Wednesday, September 29, 2021
4:30 a.m. Green Guest House
Mae Sot, Thailand
I had an interesting day yesterday. The main part of the day started with a trip to the Lucky Tea Garden for breakfast. It’s open again. I love that place. I had a big Burmese-style breakfast: chickpeas with onions; roti; potato curry; beef curry; and milk tea. I felt so much better afterwards. And I took advantage of my walk to the restaurant to continue testing a new mapping and tracking app I discovered called Relive. Instead of taking my scooter to the Lucky Tea Garden, I went there on foot, and I recorded my journey using Relive. My idea was to test out a bunch of the features. And then later in the day, I was going to make my first “Learning Curve” video about this Relive app. So, as I walked, I stopped from time to time to take a picture or a video clip. These would be added to the Relive 3D animated map later on. I also tested out the pause feature. With pause, you can stop recording with the app for a period of time and then resume afterwards. And that makes sense, because the app records physical movement. There is no point recording your movement while you sit inside a restaurant for an hour having a meal. So, you pause the app when you stop for a long time, and then when you start walking again, you hit resume and the app begins recording again. In order to complete a full test, I continued walking for a couple of kilometers and made my way through the main market. I love spending time there. It’s so active and full of life, even during this pandemic.
I had one Planet Doug encounter during this walk. This illustrates the kind of thing that always happens on Planet Doug. It happens all the time to me because I’m such a dummy. I was walking along holding my smartphone in my hand when a man at the side of the street called out to me. 99.9% of the times when this happens, the person is from Myanmar. Thai people don’t often interact with me. And this man was clearly from Myanmar. He was a youngish guy and relatively well dressed in a clean pair of shorts and T-shirt. I didn’t know why he called out to me, but when I walked up to him, he indicated his young son beside him. I couldn’t tell you how old the boy was, but he was young. Not quite a toddler, but not quite a fully-formed evil boy yet. A cute, friendly kid. And the father seemed to want his son to have the experience of saying hello to a foreigner in English. This happens all the time, too, as parents eagerly push their children forward to practice the English they learned in school. And they look on proudly.
In this case, the kid and I exchanged hellos and waves, and then we gave each other a high five. And then after smiling at the man and being as friendly as I could without being able to actually speak to him, I said goodbye and continued on my way to the Lucky Tea Garen just up the street. I had my breakfast, and then I resumed the Relive app and left the restaurant. And just outside the restaurant, I ran into this same man and his son. He greeted me again, but this time, it suddenly became clear that he was asking for money. THAT’s why he had called out to me the first time. And THAT’s why he had pushed his son forward. He was using his son to illustrate his need for money. He needed money to take care of his children. And his son wasn’t holding out his hand for a high five. He was holding out his hand, as his father taught him, to ask for money. And I had completely misunderstood.
I can only imagine how dumb this man thought I was after our first encounter. He was asking me for money, and he indicated his son to emphasize his need. And what does the foreigner do? He gives his son a high five and walks away. This time, he decided to be more clear, and he pointed at his son and then he made eating motions to indicate that he needed money for food. Hopefully, this dude from Planet Doug wouldn’t be so obtuse this time.
And this time, I understood. I gave him 100 baht, did my best to smile and be friendly, and then he moved on. This has been happening more and more in 2021. In the past, you really didn’t run into people asking for money in Mae Sot or in Thailand in general. But since the coup in Myanmar, there has been an increase in refugees, and with the pandemic, people are in trouble.
Much later in the day, I had a second encounter like this. I was making my Relive Learning Curve video, and a woman on a bicycle stopped to chat with me. She was also clearly from Myanmar. I can easily tell by how people look, dress, speak, and behave. I couldn’t get all the exact details of her situation, but she explained to me that she was very sick. And she had just come from the hospital, but she didn’t have enough money for the medicine she needed. She said that the medicine cost about 1,000 baht. And she opened her wallet to show me that she had 800 baht or so. She was 200 baht short, and she was going home without the medicine she required. And could I help her out?
So, I gave her the 200 baht. I wish we could have spoken more, but her English was just good enough to get across the details of her situation but no more than that. We tried to chat, but I didn’t really understand much more, and we eventually fell into a series of smiles and friendly gestures and goodbyes. And then she turned her bike around, and started riding back in the direction she had come from, presumably to return to the hospital to get the medicine that she could now afford. She had heavy bandages over one hand and arm, but beyond that, I wasn’t able to figure out what illness or injury she might have had.
My Relive Learning Curve video turned into a bit of a monster, I’m afraid. I was hoping to keep things short and snappy, but it kind of spiralled out of control. I do tend to babble on. And I love to go into things in depth. I like to cover all the details of whatever it is I’m talking about. My idea is also to complete these videos out in the real world as much as possible. I’m often annoyed with camera reviewers on YouTube, because they do their reviews inside their studios, basically in a perfect environment. It’s perfectly lit. It’s perfectly cool. And it’s perfectly quiet and spacious. But testing a camera or a microphone in those situations is not representative of how this stuff actually gets used. It’s one thing to test a microphone inside your quiet studio. I need to hear how it sounds when you are out on the street near traffic or inside a busy market or restaurant.
With that perspective, I want to shoot as much of my videos outside in the real world as possible. And I thought that approach would help make my videos a bit special. Everyone shoots their videos inside nice studios. It would be different and unusual to be outside and surrounded by Thailand while talking about an Android app.
There were three stages to this Learning Curve video experience. Stage One was just sitting down and talking into the camera and describing what the Relive app is all about and how you use it. Stage Two was going for a walk around Mae Sot and actually demonstrating using the app in real life. And Stage Three was demonstrating, on my phone, how you complete your project and produce the final 3D animated movie.
