Sunday, April 17, 2022
7:55 a.m. Phannu House, Room 1102
Mae Sot, Thailand
I’m starting my day later than I usually do. And that’s a good thing. I needed the extra sleep. It might be all of my technology adventures of late, but I haven’t been able to sleep lately. And the sleep deficit was starting to get me. I met a friend for coffee yesterday, and I was in rough shape. I was babbling through my fatigue. But this morning, I feel back to my old self.
I left off my thoughts yesterday with the goal of setting up my next video Premiere. And that is one thing that I did manage to accomplish. I finalized the thumbnail for the second Sukhothai video and wrote the video description and wrote the various tags. And once that was done, I scheduled it to appear as a Premiere at seven on Sunday evening. That’s tonight, of course.
I realized in going through this process that I’m getting a bit tripped-up by the word premiere. A premiere is a very grand concept in my head. Big Hollywood movies have premieres. It’s the first night that the movie plays in a theater, and it takes place in the grandest theater, and the actors and other important people attend the premiere in their nicest clothing. The press are invited. It’s a big event. And that’s how I think of a premiere. And when I think of that as it relates to my YouTube videos, the videos don’t seem important enough. There’s the question of how often to do an official Premiere, and my instinct is to limit them. You don’t want to do them too often because people would get tired of them. Therefore, I was wondering whether posting all of my Sukhothai videos as a steady series of Premieres every three days was a good idea or not.
But there is another way to think of it. A YouTube Premiere is really not that big a deal. It’s simply the video with a chat window. And that’s it. What’s the big deal about that? All it means is that the person who created the video is watching the video with a chat window open. And when you think of it that way, it’s much more casual. You could make every video a Premiere. Why not? If I just happen to be sitting around in my hotel room at the time when a video of mine is going to go public, why not turn it into a Premiere and watch it when it goes live? You don’t have to think of it as a big event, because it isn’t a big event. From that perspective, Premiere is a bit of a misnomer. It’s really the question of whether there is a live chat window or not.
I didn’t do much more with the website yesterday. I started at one point to read through the WordPress instructions for the new Block Editor that is built into it. I didn’t get very far with that. I played around with a couple of things. I created a Post and inserted a link to one of my YouTube videos. This was on the WordPress default theme of Twenty-Twenty-Two. I was pleased to see that with no input from me, the video appeared in a nice window that was sized perfectly to display properly both on my computer and on my smartphone. I also took my journal entry from yesterday and made it my first official Post. I didn’t do any formatting, and I didn’t add any graphics. I didn’t set a Featured Image or select an excerpt. I just dumped the text into the window and left it there. It looks bad in the Twenty-Twenty-Two theme, but that’s okay for now. I’m just playing around. And after that, I started posting more and more of my journal starting with the journal entries that I originally turned into videos for the Planet Doug Behind the Scenes channel. I just went back to the very first entry on September 13th and cut and pasted that entry. And then I slowly started moving forward through time and made a separate post for every journal entry. I’ve still got a long way to go to catch up with real time.
And that is pretty much all I did for the entire day. We are still in the middle of the Sonkgran holidays, and all of my usual restaurants in my neighborhood were closed. I ended up getting lunch from 7-Eleven. I’m continuing with alternating fasting days. I want to get down to a slimmer waist size before I buy new pants. As always, it feels like a slow process. My current approach is pretty extreme. I eat normally on one day. And then the next day, I eat nothing at all. It’s a total fast for twenty-four hours. And then on the following day, I eat normally again. Basically, I fast on alternating days. When I did this before, I fasted two days a week. I fasted on Monday and Thursday. But that got complicated. I had to keep track of the days. I decided to up the ante by fasting for three days a week, and I decided to make it simpler by just alternating days. It doesn’t matter whether it is a Monday or a Tuesday or a Sunday or a Friday. In fact, because there are seven days in a week, my fasting days change all the time. For one week, Monday is a fasting day. During the next week, it isn’t. And I like this approach. It’s simple. All I have to remember is that I don’t eat today because I ate yesterday. And I will eat tomorrow because I’m not eating today. The day of the week is irrelevant. I don’t have to keep track of the days. And, therefore, no particular days develop any kind of feeling. There’s no routine. In addition, fasting every other day increases the overall amount of fasting so much that skipping a day is not such a big deal. For example, a man from Australia showed up in Mae Sot the other day. I’ll call him Travis. Travis is riding a scooter around Thailand, and he got in touch with me because he had plans to pass through Mae Sot. He happened to show up here on a fasting day. But I still went out for a good meal with him. Since I fast on so many days now, skipping one doesn’t matter. It’s not like it sets me back in my goal of reducing my waistline. I just fast the day after and get back to fasting on alternate days. With my old system, when I skipped a fasting day, it was like losing out on an entire week of fasting.
There’s no question that fasting for a full twenty-four hours is not easy. In fact, it is usually even longer than twenty-four hours because I don’t normally eat breakfast. But I also enjoy some aspects of it. For one thing, I appreciate food so much more. It’s a cliche and a truism, I suppose, but when you eat all the time every day, food itself loses its edge. Perhaps you don’t appreciate it as much as you should. But when you are fasting for twenty-four to thirty-six hours, you quickly change how you feel about food. Food suddenly becomes very special. You see it clearly and you have very strong feelings and thoughts about it. And you suddenly have a better appreciation of yourself as a physical being and how temporary and fragile you are. When you are eating regularly, you don’t appreciate how much that food relates to your existence. Once you stop eating, your body will soon stop working, and you will not exist anymore. It happens fast. There’s a direct correlation between that food flowing through your body and the fact that you have energy and are alive. Stop eating, and you disappear. And when you fast for thirty-six hours, you become intensely aware of this fact. Food takes on a much greater significance. Basically, you stop taking it for granted when you deprive yourself of it.
