would like. I’ll put you onstage. If you get any applause — any applause at all — I will set you up with all the beer you can drink.”

We ran home and learned the song that led us to meet — Nine Inch Nails’ Head Like a Hole — and returned that evening in black clothing. Here’s the outcome:

If you’d like to read a more detailed recounting of the day I became the Accordion Guy with Karl, the story’s here.

Toronto’s Project Ukelele Gangsterism is a beautiful idea: they’re a group of ukelele players who are making surprise performances on the subway to brighten people’s commutes with a sweet little ditty titled Have an Awesome Day. As their Facebook page says, they’re following the Emersonian ideal of not pursuing happiness, but creating it.

I know from my own experience with the accordion how a surprise musical number can turn someone’s day around, and it’s great to see projects like this take root. It’s one of the reasons why Accordion City is one of the nicest places around.

Here’s a video of them playing earlier this morning:

Photographer Jason Cook caught the performance this morning and took some great photos, including this one:

Click the photo to see the original.

For more on this project, check out this news piece featuring the project’s creator, Adil Dhalla.

Here are more videos featuring Project Ukelele Gangsterism:

Hey, Project Ukelele Gangsterism: you have an awesome day, too!

Until last night, I had no idea that this video was posted online: it’s of me performing AC/DC’s Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap on accordion, my finalist number at the Karaoke Apocalypse competition at South by Southwest 2011.

Watching this video, it’s hard to believe that two months prior, I was a newly-separated guy gasping for breath in the intensive care unit. How quickly and completely things can change.

This took place in the back room of Austin’s The High Ball, a Mad Men-esque bowling alley straight from the 1960s, and my performance landed me second place, for which I won an iPad. I much preferred that prize to the first-place one: a year’s worth of Fandango tickets, which would’ve been useless to me since I’m in Canada.

The following year, I was invited onstage to reprise that performance:

Something’s up with my WordPress installation that’s messing with its layout. I’m working on it, but right now, the cause is a bit of a mystery. Please bear with the wonkiness!

I picked up this padlock earlier today, and here’s how it came out of the package: with the keys padlocked. Between this and IKEA instructions for their larger pieces, I get the feeling that some products were intended as cruel, cruel jokes.

Something to keep in mind today, whether here in North America, or on the other side of the world.

Here’s the text:

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me,

“Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”

To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.

— Fred Rogers (“Mister Rogers”)