Thursday February 17, 2022
5:48 a.m. Room 1102, Phannu House
Mae Sot, Thailand
Since I’ve restarted the Skinny Doug project, today is a fasting day. I’ll be drinking instant coffee and water all day and night and consuming nothing else. Since I find it difficult to take half measures, I want to fast two days a week. I like to see results of anything I do quickly. And, as before, I’ve chosen Monday and Thursday as my fasting days. Those days make the most sense. Yet, they are too close together. That always happens when I try to schedule something. The fact that there are seven days in a week makes it difficult to space things out. It would be better if there were eight days. Then I could fast on days one and five, and there would be three days exactly between them. But with seven days, you can’t space them out like that. I suppose I could simply set up a schedule based on eight days. But then my fasting days would fall on different days of the week all the time. It would be harder to keep track of. But maybe the variety would be better. I’ll have to think about that.
One issue is that my day of fasting, because of my habits, often extends into much longer than a day. My last meal might be at five p.m. on Wednesday night. And by five p.m. on Thursday, I won’t have eaten for 24 hours. But since Thursday is my fasting day, I go to bed without eating. And by the time I wake up the next morning at perhaps five a.m. I won’t have eaten for 36 hours. That’s a day and a half. And I often don’t eat in the morning anyway. I just drink coffee until I have lunch. That can be another eight hours until one in the afternoon when I have lunch. And that puts my total fast at forty-four hours, or nearly two days, not just one. And if I do that on Monday and Thursday, I end up fasting for a lot longer than I actually intended. For that reason, this idea of inventing an eight-day schedule would be better. I can space out the fasting period better. There would be three full days between each fast, not just two.
I’m not exercising at all right now to go along with my fasting routine, other than long walks. My exercise regimen fell apart in the time leading up to and then during my Mae Hong Son Loop Trip. I hope to adopt some kind of toning exercises eventually. But for now, I just want to take steps towards Skinny Doug first. Once I see some progress towards becoming Skinny Doug again, I’ll incorporate a bit of exercising.
Yesterday was again all about that Pai Canyon video. I made more progress than I expected. In fact, the video is completely done, and I uploaded it to YouTube overnight. I managed to do that because I worked non-stop from around eight in the morning to eleven at night. And I decided to keep things simple. I decided to use no music and no graphics. Once I finished the rough cut of the video, I liked it the way it was. It didn’t seem like it needed any music. A lot of the video is of me just walking and climbing in the canyon, and I like that I can hear my footsteps and the scrape of my sandals against the rock. Every time I tried to insert some music, it felt out of place. I was at the canyon at sunrise, and the quiet and peace there was part of the experience. To interrupt that with some generic music track felt wrong. So I added no music at all.
The final video ended up being fifty-eight minutes and nine seconds long. Just shy of an hour. At most, a YouTube video should be twenty minutes long. But I just can’t help it. I like the long form. To even get this video down to one hour in length, I had to remove and leave out all the stuff that I actually really liked. I’m always babbling about inconsequential things. But including those sequences in the videos makes them too long.
In the past, I’ve occasionally made different versions of the same video. I’ll try to make a twenty-minute version. And then I’ll also upload what I called an extended cut of that same video, usually about an hour long. And I’ll stick in all the things that I deleted for the short version. I liked doing that, but the world at large wasn’t a big fan.
But I’m considering also making a short version of this Pai Canyon video. It might be interesting to keep only those sections that show me on the canyon trails. Remove everything else. Just keep the scenic shots. There would be no story, but it would be a quick way for someone to watch a video and see what the canyon looks like. I’ll probably do it. It won’t take long to do, since I already have the long version completed. To make a short version, I just have to delete all the sections when I’m talking. Maybe music would fit into that version.
I had a ton of technology problems yesterday, unfortunately. I don’t know what changed, but again I had problems exporting the final video on my phone. The rendering job failed twice. And this never happened before. Something has changed, but I don’t know what it is.