And with all that to do, as I said, the video spiralled out of control and became a monster. For Stage One, I sat outside at a crazy kind of table beside the canal here in Mae Sot, out in the full force of a brutal sun, which decided to make an appearance. This table is a solid piece of granite with some old trees slammed into place roughly as benches. Garbage is strewn around everywhere. Some local homeless guys, alcoholics, and drug addicts tend to hang out there, particularly at night, and they often have bonfires there out in the open. I often end up sitting there because any kind of table or bench is in very short supply in Thailand. I’m always keeping my eyes open for anywhere that I can sit down at all. Forget about comfort or cleanliness.
And for this video, I was using my brand new DJI Pocket 2. So, in fact, I was deeply immersed in two learning curves. I was learning how to use the Relive app. That was the subject of the video. But I was filming that with a new camera that I barely knew how to use, and I constantly made mistakes and struggled. I really should have used a GoPro, a camera that I’m very familiar with, but I’m so excited by the Pocket 2.
In Stage Two, I went for a walk around Mae Sot. That was exhausting and stressful as well, because I was using the Relive app on my phone, but I was also carrying the Pocket 2 in my hand and trying to film the experience at the same time. AND I was making my very first learning curve video, something I’d never done before. And I had to remember to constantly take screenshots with my phone for illustration purposes later on. And I had no idea what I was doing. I was making it up as I went along. It was during this walk that I encountered the woman on her bicycle that needed money for medicine.
Stage Three took place back in the relative comfort of my guest house room, but that involved yet another extreme learning curve. To record how to actually process all the data from Relive and create the 3D movie, I needed to use a screen recording app on my smartphone AND record high quality audio AND manipulate my phone using a Bluetooth-connected mouse, ALL at the same time. And that involved another very steep learning curve as I had to figure all that out. The technical challenges were extreme.
By the time I was done, I was a mental and physical wreck. I had, unknowingly, set myself a very challenging video project. And, believe it or not, that was just the beginning of the process. All of that was just about recording the raw video, audio, and pictures that I need for the final video. I still have to copy all of those files onto my phone or this MacBook. And then I have to import all of that material into a video editing application, and spend a lot of hours editing it and putting it all together with music and graphics. And then I will have to export the final video, review it, create a thumbnail for it, write a description and title and tags, and then upload the video to YouTube.
To be honest, it’s too much. It’s crazy to do all that. Luckily, I enjoy it. But enjoying it doesn’t make it any less exhausting or time-consuming. And, unfortunately, I can already tell that the final video will be pretty bad. It’s going to be too long, too boring, and too clunky and awkward. My original idea was, as I said, to make something short and snappy and fun. But it didn’t work out that way. A video like this should be twelve minutes long at most. And the raw video I have is over an hour long. And nobody wants to sit through an hour-long video tutorial about an obscure Android app.
My vision for the Learning Curve is to make the standard twelve-minute videos that I keep dreaming about. And I hope to do it by dividing any particular learning curve into small pieces. For example, I want to document my learning curve for this Pocket 2 camera. But I won’t make one long video about the camera. I’ll make short videos, perhaps ten of them at a minimum. And each one will be twelve minutes long and focus on just one aspect of the camera. So, I’m thinking of it as a series of short tutorials.
I have to sit down and organize my thoughts about the Pocket 2 so that I can divide up all of its features and controls into small bites. And I will make a separate video about each bite. For example, the Pocket 2 has five physical buttons. I will make one video about just those buttons and what they do. The Pocket 2 also has a gimbal with four gimbal modes. I will make one video as I learn about those four modes. I’ll make another video about just the settings menu. I’ll make another about the microphones and recording audio. And on and on.
That’s the theory, anyway.
10:30 a.m.
I just got back from an errand run. I’m still thinking about going on my scooter trip to Sukhothai. I could embark on that journey after I get my visa stamp on Friday. And for that, I still need cash. I tried to get some cash again the other day during my Relive test walk to the Lucky Tea Garden. This time, the Bangkok Bank ATMs were operational. However, they were not operational for me, and I got the dreaded error message telling me in the vaguest terms that I needed to contact my bank. I’ve learned through experience, however, that there really is no need to contact my bank. That’s just a standard message they throw up when anything goes wrong.
So, this morning, I decided to return to the big Tesco plaza where I can stock up on some essentials and visit a range of banks. Oddly enough, there is a large branch of the Bangkok Bank at Tesco as well, and I went to their ATMs first. And not to my surprise, it worked fine, and I was able to withdraw money. That’s the weird thing about the modern world. It’s nutty. The ATMs at one Bangkok Bank in this town rejected me. But the same transaction at an ATM at a different Bangkok Bank was successful. No error message. No message that I needed to contact my bank. Same bank, same town, same transaction, same bank card, but one ATM hates me and the other one loves me, and no one would ever be able to tell me why.
I don’t have any grand plans for the rest of today. It’s actually very nice and sunny outside, but I have so many technology projects on the go that I don’t imagine I will be outside doing exciting things. Despite the sunshine, this will be a largely inside day. I’m also quite tired again, so I don’t feel the urge to immerse myself in the life of the country out there.
I recently watched the first episode of a new sci-fi show called Foundation. It is, of course, based on the famous book series by Isaac Asimov, a series that I read long ago when I was in high school. The first episode was fantastic for a sci-fi dude like me. I was enthralled. As soon as it was over, I started at the beginning and watched it a second time. And then when I was making dinner last night, I started watching it a third time. The visuals were stunning, I thought. And the storytelling was excellent as well. I don’t know if the series can keep that up, but it is off to a good start.