It’s a bit unrealistic to expect quick results. But as humans we always do. The chubby waistline I currently have is the result of years. I started putting on this extra weight back when I was in Kuala Lumpur. Actually, I think it started when I was hanging out in Sumatra. I just started eating more. And all this extra weight I’m carrying around built up gradually over the last five years, I think. But then when you start dieting, fasting, or exercising, you expect to see results right away. You become impatient. You think you are going to get rid of that extra fat in a month. So you have to temper your expectations. If you put on that weight over five years, you should probably set a schedule of at least a year to lose it. But according to my Ikea measuring tape, I’m already nearly two inches skinnier around the middle. I had a 38-inch waistline while I was scootering around the Mae Hong Son Loop. Then on April 4, my waistline was 37 inches. And this morning, it measured at 36 inches. I still look fat, and I can pinch very large rolls of fat around my stomach. But according to the numbers, I’m significantly skinnier than I was just a short time ago. I’m not sure if there was a large change in weight, though. I don’t generally weigh myself.
I’ve already started my first technology project for today. And this project was to finally do something with my original The Cycling Canadian Facebook Page. I’ve been ignoring that page ever since I changed the name of my YouTube channel to Planet Doug. I’m such a dummy that I didn’t realize that I could have changed the Facebook Page name to match it. I thought I was stuck with that name. And so I created a brand new Facebook Page, and I ended up with two of them. I kept intending to simply delete the old one. But I never got around to it. I was going to do that this morning. But at the last minute, I started to wonder if I could merge the two pages together. If I did that, I wouldn’t lose contact with the people that were following that page, and I wouldn’t lose all the posts and comments. And to my surprise, I learned that it was possible to merge two pages. While I was reading about that, I discovered that the first step in merging two pages was to change the names so that they are identical. Doing that smooths out the merging process. And that’s when I learned that I could have simply changed the Page name long ago when I changed the YouTube channel name. That’s what I should have done. But it’s too late now.
I’ve already started the process, and with my fingers crossed, I changed the name of the The Cycling Canadian Page to Planet Doug. According to what I read, it could take several days for Facebook to approve this change. But it appears to have happened instantly and without any issues at all. I suddenly have two separate Facebook Pages, and they are both called Planet Doug. The next step is to merge them. I did some more reading, and I was disappointed to learn that in actuality the pages themselves don’t really merge. All that happens is that people who are following one page will be transferred to the other. All of the Posts and comments and chats from the original page will simply be deleted. They can’t be transferred. So you lose all of the content of the original Page. All you keep are the followers. That’s disappointing, but I’m going to do it anyway. I think I will wait for a few days to make sure the name change has taken full effect. And then I will do the merge.
My big small adventure from yesterday was to meet a friend at a coffee shop. The two of us were going to go to Braverly. A couple of days ago, we also met for coffee. And the plan was to meet at BK Coffee & Beer. I walked all the way to BK only to discover that it was closed for the Songkran holidays. My friend and I ended up having our coffee at Braverly. Braverly just happened to be open. Because of that, we made plans to meet at Braverly again yesterday. The chances seemed highest that it would be open. But it was closed. Luckily, on my way to Braverly, I walked past another coffee shop, one that I’d always been curious about and which I had never visited. This place is called Coffee Flavor Hunter. It opened many months ago, maybe even a year ago, but at that time, it consisted of a very small booth and nothing more. Then it expanded, and it is now a full coffee shop.
I was very curious about this place, but the outside windows were heavily tinted, and I couldn’t see inside. For some reason, that made me hesitant to open the door and actually enter. And I kept walking by the place over and over, being very interested, and yet never entering. But I finally went there yesterday, and I was pleasantly surprised. It’s a fancy and highly developed coffee shop. It’s got a lot of style and a lot of purposeful design. And I don’t know if it is always this way, but it was quite busy. It’s easily the most expensive coffee shop I’ve come across in Mae Sot. A hot latte there costs 70 baht when the regular price elsewhere hovers around 40 to 50 baht. But that higher price hasn’t seemed to deter customers. The place was packed and new customers kept coming in all the time.
I’m thinking about going back there right now for a morning coffee and shooting a video profile of the place. I even asked the owner yesterday if that would be okay with him, and he said it would be fine. He seemed very pleased that I’d be interested in making a video there. I wish I had name cards for my YouTube channel made up. Now that I have the Planet Doug website, I could do that now. That will probably be a project for next week. I didn’t want to make a name card until I knew what the official URL of the website would be. But that is settled now, and I can make a name card. I do wish I had some Planet Doug graphics to put on it. But for now, I will have to settle on a plain card with just text I guess. Maybe I could put my picture on it? I’ll look into that next week.
I have other thoughts this morning, but I think I will stop here and get on with my day. Perhaps my first task will be this video about the coffee shop. I was also thinking about shooting an intro video for the Premiere. It’s possible to do that and add the intro as a kind of trailer. I don’t know how that works, and I wanted to do it once to learn the ropes.