I also had some very frustrating problems with my new editing program, PowerDirector. I tried to make my first video with PowerDirector on my laptop. It was a slow job, because I had to stop at every stage and do a lot of reading to figure out how to do certain tasks. I’ve begun the long process of learning how to use a new editing program. And things seemed okay at first. I discovered quite a few features in the program that I liked. These are convenient features meant for amateurs like me. You don’t find these features in the pro programs like DaVinci Resolve. For example, PowerDirector comes with presets for text. There are thirty of them built into the base program itself, and you can probably download hundreds more. A preset is essentially a graphic design for text. Someone chose a particular font and color and text style with drop shadows and borders and background colors or whatever. And then they would save all those settings as a preset. And then to use that type of text, you just click on one button. And in PowerDirector, you can save your own custom presets. If you set up a certain title to look a certain way, and you want to use that same look in all your videos, you can save it as a preset and give that preset a name. It’s so efficient and so convenient.
A professional program like DaVinci Resolve would turn up its nose at a feature like that. It’s something meant for amateurs and consumers. A professional would custom design everything in their video and take the time to do everything themselves. There are no automated presets in DaVinci Resolve that I know about.
However, I ran into a big problem in PowerDirector. And it meant that I lost hours of work. I worked on a video for quite a long time. And I added some text elements. And then, for no reason that I can think of, the whole thing just fell apart. The audio waveform was suddenly misaligned. It didn’t line up with the video. And that made it impossible to edit. I couldn’t tell where to cut the video or which sections to delete. Basically, the graphical representation of the audio was out of sync with the actual audio. And then the video started stuttering and lagging. And it would freeze. Then the video started to misalign. It would end up seconds and then even minutes behind or ahead of the audio. It was crazy. I have no idea what had happened or what was going on. And I couldn’t fix it. I basically lost the entire project and had to start all over again. And now I’m just crossing my fingers that it won’t happen again.
And I ran into problems many times where a feature that is supposed to exist in PowerDirector just isn’t there. And I learned that this is because this version of PowerDirector for the MacBook is relatively new. And it lacks a lot of the features that are in the Windows version. I really struggle with having a MacBook. It’s an unfamiliar world for me.
And I think today will largely mirror yesterday. In a few minutes, I will be working on the Pai Canyon video to make a short version of it. And then I will continue working on a video on the MacBook using PowerDirector. I want to use it as much as possible quickly, because I learned that it’s possible to get a refund within 30 days. I want to decide if this program will work for me or not. And if not, I guess I can get a refund. I suspect that will never work. In my experience, even companies that say they offer refunds will put up so many roadblocks that you have little hope of ever actually getting that refund. But who knows?
My noodle shop was closed yesterday, which was disappointing. But it is a typical thing here in Thailand. Businesses have random hours. You never know when any restaurant or store will be open or closed. They just open and close whenever they feel like it. However, that pushed me towards looking for an alternative, and I ended up getting a fabulous bowl of noodles at a place right across the road. I wasn’t even sure if this restaurant was open at all. They do this weird thing of raising the front shutters only part way. And I never saw any customers inside. And chairs would be piled on top of tables. I never tried to eat there, because I couldn’t figure out what was going on. But yesterday, I saw two people sitting inside at tables and eating something. So I ducked under the shutters and went inside, and I ended up getting a fantastic bowl of noodles. It was so tasty and had a large variety of ingredients, each with a distinct flavor. I have no idea what it was called, but it was very good. Hopefully this place will be open often.
And to feed my media addiction, I downloaded a few episodes of a National Geographic show called Ocean Wreck Investigation. It is pretty much exactly what you’d expect. It’s a total dad show. And I love it. Each episode focuses on some kind of shipwreck or multiple related shipwrecks from history. Researchers and divers investigate these wrecks and try to piece together the story of what happened to them and why they sank.
I tried to move on to another fictional TV series or movie. But I just wasn’t in the mood. I started watching a show called Chloe, which looks promising. But I found I wasn’t in the mood for the dour and serious tone. I was in the mood for something light and factual. And when I saw this show about shipwrecks, I was hooked. It’s perfect for my mood right now. After the emotional intensity of It’s a Sin and similar shows, I needed a mental palate cleanser. A good story about World War I German U-boats lying at the bottom of the English Channel is just right.
I’ve seen a million shows like that in my life. And I often end up wondering how one gets that kind of work. The first episode focused on one man in particular who appears to have a career simply riding around the ocean on a multi-million-dollar ship investigating shipwrecks. It’s what he does. He’s clearly an academic type. A scholar. He’s not a hedge-fund billionaire. So exactly how did he get this job? I’d love to be on that ship with him. Where does the money come from?